2.A.5.a - Quarrying & Mining - Other Than Coal

Regarding particulate emissions, Mining is the main emissions source in the Mineral industries.

In Germany, two diffrent approaches are applied for sands and rocks, and for salts, respectively.

The mining process emits relevant amounts of particles. Quarrying and mining of minerals other than coal is subsumed, in particular mining of limestone, hard rock and building Sands, with rising recycled materials.

Salt production is a sub-category of the mining activities in respect of the country specific approach used.

With the use of the 2019 GB method ¹⁾, a Tier 2 method is available that can reflect different national conditions.

In particular, this concerns input variables on humidity and wind speed, which are differentiated into regions. Due to data availability, the regions are represented by the administrative states (German Länder), which does not necessarily represent characteristic weather regimes. Regionality can be increased by merging urban and surface states. Parameters on weather as well as on areas can thus be improved, in a first step by using open wheather data back to 1990.

No area information from the Corine land cover before 2010 is used (consistent data sets). In addition, information from CLC category 131 (Mineral extraction sites ²⁾) had to be adjusted for areas of active open-pit lignite mines.

For salt production currently a Tier 1 method is used: information on production of salts are multiplied with country specific emission factors for TSP and PM. Please see the small relevance of this under trend diskussion.

As provided in the Guidebook model, specific AD for hard rock, sand, and recycled material are applied. Because of incomplete national statistics, these AD are taken from nationals and international association information ³⁾. Within the framework of technical consultations, historical data were confirmed by the National Association for Mineral Resources ⁴⁾. Now we are additionally in contact with Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources for figures og mineral raw materials ⁵⁾. For time series concsistency, data gaps are closed via interpolation or expert adjustement.

The data from national statistics includes production of potash and rock salt. Potash salt is dominating, nevertheless gaps of statistics are filled and emissions are modelled as potash salt only.

The calculation of emissions takes into account national circumstances and reduction measures.The calculations are available in total more than ten Excel files (individual years since 1990, annually from 2010). Since the GB tool in principle calculates emissions for exactly one year ⁶⁾, files must be available for exactly those years in which input data are available. Intermediate years are interpolated in case of data gaps.

With the help of the GB tools, IEFs are estimated on an annual basis, which are used for the inventory method AR x EF. The emission factors are virtual, but the calculation of this is modified by national circumstances on the parameters. So we would name the EF as country-specific.

The emission factors for salt production are based on analogy to bulk product handling by an UBA expert judgement:

Table 2: Overview of applied emission factors, in kg/t salt

Trends in emissions follow the shrinking mining activities.

Emission trends in NFR 2.A.5.a

The Tier 1 methodology for the emissions from salt mining represents only a small portion of emissions from this sector - few than 4%, depending on the PM fraction. Considering the limited scale of the activity and emission, the part is considered to be below the significance for higher Tiers.

At the moment, it is planned evaluate further Country specific conditions.