INSTITUT Veolia Environnement

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  • Report n°4: How Much to Spend for the Protection of Health and Environment

Report n°4: How Much to Spend for the Protection of Health and Environment

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    • Cost-benefit Analysis of Pollution Abatement
      • An Example: DeNOx for Incinerators

An Example: DeNOx for Incinerators

It is interesting to present as specific example a CBA of NOx abatement for incinerators, for which ADEME [2004] indicates abatement costs based on a study by Bio Intelligence. The costs for several technologies are shown in Table 6. The technologies are:

  • SNCR : Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction (injection of ammonia or urea into the combustion chamber, at 850°C - 1100°C)
  • SCR : Selective Catalytic Reduction (Injection of ammonia together with the flue gases into a special reaction chamber at 200 °C - 400°C).

Costs and benefits are compared in Table 7. With the damage cost of 3.4 € per kg of NOx (see Fig.5) only the 50% reduction with dry SNCR is justified. However, the uncertainties of the NOx damage cost is high and even an 80% reduction might be justified. Some limitations of this very simple and sketchy CBA should be pointed out:

  • SCR requires natural gas to heat the reaction chamber to the operating temperature, and so it entails additional CO2 emissions;
  • SCR destroys dioxins at the same time as NOx, obviously a significant additional benefit that should be counted in the CBA;
  • both SCR and SNCR emit significant amounts of ammonia, a pollutant regulated by the EU even if ExternE has not been able to calculate a damage cost for it;
  • the damage cost per kg of NOx does not account for ozone impacts.

A more thorough CBA should take those points into account and it should go into more detail for the damage cost by showing fixed and variable costs separately, as well as variation of the costs with the size of the installation.