Atmospheric Emission Reduction and Abatement Costs in Regional Environmental Planning

Atmospheric pollutant emissions caused by anthropic activities are becoming one of the main problems in environmental research. The question of assessing their impact on the global and on the local scale, and of reducing their amount, represent one of the main objectives in environmental projects such as the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative (SBI). lyse the Basilicata energy system to investigate the possibility of reducing atmospheric pollutant emissions by the cost minimizing allocation of technologies and fuels. We focus our attention on SO2 and NOx emissions, the most interesting pollutants in a regional analysis. We deal also with CO2 emission reduction, to bring out the relationships with the other two pollutants. Energy system analysis is performed with the MARKAL linear programming model. We calculate the minimum total system cost at different levels of emission reduction, for each of the investigated pollutants. The tradeoff curves show graphically the reduction cost vs emission reduction. We analysed also the main components of the total energy system cost, in order to point out the factors which have the greatest influence in determining the abatement costs.