Alexander Pereskokov (Head Specialist at Bioterm Scientific Research Company in Yekaterinburg, innovation manager, with a diploma from the Russian Government Academy of Economics)

Every spring, as the snow melts, the cities of the Urals are surrounded by thick clouds of dust. This kind of air pollution, along with the high incidence of smoking, is one of the leading reasons for the steady growth in lung cancer in the area. According to the International Agency for Cancer Research, around 85% of malignant tumors can be attributed to unhealthy environmental conditions. Emissions from petrochemical, power generating, aluminum, nickel, coking, and other factories have led to a higher concentration of carcinogens in the air over many cities. Specialists from Sverdlovenergo have invented an extremely effective gas scrubbing method to remove contaminants. If installed at factories, it will allow them to comply with the Law on Protecting Air Quality and citizen initiatives.

It’s not fair to say that nothing is being done to clean up the air. Companies have scrubbing systems left over from the era of “developed socialism,” which are still being used more or less. However, the privatization of fuel and energy plants and metal manufacturing facilities has not led to noticeable improvements in environmental protection. One rarely hears of new owners refitting their factory to reduce its harmful influence on the environment.
Russian technology to scrub pollutants from the air is now in a position to address this problem more efficiently than its Western counterparts. It provides better technical and economic results for the same money or similar results for less money. How well heavy elements, aerosols, and acid gasses are removed depends on how effectively the large-scale processes involving scrubbing devices are set up. Without a doubt, engineering in this area in other countries has reached far higher levels than in Russia. However, Russia still has specialists capable of conducting complex technical projects, its innovation engineers.

Gas scrubbing has been well studied for a long time. Innovations have been made to perfect the large-scale processes at the heart of these devices, where gasses are drawn through a layer of foam (called an emulsion) stabilized by centrifugal force.
Oleg Kochetkov’s scrubber model became the prototype built by Sverdlovenergo for the Artemosky Electric Energy Center. This first “Artemovksy” set-up has been in operation since 1996 for a total of 25,000 hours. Additional modification of Kochetkov’s device led to the creation of an essentially new type of gas scrubbing equipment. The perfected Artemovsky device can remove containments even when dust concentration reaches 60 g/m3. It can remove 98.6% of suspended particles when a furnace is running at low capacity and 99.7% at regular capacity. Low hydraulic resistance means the scrubbing system requires little electricity. It also uses remarkably little water, less than 0.3 m3 for every thousand square meters of gas. This is exponentially less than the water used by disc-shaped scrubbers. The efficiency of the device means that it does not require electrostatic precipitators, which are expensive and not always very effective.

The Russian miracle

The Artemovsky device caught the interest of the Design Bureau at the Yekaterinburg-based Energotsvetmet State Company, which is developing ways to clean emissions from the sintering furnaces on the aluminous production line of the Urals Aluminum Factory.
“The electrostatic property of dust forming in sintering furnaces severely reduces the effectiveness of electrostatic precipitators,” says Yuri Frolov, Technical Director of the Design Bureau. “The disc scrubbers that follow it are literally choked with the dust the precipitators miss. When the gas escapes, it contains a much higher than acceptable concentration of dust particles, as high as 6 grams per cubic meter, and releases them into the atmosphere. As we were looking for a solution to this problem, I met the inventors of these patented devices. Their ideas and experience with the Artemovsky device made such an impression on our specialists that we changed our approach to solving the scrubbing problem at the Urals Factory. The ideas in the patents were also applied in our system for cleaning up emissions from the Urals electroplating production line.
According to Frolov’s estimates, installing the updated Artemovsky device at the Urals Aluminum Factory reduced emissions from the sintering furnace polluting the atmosphere by 60 times. This means that the volume of dust drifting over the town of Kamensk-Uralsky will fall by 4,500 tons in a year.

The residents of Kamensk-Uralsky are lucky. But what about those living near other industrial centers and living with air pollution? The resistance of many factory owners to installing new environmental technologies must be opposed by legislation and citizen initiatives.
Until 1999 the State Committee for the Environment did the best it could to fight for a cleaner environment. The committee was then dissolved under the government of Mikhail Kasyanov. Only in May 2003 did members of the State Council recall Russia’s environmental problems and the ineffectiveness of the 1999 federal Law on Protecting Air Quality. This State Council meeting came on the eve of a series of official visits by the Russian president to several EU countries, where environmental ministers had just announced new regulations for industrial emissions due to come into effect in 2005. The EU intends to reduce emissions by 8% compared to 1990 levels.