Quintero

Quintero is the demo of a real, heavily documented industrial belt: Concón, Quintero and Puchuncaví, a zone declared saturated under the PPDA, with the 2018 episodes and the public monitoring network built because of them. Unlike Santiago and Bali, this inventory comes from no client: it was assembled from public sources — the MMA emissions inventory, the SMA’s enforcement records and the SINCA station pages — with the brief to model every facility, by sub-unit and with several source types, to stretch what AirDesk can do.


Time zone	America/Santiago
Standard evaluated	Chile, MMA primary standards (`cl-mma`)
Grid	121 × 121 cells of 500 m, about 60 × 60 km — the finest of the three demos
Forecast	120 hours, every 15 minutes
Sources	17 in 9 groups: 12 stacks, 4 areas, 1 volume source
Receptors	15, the new CQP public monitoring network
Species	SO₂, NO₂, PM₁₀, PM₂.₅ and CO

The stations

The fifteen receptors are the new public monitoring network for Concón, Quintero and Puchuncaví (2026), five per commune. Nine sit at their SINCA station’s coordinate — Escuela La Greda and Valle Alegre have measured since 1992; Puchuncaví Centro, Puente Colmo, Loncura, Quintero Sur, Maitencillo, Concón MMA and the Quintero supersite, the last meteorology-only. Six are placed by proximity pending the network’s official publication (Ventanas supersite, Pucalán, the municipal stadium, Concón Oeste, Bomberos Concón and Mantagua); the SINCA record for Ventanas carries an incoherent coordinate a hundred kilometres north.

The sources, in nine groups

The groups follow the facilities, because in this belt the question is always who.

Ventanas Refinery and Smelter (CODELCO) — the main stack, and concentrate handling as an area. More than half the belt’s annual SO₂ (3,315 t in the 2023 inventory). The smelting furnace closed in 2022 and the official inventory still attributes the figure to it; kept as is, flagged for review.

Ventanas Thermoelectric Complex (Quintero Energía) — Campiche, Nueva Ventanas and units 1 and 2, plus the coal pile as an area. The zone’s NOₓ leader. Units 1 and 2 are retired according to public records and are kept at the official 2023 figure until reconciled.

Cemento Melón, Ventanas plant — the kiln as a stack, materials handling as an area.

Puerto Ventanas — bulk storage as an area and ship loading as a volume source, the domain’s only one. Leads particulate matter with 556 t a year, 39 % of the belt.

ENAP Aconcagua Refinery — the aggregated process stacks (some twenty boilers and furnaces), the flares, and the co-generation plant. The main PM2.5 and SO₂ source of the Concón sector. Its carbon monoxide is modelled; its 356 t a year of volatile organic compounds are not, because the model does not represent them.

GNL Quintero terminal, Linde Gas Concón, ENEL Central Quintero — the zone’s carbon monoxide leader — and ENEX La Greda asphalt plant complete the belt, one stack each. Thirteen facilities emitting only volatile organic compounds (terminals, tank farms, Oxiquim, Styropek, BASF…) are deliberately left out.

The scenarios

Base scenario — normal operation, no restrictions. Seven rates are official MMA 2023 figures; the rest is screening.

Environmental pre-emergency (PPDA CQP) — the scenario that inverts the question: the smelter halves its SO₂, the thermal units drop to 60 %, cement, port and stockpiles to 50–70 %, while ENAP, the terminal, Linde, ENEL and ENEX carry on unchanged. The factors are plausible but not taken from the current plan’s text.

Emergency: converter blow with the acid plant down — the platform’s first time-varying emission. Three segments over three and a half hours: the blow with the acid plant out of service at 2,000 g/s of SO₂, two hours of uncaptured emission at 1,500 g/s, then the converter stop, where the plume loses temperature and velocity and stops rising. It is the mechanism of the documented 2018 episodes and the reason the monitoring network exists. It is a hypothetical event: not a recorded incident, not an assessment of any particular facility. The start hour will be set at the worst dispersion hour the meteorology delivers.

The alerts

Alerts are evaluated against the Chilean standard (MMA), with the averaging period each species requires: hourly for SO₂ and NO₂, 8-hour moving for CO. A receptor crossing a level shows on the map and in the panel; past and forecast are told apart by their position against the forecast cycle.

A note on the figures

Only seven of the inventory’s forty-eight rates are official figures; the rest is screening from emission factors and published capacities, and the area polygons are estimates. Six of the fifteen stations await verification. It serves to read the whole belt at once and compare scenarios; it is not a regulatory submission.

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