The NAEI receives detailed data on individual sources in the industrial and commercial sector, also called ‘point sources’. A point source is an emission source at a known location, which has grid references and therefore, it can be mapped directly.
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Emissions from point sources across the UK may be either collectively responsible for the full national total emission for that sector (such as coal-fired power stations where the sector is made up of large operational facilities for which emission reporting is mandatory) or in part (such as combustion in industry, for which only the larger combustion plant within the sector are required to report emissions). In the latter case, the residual emission (i.e. the proportional of the national total emission not accounted for by individual installations) is mapped as an area source.
Emissions for the point sources are compiled using a number of different data sources and techniques. For convenience, the point source data can be divided into four groups:
- Point sources, largely regulated under the Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) or Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) regulatory regimes, for which emissions data are available to the NAEI from the Environment Agency's Pollution Inventory (PI), from Natural Resources Wales’ Welsh Emissions Inventory (WEI), from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency's Scottish Pollutant Release Inventory (SPRI), from the Northern Ireland Environment Agency Pollution Inventory (PIV), from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR), or direct from process operators or trade associations.
- Point sources registered with and trading emission credits under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) or UK ETS.
- Point sources, regulated under Local Authority Pollution Control/Air Pollution Control (LAPC/APC) in England and Wales, and in Scotland respectively, for which emissions data are estimated by Ricardo Energy & Environment on the basis of detailed, site-specific data collected from regulators in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
- Point sources where emissions are modelled by distributing national emission estimates over the known sources on the basis of capacity or some other 'surrogate' statistic.