User's manual for ecological risk assessment

Abstract

This report presents the results of a four-year project on environmental risk analysis of synfuels technologies. The overall objective was to develop a risk assessment methodology capable of: (1) ranking the waste streams in a process by risk to the environment; (2) estimating the change in environmental risk that would be achieved using alternative control technology options; (3) estimating the sensitivity of risk estimates to site-dependent variables; and (4) identifying research problems contributing the greatest uncertainty to risk estimates. An initial suite of five potentially useful techniques was applied in a preliminary risk analysis of indirect coal liquefaction technologies. As a result of this application, it was determined that two of the original five techniques were unsuitable for synfuels risk assessments. The remaining three were developed further and applied in a unit-release risk assessment, a revised indirect liquefaction risk assessment, a direct liquefaction risk assessment, and an oil shale risk assessment. This users' manual is intended to facilitate wider use of ecological risk analysis techniques by: (1) presenting the rationale for the approach developed in this project; (2) describing the derivation and mechanics of the three techniques used in the synfuels risk assessments; and (3) discussing the limitations and othermore » potential applications of ecological risk assessment methods.« less