A preliminary assessment of global mercury emissions from gasoline

Mercury is released to the atmosphere from a large number of man-made sources which include fossil fuel fired power plants, ferrous and non-ferrous metals manufacturing processes, chemicals production, processing of ores and waste disposal facilities and cement plants. Among them, emis-sion from mobile sources has been reported as an important source for which there are few estimates (EPA, 1997). However, recent studies in the United States indicate that the overall emission quantities are relatively small compared to many other categories. This work provides a global assessment, disaggregated by country, on mercury emission from pe-troleum fuel consumption for 2000 by considering emission factors reported by Landis et al. (2004) and the world consumption of petrol and diesel (IEA, 2006). Petrol combustion contributed 238 kg yr-1 (121-281 kg yr-1) to mercury emissions while diesel contributed 140 kg yr-1 (71-209). The total mercury emission was around 378 kg yr-1 (192-564 kg yr-1) with a growing trend due to the increase of gasoline and diesel consumption. The global contribution to atmospheric mercury emission from petroleum fuel combustion repre-sented 0.015% of the total anthropogenic emissions. It should be kept in mind that these estimates are very conservative because not all countries are reported in the EIA database and because fuel consumption in the shipping industry and for military use is not included in the database