Compliance with future regulation of air quality management in refining

Meeting the increasing demand for motor fuels parallel with the more and more stringent environmental norms can only be accomplished by improving engine design in parallel with the development of motor fuels. This continuously forces refineries to invest into technological development projects and this, in turn, unavoidably entails the increased emission of air pollutants from the refineries.

At the same time, the oil companies have to realize in the planning of their new capital projects that it is not sufficient anymore if the technological processes to be installed satisfy the legal requirements of environment
protection and comply with the limit values of permissible emissions from specific process units and areas. In addition to compliance with these limit values, the planned activities have to satisfy also the BAT (Best Available Techniques) in respect of both the technology-specific and general principles, such as the so-called Bubble principle, which states that the total emission of a refinery shall not increase with the implementation of new development projects in respect of a particular pollutant. The application of the “Bubble principle” has been included also in the Hungarian environmental permission procedure, enabling the local municipalities to require
compensations for additional emissions caused by development projects.
Since MOL PLC plans to implement a large-scale capital project, in the near future which will increase the emission of air pollutants at Danube Refinery due to processing additional quantities of crude oil, a fesibility study was ordered from an independent consulting company (Fôvárosi Levegôvédelmi Kft – FLA) for the investigation of possible measures capable of reducing pollutant emissions in order to prevent the worsening of the status of air pollution in the surroundings of the refinery even after the implementation of the new capital projects.

Réka Söjtöri, Henrietta Horváth