Controlling mechanisms that determine mercury sorbent effectiveness

Coal is now the primary source of anthropogenic mercury emissions in the US, accounting for 46%, or 72 tons/year, of the total US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated 158 tons/year. However, on a worldwide basis, the projected increase in coal usage over the next two decades in China, India, and Indonesia will dwarf the current US coal consumption of 1 billion tons/year. Development of cost-effective mercury control for coal-fired boilers is a primary research need identified in the EPA Mercury Study Report to Congress. A promising approach for mercury control is the injection of an effective sorbent upstream of the particulate control device. Since the amount of mercury in the gas stream from coal combustion is usually in the range of 5 to 10 {micro}g/m{sup 3} (about 1 ppbv), only very small amounts of a sorbent may be necessary. A requirement is that the mercury be tightly bound in the sorbent, not desorbing upon exposure to ambient air or leaching under wet disposal conditions. Many of the attempts at using sorbents to control mercury from coal combustion have met with limited success for unexplained reasons. Recent results at the EERC identified a major interaction between SO{sub 2} and NO{sub 2}more » that may be responsible for the poor sorbent performance observed in many tests. Results indicate that a combination of SO{sub 2} and NO{sub 2} will lead to rapid breakthrough of oxidized mercury species. These results also suggest that bench-scale sorbent data collected without CO{sub 2} and NO{sub 2} are likely to be misleading if they are generalized to combustion systems where these gases are almost always present. Understanding this mechanism will be critical to the development of better sorbents. This paper presents possible mechanisms that may explain the observed SO{sub 2}-NO{sub 2} effects on sorbent performance and lead to a more effective control approach.« less