Chemistry impacts of retorting shale oil to troposphere in United States

With the oil and gas shale retorting more and more in Texas, the polluted gases are transported to the nearby cities. The air quality in local area is focused by the society. In this paper, we explore how the production of shale oil and gas influences the quality of ambient air in order to investigate the impacts of ozone concentration in five nonattainment cities (i.e., Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio). Because the pollutant air can be transported from retorting areas, which are 100,000 miles far away, this could affect other places’ environment including atmosphere and water. Eagle Ford Shale is located in South Texas, which covers entire roads of eastern Texas, neighboring Mexico. The area is 400 miles long and 50 miles wide. The purpose of this research is to investigate if recent increases in shale oil and gas production have significantly affected emissions of precursor gases known to propel the formation of O3 in the above 5 cities mentioned. In the methodology part, satellite Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment Instrument (GOME) 2, Arc Geophysical Information System (GIS) software and Master Chemical Mechanism (MCM) model will be used to explore the objectives of the research. This includes obtaining troposphere gas level data from the GOME2 satellite and getting the changes of ratio of formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide during the three summer months (June, July and August) from the year of 2007 to 2013 via GIS. It’s explicit to see the concentrations changes from every year and also the difference between the five cities and the other areas. Master Chemical Mechanism (MCM) v3.2 model is used to measure the above five cities’ troposphere ozone formation concentration. This troposphere chemistry model contains clear mechanisms of hundreds of methane, non-methane VOC’s and inorganic gases. Troposphere ozone is mainly formed by the anthropogenic emission of NOx and Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) via sunlight. The 4th highest 8-hour ozone concentration value date is selected from EPA data from the year 2007 to 2013, compared with the output 4th highest 8-hour ozone concentrations obtained from MCM model