Mediterranean Action Plan

TURKEY - National Study
Table 43 Winter season air pollution trends in Turkish cities [55]
Coal use in thermal power plants to produce electricity is a significant source of pollution.
The industrial sector is also an important contributor. In 2000, coal and lignite accounted for
about 32% of total electricity production and for 33% of final energy consumption in the
industrial sector. Low quality and high sulphur lignite is used especially in electricity
generation. In 2000, the electricity production sector emitted 1.32 million tones of SO2, 0.19
million tones of NOx and 0.16 million tones of particulates. On the other hand, base case
projections by MENR [103] for electricity demand indicate an increase by a factor of two and
a half by 2012, which will have to be met by 41 GW of new capacity. Of this capacity, 19% is
expected to be fuelled by lignite and another 3% by imported coal for a total of 8.6 GW of
new coal capacity. As current coal fuelled capacity is about 8.36 GW, this would mean nearly
tripling the present use of lignite and hard coal for electricity generation. Over the same
period, consumption of lignite in the industrial sector would increase by about 50% and
consumption of hard coal (mostly imported) by about 160%. If the projected increases in coal
use are not met with adequate investments in SO2, NOx and TSP abatement technologies,
the resulting emissions could more than double [171].
Other significant sources of SOx, NOx and TSP are high sulphur fuel oil use in power
generation and industry and automotive fuel use in transport. The latter, in particular, is
bound to increase rapidly in the next two decades. The transport sector is dominated by road
transport, and vehicle ownership is increasing fast [171]. On the other hand, capacity
utilization of available rail lines for passenger transport is very low for inter-city traffic and
higher for suburban lines, suggesting that the construction of new mass transportation
systems needs to concentrate on large metropolitan areas and take account of consumer
preferences. Although the projected growth of energy demand in transport is not nearly as
fast as that in the power generation and industrial sectors, the growth potential for pollutant
emissions is large. Characteristically, the transport sector produces emissions of lead and
carbon monoxide besides the other usual pollutants [46,103].
Table 44 shows the calculated CO2 and CH4 emissions for the main sectors, such as energy
and cycle, industry, transportation, households and others in Turkey. Table 45 also shows
the total emission estimates with five year intervals in the country.
Table 44 Estimated CO2 and CH4 emissions in different energy-consuming sectors in Turkey
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