Assembling the Inventory of Refinery Releases

Pollution prevention cannot be adequately implemented or monitored for effectiveness unless facility operators and regulators know what is being released from the facility and its origin. Therefore one of the study team s first tasks was to assemble a detailed inventory of releases from the refinery. At the start of the project, information on all of the refinery s release sources was not available. This was understandable, considering that complex industrial sources such as the refinery contain hundreds, sometimes thousands, of potential release points. It is technically difficult and impractical to monitor and measure each of these points. 

Instead, government regulatory systems—such as those established by the Clean Water Act or Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)—require refineries and other facilities to monitor and measure releases from a few specific points, such as the end of a discharge pipe, or in specific media, such as ground-water. As a result, monitoring resources are typically allocated to meet permit requirements rather than to measure releases at the point of generation. 

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