A photo of the city of Tehran plunged under a thick cloud of black fog spreads to the daily headlines Arman Melli, Thursday January 14, with an alarmist headline: “A step before collective suffocation”. The Iranian press has been sounding the alarm bells for several days on air pollution records in the capital, placed on “red alert”. While exposure to fine particles kills nearly 40,000 people in Iran each year – or 10% of the total number of deaths – the situation is particularly serious at the start of the year. The authorities blame the excessive consumption of fuel oil in power stations, instead of gas, to explain this environmental disaster.
In Tehran, since the Iranian month of “day”, which began on December 21, the rate of fine particles 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) has been daily above 150 micrograms per m.3. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), normal values are between 0 and 50. In some places in Tehran, measurements have been taken up to 300 micrograms per m3 : dangerous levels not only for vulnerable categories but for the entire population. The day of January 13 marked a pollution record for the last twenty years. A dozen other large cities, including Isfahan in the center of the country, experienced a similar situation.
Located in a basin and surrounded by the Alborz mountain range, the Iranian capital, a megalopolis of 13.2 million inhabitants, regularly experiences peaks in air pollution. In winter, a thermal inversion phenomenon occurs with motorway congestion on the axes of the capital early in the morning: the hot and polluted air released by traffic is blocked above the city by a sheet of cold air and cannot be evacuated. The record pollution peaks of the end of December and the beginning of January – a particularly dry and cold month – were however recorded while road traffic decreased due to the closure of schools and universities decreed to fight against the Covid-19 pandemic .
Degradation of power plants
The consumption of fuel oil has been identified as the main cause of these peaks in air pollution by the Iranian authorities. This extremely polluting fuel has, according to the authorities, been excessively used in power plants for several weeks, on the one hand to offset the increase in household consumption and, on the other hand, due to the degradation of these plants. , which affects their performance. In addition, while the country sold 15 billion liters of fuel oil annually, out of the 20 billion produced in its refineries, in the United Arab Emirates, these exports ended with the embargo decreed in November 2018 by the United States, on Iranian oil and gas products.
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