Kuwait's EPA and MEW assign advisory office to study design of energy production stations

KUWAIT CITY: The Environment Public Authority (EPA) has agreed with the Ministry of Electricity and Water to assign an environmental advisory office to study the design of energy production stations and to choose the most appropriate places to install emission measurement systems in order to protect the environment from harmful emissions, reports Al-Qabas daily.

Deputy Director General for Environmental Control Affairs in EPA Samira Al-Kandari explained that coordination was made with the Ministry of Electricity and Water during the years 2017 and 2018 to work on installing these systems and linking them automatically with the EPA.

However, it faced some difficulties, which were discussed several times, most recently this month when a plan was prepared to work on adhering to the necessary requirements.

The ministry is currently measuring emissions periodically through hand-held devices and sending the results to EPA by email.

She said, “Energy production plants, in general, consume the fuel supplied by the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. If the fuel is crude oil, gas oil or natural gas, the emissions are invisible, but if it is heavy fuel such as heavy oil, the emissions are visible to everyone”.

Al-Kandari stressed that EPA’s air quality monitoring stations do not, in all cases, record increases in pollutants because of the direction of the wind, which carries what comes out of the chimneys of energy production plants to uninhabited places, adding that emissions diminish and dissolve in the air over time.