AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Impact of Wildfire on Ambient Air Levels of Unsubstituted and Alkylated-PAHs in the Region of Oil Sands Exploitation and Bitumen Processing in Alberta, Canada
ANDRZEJ WNOROWSKI, Jean-Pierre Charland, Environment and Climate Change Canada
Abstract Number: 301 Working Group: Aerosol Chemistry
Abstract Characterization of air pollutants emitted during wildfires in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region is important for understanding their impact on human health and ecosystems and their combined effects with air pollutants emitted from oil sands related exploration and processing in the region. The burden of wildfire emissions on ambient air levels of alk-PAHs in the oil sands region is not fully understood, consequently comprehensive emission source apportionment, evaluation and control of the environmental risks are still incomplete. On May 15, 2011, a wildfire started in the Richardson Backcountry area (Alberta, Canada) and burned until the end of June, consuming 577,647 hectares of boreal forest (Canadian Wildland Fire Information System, 2018). This wildfire spread across the Athabasca region and came within 10 to 30 km of the ambient air monitoring stations in the oil sands region. This resulted in the detection of substantially higher levels of unsubstituted and alkylated-PAHs (PACs) during this fire episode (May 15 to June 30, 2011).
The measured PAC levels differed amongst the three regional air monitoring stations in relation to distance from the wildfire and oil sands industrial locations. In addition, we observed an unexpected high contribution of alkylated-PAHs which suggests that wildfire emissions in the oil sands region are unique and contribute notably to the overall annual burden of unsubstituted and alkylated-PAHs in ambient air. The study highlights the notable contribution of alkylated-PAHs that are not routinely monitored in air, and that wildfire emissions can be characteristic to the region where previously deposited or naturally present chemical species such as PACs can be released to air at high temperatures occurring during fires.