The California Air Resources Board has unveiled an update of its Greenhouse Gas Emissions Mapping Tool. The tool enables users to locate, view, and analyze emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from nearly 800 facilities in California that each emit more than 10,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.
The mapping tool enables you to locate the reporting facilities and determine their greenhouse gas emissions, individually or as a group, using data from 2008 through 2013. (2014 data will be added soon.) The tool’s database does not include emissions from transportation fuel or natural gas suppliers, or electricity importers.
Using the familiar Google Maps interface, you can pan and zoom the map. Facilities are color-coded by sector (cement plants, refineries, electrical generation, etc.). You can also search for facilities by name, or filter the display by geographic region, air basin, sectors, threshold levels, and pollutant types.
A particularly useful feature enables users to draw a shape around a group of facilities. The tool will then sum the GHG emissions and graph the trend of emissions of facilities within the shape. For example, the blue rectangle in the illustration on the right encloses the 5 refineries in our region: Chevron, Phillips 66, Shell, Tesoro, Valero.
Choosing the “Chart” tab in the panel above the rectangle displays a graph, showing a slightly downward trend in GHG emissions from 2008 to 2013 (blue bars), with an uptick in 2013. If we choose the “GHG” tab we would find that the 2013 sum of GHG emissions from these 5 facilities was 14,654,657 MT CO2e * Bear in mind that this selection of data includes only the 5 refineries within the defined area of our example. The Bay Area Air Quality Management Districts estimates GHG emissions from all sources in the entire Bay Area at approximately 88 million MT CO2e.
* CO2 e, or “carbon dioxide equivalent” is the internationally recognized measure of GHG emissions and includes many types of greenhouse gases.