The Vulcan Project: Methods, Results, and Evaluation

The Vulcan Project has quantified fossil fuel CO2 for the United States at the sub-county spatial scale, hourly for the year 2002. It approached quantification of fossil fuel CO2 from a novel perspective: leveraging the information already contained within the National Emissions Inventory for the assessment of nationally regulated air pollution. By utilizing the inventory emissions of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides combined with emissions factors, specific to combustion device technology, we have calculated CO2 emissions for industrial point sources, powerplants, mobile sources, residential and commercial sectors with information on fuel used and source classification information. In this presentation, we provide an overview of the Vulcan inventory methods, results and evaluation of the Vulcan inventory by comparing to state-level inventories and other independent estimates. The inventory has been recently placed onto Google Earth and we will provide a preview of this capability. Finally, we will present the result of fossil fuel CO2 concentration as transported by an atmospheric transport model and a comparison to in situ CO2 observations.