A new prediction method of industrial atmospheric pollutant emission intensity based on pollutant emission standard quantification

Industrial emissions are the main source of atmospheric pollutants in China. Accurate and reasonable prediction of the emission of atmospheric pollutants from single enterprise can determine the exact source of atmospheric pollutants and control atmospheric pollution precisely. Based on China’s coking enterprises in 2020, we proposed a quantitative method for pollutant emission standards and introduced the quantification results of pollutant emission standards (QRPES) into the construction of support vector regression (SVR) and random forest regression (RFR) prediction methods for SO(2) emission of coking enterprises in China. The results show that, affected by the types of coke ovens and regions, China’s current coking enterprises have implemented a total of 21 emission standards, with marked differences. After adding QRPES, it was found that the root mean squared error (RMSE) of SVR and RFR decreased from 0.055 kt/a and 0.059 kt/a to 0.045 kt/a and 0.039 kt/a, and the R(2) increased from 0.890 and 0.881 to 0.926 and 0.945, respectively. This shows that the QRPES can greatly improve the prediction accuracy, and the SO(2) emissions of each enterprise are highly correlated with the strictness of standards. The predicted result shows that 45% of SO(2) emissions from Chinese coking enterprises are concentrated in Shanxi, Shaanxi and Hebei provinces in central China. The method created in this paper fills in the blank of forecasting method of air pollutant emission intensity of single enterprise and is of great help to the accurate control of air pollutants. [Image: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at 10.1007/s11783-023-1608-1 and is accessible for authorized users.