A method to estimate the direct nitrous oxide emissions of municipal wastewater treatment plants based on the degree of nitrogen removal.

The greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (NO) is produced in activated sludge tanks as a byproduct of nitrification and heterotrophic denitrification. Insufficient knowledge on how microbiological NO generation and degradation pathways impact NO emissions in activated sludge tanks still hampers the development of effective mitigation strategies. Our research contributes to overcome this gap by quantifying NO emissions through extensive measurement campaigns at ten full-scale wastewater treatment plants and correlating them to relevant operating parameters by multivariate regression analysis. Measurements revealed that NO production depends mainly on the activity of nitrifying bacteria and is triggered by high ammonium concentrations. In contrast, well-performing heterotrophic denitrification plays a key role as a sink of NO in activated sludge tanks. Following these patterns, low loaded plants achieving high nitrogen removal (83-92%) exhibited the lowest NO emission intensity (0.0012 ± 0.001 kg NO-N emitted per kg TKN in the influent wastewater). The regression analysis corroborated these results by revealing a negative linear correlation between the NO emission factor and the total nitrogen removal degree of the plants. The regression model represents a novel estimation method that links NO emissions with plant performance and provides a significant improvement over approaches applying fixed NO emission factors.