For Taiwan to be a healthy nation, vehicles more than 10 years old should be regulated or even phased out, because the health cost of air pollution is really too high. However, how to implement such controls is a difficult question.
As the legendary Chinese emperor Yu the Great (禹) found out when he set out to control the floods that plagued his empire, they can only be diverted, not shut in or dammed back, and they must be diverted in the right direction.
The current strategy is to provide subsidies for phasing out two-stroke scooters and replacing them with electric ones, as well as phasing out aging diesel vehicles and building railways, but providing subsidies for changing over to electric vehicles is only half right.
If electricity generation cannot make the transition to non-nuclear and reduced or zero coal power plants, it might even be the completely wrong policy. Even if electricity is generated by Taiwan’s most advanced ultra-supercritical coal-fired power station, it would be 10,000 times as carcinogenic as the original gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles.
Taking only the fuel factor into consideration, the natural gas burned by the Datan Power Plant (大潭) in Taoyuan is cleaner than the gasoline burned by cars and scooters, which is cleaner than the diesel fuel used by trucks, which is cleaner than the heavy fuel oil burned by Keelung’s Hsieh-ho (協和) power station, which is still much less toxic than the coal burned by the ultra-supercritical Linkou Power Plant (林口) in New Taipei City.
That is because coal-burning power stations emit grade 1 heavy metal carcinogens such as hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium 6, whereas natural gas and fuel oil-fired plants such as the Hsieh-ho power station do not emit it — neither do vehicles that are gasoline or diesel-powered.
The pollution prevention equipment on existing vehicles and their combustion efficiency are inferior to those of the advanced new Linkou coal-fired power plant. Scooters, especially those with two-stroke engines, emit a considerable amount of grade 1 carcinogens because of inefficient fuel combustion.
Gasoline-powered vehicles emit 3mg of benzene per kilometer traveled, a research report published by Tang et al in 2002 showed.
Let us compare the grade 1 carcinogen chromium 6 emitted by the most advanced new Linkou coal-fired power station with the grade 1 carcinogen benzene emitted by aging scooters. The cancer inhalation unit risk of chromium 6 is 0.012 per microgram per cubic meter, whereas that of benzene is only in the range of 0.0000022 to 0.0000078 per microgram per cubic meter, making chromium 6 about 4,000 times more carcinogenic than benzene.
Moreover, the life cycle for natural decay of chromium is 20 years, while that of benzene is only a few days.
Hence, the cancer risk posed by 1 gram of chromium 6 is 8 million times that of 1 gram of benzene. So, with regard to toxicity, if benzene emissions from motor vehicles are reduced by eight grams, chromium 6 emissions are only increased by 1 microgram.
The new Linkou ultra-supercritical plant emits about 22 micrograms of chromium for every kilowatt hour of electricity it generates, data reported to the New Taipei City Government by Taiwan Power Co showed.
Ultra-supercritical coal-fired power stations emit about 11 micrograms of chromium 6 for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they generate, according to a research paper published by Ma Hwong-wen (馬鴻文), a professor at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering.
A Tesla electric car can travel 3km on 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity. Therefore, if the electric power for the Tesla electric car was generated by the Linkou ultra-supercritical plant, the plant would emit about 4 micrograms of chromium 6 for each kilometer traveled by the car.
This means that although a Tesla would emit — via the power received from the coal-fired power plant — only one-750th as much benzene as a gasoline-powered car when traveling 1km, the resulting carcinogenicity would be nearly 10,000 times higher.
The kind of cancer caused by inhaling benzene is leukemia, while the kind of cancer caused by inhaling chromium 6 or arsenic is lung cancer.
In 2015, there were 1,956 new cases of leukemia and 13,086 new cases of lung cancer in Taiwan. Clearly, cutting the amount of chromium 6 and arsenic, which cause lung cancer, is much more important than cutting the amount of benzene.
Therefore, from the aspect of protecting the health of Taiwanese, reducing the amount of electricity generated by coal power stations is much more important than cutting the use of gasoline-powered vehicles.
According to the calculation method the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) employs, cutting vehicle emissions by a factor of three causes smokestack emissions to increase by a factor of one.
However, this method of assessment is seriously defective in that it only considers traditional pollutants, without taking into account the different toxicities of carcinogens emitted by different fuels.
The only solution would be to introduce subsidiary legislation that expressly states that manufacturing processes, fuels and raw materials that emit grade 1 carcinogens, such as those involved in coal-burning power stations, factories and the steel, cement and oil refining industries, are excluded from being offset against vehicle emissions.
Moreover, any plan to build a coal-fired power station at Shenao (深澳) in New Taipei City’s Rueifang District (瑞芳) is wrong.
The idea of transferring pollution from vehicles, whose emission outlets are close to the ground, to power plants, whose emission outlets are much higher up, to disperse the pollution, is not entirely correct.
Taking Feb. 26 and March 3 as examples, my research shows that the former was a normal day influenced by northeasterly seasonal winds, whereas the latter was a red-alert day under the effect of the return flow of an anticyclone.
On Feb. 26, the EPA’s local air quality monitoring station in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) recorded a concentration of PM2.5 — particles less than 2.5 micrometers wide — of 20 micrograms per cubic meter, which is considered normal air quality.
However, on March 3, it reached 70 micrograms per cubic meter, sparking a red alert for seriously bad air quality. On the red-alert day, the proportion of pollution contributed by the main sources in Taipei, such as gasoline-powered cars, remained at 5 percent, while the contributions of four-stroke scooters remained at 2.5 percent, buses at 1.8 percent and aging two-stroke scooters at 1 percent.
However, the share of air pollution generated by big diesel trucks, which mostly travel along the freeway between Port Keelung and the Port of Taipei, increased from 2 percent on the normal day to 4 percent on the red-alert day, while the effect of ships soared from 4 percent to 18 percent.
The effect of the Hsieh-ho oil-fired power station shot up by 16 times from 1 percent on the normal day to 16 percent, and the effect of the Linkou coal-fired power station grew by six times from 0.2 percent on the normal day to 1.2 percent.
An analysis of the above figures shows Taipei residents that local pollution purely attributable to weather-related factors would increase, if gasoline-powered scooters were replaced by electric ones whose electric power came from the Hsieh-ho and Linkou power stations, by six to 16 times on red-alert days, with some difference according to the location of the power stations.
Under weather conditions with stagnant air flow such as those caused by the return flow of an anticyclone, winds — be they sea winds or winds resulting from the heat island effect — blow from the Linkou or Hsieh-ho power stations, and indeed the future Shenao power station, into the Taipei Basin and get trapped there.
If, for the sake of environmental protection and public health, we want to regulate aging vehicles and encourage people to use electric cars and scooters instead, then we must do as California has done and convert to non-coal and non-oil electricity generation.
In 2002, 28 percent of California’s electricity was still generated by burning coal, but by 2013 that figure had fallen to 1 percent. California no longer has any oil-fired power stations either, so it can now focus its efforts on vehicles as a way to reduce pollution.
Tsuang Ben-jei is a professor in National Chung Hsing University’s environmental engineering department.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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