4.18 Fiberglass Manufacturing
Category 45
4.18.1 Introduction
Category 45 accounts for organic emissions from fiberglass products manufacturing plants. Organic compounds are used for the production or rework of product by mixing, pouring, hand laying-up, impregnating, injecting, forming, spraying, and/or curing unsaturated polyester materials with fiberglass, fillers or any other reinforcement materials and associated clean-up. The evaporation of these organic compounds, are considered as emissions from this category.
4.18.2 Methodology
Point Sources are operations that emit air pollution into the atmosphere at a fixed location within a facility, for which the Air District has issued a permit to operate, e.g. refinery cooling towers. These could also be a collection of similar equipment / sources located across multiple facilities, e.g. reciprocating engines.
During the permit to operate (PTO) issuance process, the BAAQMD collects information from the operating facility and/or determines from published literature, e.g. EPA’s AP-42, characteristics of a source including maximum throughput, emission factors for emitted pollutants, and control factors associated with downstream abatement devices. These characteristics are then stored for future use in the BAAQMD’s internal database. Facilities that hold a permit to operate are required to renew this permit periodically (this period varies based on facility and source type). Upon renewal, the facilities are requested to provide any updates to source characteristics as well as the source throughput for the last 12 months. This throughput, in combination with the emission factors and controls factors stored in the internal database, are used to estimate annual emissions at the source level. These source level emissions are then sorted and aggregated into categories.
Further speciation and quality assurance of emissions are performed as a part of the inventory process. The BAAQMD staff also perform a systematic crosswalk between CEPAM’s source category classification (Emission Inventory Code - EICs) and the District’s source category classification (category identification number - cat_ids), which ensures consistency in the annual emissions reporting process (CEIDARS) to California Air Resources Board. The last part of the inventory development process includes forecasting and back casting, and aggregation into sub-sectors and sectors for documentation purposes. For those years where no data is available, emissions data are backcasted to year-1990, as well as forecasted to year-2040 using either interpolation or another mathematical approach (see Trends section). Finally, emissions trends spanning from year 1990-2040 for each category and pollutant are evaluated for anomalies that are then investigated and addressed.
Category 45 is considered a point source category and follows the above methodology for emissions estimates.
District Regulation 8 Rule 50 - Polyester Resin Operations 102 effective June 1991 has set standard requirements in polyester resin operations. Currently, it is estimated the overall control of this rule is approximately 87%.
The total organic gas (TOG) emissions from this Fiberglass Manufacturing category are considered all reactive organic gas (ROG). The ROG:TOG ratio is equal to 1.
4.18.3 Changes in Methodology
There are no changes to methodology for Fiberglass Manufacturing (Category 45).
4.18.4 Emissions
A summary of emissions by category, county, and year are available via the associated data dashboard for this inventory publication.
4.18.5 Trends
(a) Historical Emissions / History
Historical emissions for point source emissions are derived from source-specific throughputs provided by the permitted facility, compiled/reported emission factors, and regulation-based control factors. This information is archived in the BAAQMD’s internal database which is queried to retrieve the data for historical and current years. Interpolation techniques to account for missing data are used when necessary, this is the case for years 1991-1992.
(b) Future Projections / Growth
Forecasting of point source emissions is done based on calculations as shown in the equation below using recently updated growth profiles and a base year of 2020. The growth profiles for the current base year inventory have been verified and updated to represent the most likely surrogate for growing emissions for a given category up to year 2040. Forecasting for point source emissions includes impact of in-place regulations, but does not include estimation of controls that will theoretically be implemented as part of future policy emission targets or proposed regulation and legislation.
\[ \text{PE} = \text{Gr} * \text{Ci} * \text{Ei} \] \(PE\) = projected emissions of pollutant i in a past or future year
\(Gr\) = growth rate by economic profile of industry or population
\(Ci\) = control factor of pollutant i based on adopted rules and regulations
\(Ei\) = base year emissions of pollutant i
Projections of emissions to 2040 were based on ABAG’s 2017 Manufacturing & Wholesale Employment growth profile.
4.18.6 Uncertainties
The estimated emissions for this Fiberglass Manufacturing category are based on only two fiberglass facilities within the District. Therefore, the individual operations at each of these facilities may strongly dictate future emissions. This leads to some uncertainty in emission projections, which are based on employment growth in the larger industrial sector.
4.18.7 Contact
Author: Michael Nguyen
Reviewer: Ariana Husain
Last Update: November 06, 2023
4.18.8 References & Footnotes
BAAQMD. 2009. Regulation 8 Rule 50 - Polyester Resin Operations, https://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/dotgov/files/rules/reg-8-rule-50-polyester-resin-operations/documents/rg0850.pdf?la=en&rev=ea70610abffe492baabcc431e82d71c6↩︎