Chapter 10.1 - Point Sources

Germany, alongside with the European Union (EU) and EU Member States, has signed the UN-ECE PRTR Protocol, whereby Germany commits to establish and operate a national Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) for public information. The E-PRTR Regulation (European Regulation (EC) No 166/2006) and the German PRTR Act (SchadRegProtAG) provide the legal basis for this. If pollutant threshold values or waste quantities specified in the E-PRTR Ordinance are exceeded, releases of pollutants to air, water and soil, shipments with wastewater, and disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous wastes from certain industrial activities have to be reported annually for the PRTR. ¹⁾

Since December 31, 2016, the new NEC Directive (2016/2284/EU) on the reduction of the national emissions of certain atmospheric pollutants came into force, replacing the Directive (2001/81/EC) on National Emission Ceilings. The new NEC Directive (2016/2284/EU) requires EU Member States to achieve new reduction targets from 2030, which in addition to the previously regulated air pollutants SO₂, NOₓ, NMVOC and NH₃, also include reduction targets for particulate matter (PM₂.₅) for the first time. This means that the new directive imposes significantly extended reporting obligations on the EU Member States. For the first time, EU Member States are required to create emission inventories for particulate matter, heavy metals and POPs. The inventories must also include emission projections. Furthermore, emissions from large point sources must be reported and emission data must be spatially itemized. For the first time in 2017 and then every four years, EU Member States must report spatially distributed emissions (raster data) with a resolution of 0.1° x 0.1° (longitude-latitude). Large point sources (LPS) must be reported every 4 years, starting in 2017. Reporting is mandatory for agro-industrial and industrial activities whose annual emissions exceed certain thresholds, which correspond to those for emissions reporting under the E-PRTR Regulation (European Regulation (EC) No 166/2006). ²⁾

Annex IV of the Directive indicates, that member states shall prepare emission inventories “in accordance with the methodologies recognized by the Parties to the LRTAP Convention (EMEP reporting guidelines)” and “shall base their reporting on the Air Pollutant Emissions Inventory (EMEP/EUA Guidelines) referred to in the Convention.” The reporting guidelines (UNECE 2015) define large point sources as follows:

Germany provided its point source data under the LRTAP convention for the first time in 2017. However, additional information is missing, such as stack heights, which are not available at the federal level. Therefore, the German submission is rather a copy of the ePRTR data available on both the national and European websites. The most recent provision of Large Point Source data refer to 2018, as data for 2019 are not yet available.

Various quality checks of the data were carried out beforehand. The data from the ePRTR database, which is provided by the website www.thru.de, was cleaned, processed and missing data was added. Now the data can be transferred into a suitable format (Excel template under LRTAP convention). Before the data could be transformed into the appropriate format for submission, several data preconditions were determined. Furthermore, data quality checks were performed. The total emissions of the LPS were cross-checked with the corresponding NFR tables. Below is a list of the quality checks that have been performed.

• calculation of the sum of LPS emissions and comparison with the NFR tables
• unit mistakes checks
• outlier checks
• verification of missing information in the data (such as ID’s, stack heighs, GNFR, coordinates, etc.)
• checking whether the coordinates are within Germany
• sanitizing of plant names
• comparison of quantities (e.g., quantities of PM10 and PM2.5 lower than quantities of heavy metals)

Furthermore, efforts were made to provide the missing information regarding stack heights. GNFR membership and stack height class have been added according to Table 1 .

Point source emissions have been derived for the following GNFR sectors:

• A_PublicPower
• B_Industry
• C_OtherStatComb
• D_Fugitives
• E_Solvents
• F_RoadTransport
• G_Shipping
• H_Aviation
• I_OtherMobile
• J_Waste
• K_AgriLivestock
• L_AgriOther
• M_Other