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Barstow Air Pollution Control System
Improvements
The leading technology for air pollution control from paint lines is
thermal oxidation -- essentially the burning of volatile organic
compounds emitted during painting operations, converting the compounds
into carbon dioxide and water. The technology is very effective, but has
some drawbacks. The major disadvantage is that it requires a relatively
large quantity of fuel to destroy a relatively small amount of material.
Thus the cost of this type of control is very sensitive to energy
prices. It is also a significant contributor of carbon dioxide (from the
fuel, as well as from the compounds being destroyed), which will become
a liability if global warming concerns lead to a future effort to
minimize carbon dioxide emissions from all sources.
Under the circumstances, it seems prudent to evaluate alternative
technologies for air pollution control. One promising candidate is
biological control. While proven highly effective for water pollution
control, application of biological control systems to air pollution
control is in a much earlier stage of development. An innovative
biological air pollution control system has recently become available.
An existing coating facility at the Barstow Marine Corps Multi-Commodity
Maintenance Center provides a good test bed to evaluate whether the
biological system can function well in a military installation. The
project will install a pilot scale biological control system in the
existing line, and will test its performance under conditions of actual
use.
Program Manager: Paul Chalmer, (734) 995-4911,
paulc@ncms.org
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