Preview Newsletter
ACC AM 22/05
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Making Implementation of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ground-Level Ozone Attainable: Legislative Hearing on S.263 and S.452
May 23, 2017 | U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works
Location: Room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building / Time: 2:30 PM -
Environment Subcommittee Hearing- Expanding the Role of States in EPA Rulemaking
May 23, 2017 | Committee on Science, Space, & Technology
Location: 2318 Rayburn House Office Building / Time: 10:00 -
(ACC Mentioned) Environmentalists Fear Regulatory Reform Push May Hinder TSCA Reform
May 19, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
Environmentalists fear that the Trump EPA's regulatory reform effort might hinder implementation of the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) by diverting scarce agency resources to identifying TSCA rules for possible repeal rather than pursuing the new toxics rules mandated by the law that have broad bipartisan backing. -
SEMI Will Host Webcast on New TSCA Requirements for Nanoscale Materials
May 19, 2017 | National Law Review
By Lynn L. Bergeson and Carla N. Hutton
On June 1, 2017, in concert with industry partners, SEMI will host an information-sharing webcast concerning the new regulatory requirements for nanoscale materials under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). -
(ACC Mentioned) Common Chemical Found to Change Behavior, Sex Organs of Turtles
May 21, 2017 | Columbia Daily Tribune
By Rudi Keller
New findings from University of Missouri research showing a common chemical changes the behavior and sex organs of turtles will be the cover feature for a major academic journal. -
Endocrine Society Praises New Push to Regulate Chemicals
May 21, 2017 | Healio
The Endocrine Society applauds the reintroduction in the U.S. Senate of the Personal Care Products Safety Act, which attempts to ensure that consumers are protected from hazards associated with chemical exposure, according to a press release from the organization. -
(ACC Mentioned) US ACC Report Supports Appalachian Petrochemical Development
May 18, 2017 | ICIS News
The US Appalachian region could become a centre for petrochemical and plastic resin manufacturing similar to the US Gulf Coast, according to statements made on Thursday by the American Chemistry Council (ACC) during a press event for legislation aimed at studying the area’s potential. -
(ACC Mentioned) ACC Report Says Appalachia Could Become Second US Petchem Hub
May 18, 2017 | Chemical Week
By Clay Boswell
The Appalachian region of the United States could become a center of petrochemical and plastic resin manufacturing similar to the US Gulf Coast, but financing the necessary energy infrastructure could be challenging, according to a report issued by ACC on 18 May. -
(ACC Mentioned) Storage Hub Carries Big Concept, Price, But Enormous Economic Potential
May 20, 2017 | Observer-Reporter
By Michael Bradwell
For most of the past year, the biggest story in energy in the Appalachian Basin has been the advent of the Shell ethane cracker plant, which is now under construction in Beaver County. -
(ACC Mentioned) Howard Swint: Natural Gas Storage, Manufacturing Poised to Fuel Some Good Times Ahead
May 20, 2017 | Charleston Gazette-Mail
By Howard Swint
West Virginia is on the threshold of profound economic changes that will greatly impact the state for generations to come. -
How Rollbacks at Scott Pruitt’s E.P.A. Are a Boon to Oil and Gas
May 20, 2017 | The New York Times
By Hiroko Tabuichi and Eric Lipton
In a gas field here in Wyoming’s struggling energy corridor, nearly 2,000 miles from Washington, the Trump administration’s regulatory reversal is crowning an early champion. -
A Surprise Victory for Environmentalists on Methane
May 19, 2017 | The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
The senate last week delivered a surprise victory for environmentalists. Three Republicans joined with several energy-state Democrats to slow the Trump era’s wave of deregulation, preventing Congress from killing one of the Obama administration’s most rational global warming rules -
Colorado Governor Declines Fracking Case Appeal; AG Appeals Anyway
May 22, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) said he does not want to appeal a recent ruling saying oil and gas development is subject to the protection of health, safety and the environment, but state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman (R) disagreed and filed the appeal anyway. -
(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Chemical Safety Board Faces Death Sentence
May 22, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Jeff Johnson
The future of the U.S. Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board is in doubt now that President Donald J. Trump is proposing to abolish the small agency. -
Meanwhile, These Americans Are Being Poisoned
May 19, 2017 | Esquire
By Charles P. Pierce
Out in the country, far from the feeding frenzy, and at some remove from those now media-drenched Rust Belt hamlets where a huge percentage of the elite political media have set up shop to take the pulse of the unfortunate suckers therein, there are places where the policies of this administration—and its general attitude toward some of the fundamental responsibilities of the national government, which has also been the attitude of conservative politics toward those same responsibilities for the past four decades—are making people very, very sick. -
Chemical Board Hands Anadarko Fire Inquiry to Transport Board
May 22, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson
The U.S. Chemical Safety board has dropped its probe into Anadarko Petroleum, the operator of a natural gas pipeline thought to have caused an explosion that leveled a Colorado home last month. -
Trump Urged to Exit Climate Deal as Scandals Stall Derugulatory Agenda
May 19, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves
President Donald Trump, with his deregulatory agenda stalled by scandals related to alleged campaign ties to Russia, is facing a barrage of conservative pressure to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, -
Trump Budget Would Cut E.P.A. Science Programs and Slash Cleanups
May 19, 2017 | The New York TImes
By Coral Davenport
President Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal would cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Science and Technology nearly in half, while paring by 40 percent funding for E.P.A. employees who oversee and put in place environmental regulations, according to a White House document that was shared with The New York Times. -
Report Details Sweeping Impact of Trump's Proposed Cuts
May 19, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
A report released this afternoon by state air pollution regulators spells out how the across-the-board cuts in the Trump administration's upcoming budget proposal could affect virtually every facet of U.S. EPA's operations next year. -
Hearing to Focus on Bills Targeting Ozone Standard, Clean Air Act
May 22, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Sean Reilly
A Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee will hold a hearing tomorrow on two bills that share a common purpose: delay implementation of U.S. EPA's 2015 ground-level ozone standard and revamp a keystone requirement of the Clean Air Act. -
GOP Pushes Rulemaking Reform; Dems Showcase Fired Scientists
May 22, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Arianna Skibell
A House panel this week will review the relationship between U.S. EPA and state environmental quality departments on how they implement federal environmental regulations. -
Chemical Found in NASA Site Wells That Supply Chincoteague
May 19, 2017 | AP (in The Washington Post)
NASA is providing extra drinking water for Chincoteague after chemicals used in firefighting foam were found in some wells on the Wallops Flight Facility property that supply the town.
Congressional Hearings
Industry and Association News News - There are no clips to report at this time.
LCSA News
Chemical Management News
Energy News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News
Environment News
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May 23, 2017 | U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety will hold a subcommittee hearing entitled, “Making Implementation of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ground-Level Ozone Attainable: Legislative Hearing on S.263 and S.452.”
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
2:30 PM
Room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building
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Environment Subcommittee Hearing- Expanding the Role of States in EPA Rulemaking
May 23, 2017 | Committee on Science, Space, & Technology
Expanding the Role of States in EPA RulemakingWitnesses
Mr. Misael Cabrera, PE
Director, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality
Ms. Becky Keogh
Director, Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality115th Congress
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(ACC Mentioned) Environmentalists Fear Regulatory Reform Push May Hinder TSCA Reform
May 19, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Maria Hegstad
Environmentalists fear that the Trump EPA's regulatory reform effort might hinder implementation of the revised Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) by diverting scarce agency resources to identifying TSCA rules for possible repeal rather than pursuing the new toxics rules mandated by the law that have broad bipartisan backing.
Some industry groups, including the Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) and American Chemistry Council (ACC) are also calling for ongoing priority implementation of the overhauled toxics law, also known as the The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (LCSA). But they nevertheless support the concept of EPA reviewing some of its existing chemicals policies as part of the overall regulatory reform push.
EPA took comment through May 15 on how to improve existing and future rulemakings, and many groups weighed in with calls to either repeal, revise, or retain a slew of air, waste, water, and other regulations.
But environmentalists question the administration's premise that regulations are entirely negative or do not provide worthwhile benefits. They raise these doubts in their comments on implementation of TSCA, which Congress rewrote last year as part of a bipartisan effort with multiple stakeholders, in large part due to chemical industry concerns that they needed better TSCA regulations to assuage consumer concerns about their products.
The Safer Chemicals Healthy Families coalition that supports stricter toxics regulation says in May 15 comments, “In the case of TSCA, the expenditure of time and resources on 'regulatory reform' would be uniquely wasteful, counterproductive and detrimental to the public interest. Presented with overwhelming evidence that this 40-year-old law was failing to provide basic protections to health and the environment, Congress voted, on an overwhelming bi-partisan basis, to give EPA significantly greater authority to regulate chemicals.”
The coalition says that “[t]o meet these heightened expectations, EPA must focus its limited resources on implementing LCSA. The worst thing it could do is divert these resources to a futile search for deregulatory opportunities under a program that is grossly underperforming by universal agreement and whose major shortcoming is that it has demanded too little of industry, not too much.”
The group also protests some industry arguments made at a May 1 meeting that EPA's toxics office hosted to gather public input on how to improve its TSCA rules, faulting one speaker's suggestion that EPA place less emphasis on designating chemicals as high priority for risk assessment, and instead label more chemicals low priority.
“While purporting to support LCSA implementation, industry speakers at the May 1 meeting suggested cutting corners on key elements of the new law in the interest of 'efficiency.' EPA should reject these proposals,” the coalition's written comments say. “For EPA to list more low priority chemicals than the law requires and use precious resources to justify such listings would be contrary to Congressional intent and weaken efforts to achieve LCSA’s primary goal of strengthening protections against unsafe chemicals.”
TSCA Implementation
The Safer Chemicals Healthy Families coalition also rejects industry concerns over changes EPA has made to its program for reviewing new chemicals, known as the pre-manufacture notice (PMN) program.
Revisions to TSCA resulted in programmatic changes that have led to a backlog of reviews in the PMN program, an issue of great concern to industry.
But the coalition's comments note that the revisions to TSCA give EPA the new requirement of making an affirmative finding of safety regarding all newly approved PMN applications, which requires a more in-depth review from EPA. “And with this greater scrutiny, EPA is identifying many more chemicals that either raise concerns or lack evidence that they are likely to be safe. Accordingly, EPA is issuing more orders imposing limits on exposure and release and requiring testing. Far from representing EPA overreach, this is exactly what was supposed to happen under the new law,” the comments say.
The coalition adds that EPA is taking steps to address the backlog, and that industry could help by submitting “better
PMNs that provide more detailed explanations of conditions of use and likely exposures, conducting more testing in advance of PMN submission, and identifying acceptable limits on exposure and release that can be incorporated in consent orders. Equally important, industry can advocate for increased funding for the TSCA program.”
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another longtime player in efforts to reform TSCA, in its May 4 comments to EPA raises similar concerns to the Safer Chemicals Healthy Families coalition.
EDF also argues that it is unwise to attach regulatory reform efforts to TSCA after its recent overhaul, because of the reform effort's widespread support, including by industry. Addressing the PMN process, for example, EDF argues that “the backlog is shrinking, not growing. The backlog was the result of Congress making the law’s new requirements immediately applicable.”
Further, EDF argues that changes to TSCA in the reform law “expressly requires EPA to consider reasonably foreseen as well as intended uses of a new chemical in making its requisite risk finding. This is not optional as some in industry have suggested. Industry’s call for EPA to revert back to prior practice of using significant new use rules instead of orders when it finds that reasonably foreseen uses of a new chemical may present unreasonable risk is simply not allowed under the new law.”
EDF notes that EPA is working to complete three “framework” rules intended to implement the new TSCA: updating the inventory of existing TSCA chemicals, describing how chemicals will be prioritized for risk assessment, and detailing how those assessments will be conducted.
EDF argues that these rules must be completed by their intended June 22 deadline and they should not be subject to President Donald Trump's Executive Order 13777 that requires agencies to identify two rules for potential repeal for every new rule the agencies issue. “Not only are these rules mandated by law and not yet finalized, but stakeholders have had ample opportunity to comment on the rules, including on opportunities to create efficiencies,” EDF says.
Echoing the coalition, EDF also urges the Trump EPA not to delay or hinder TSCA rules initiated under the Obama administration, including a final rule on formaldehyde from pressed wood emissions mandated by Congress but which the Trump EPA has delayed for review, and three ongoing rules that would ban certain uses of three chemicals.
“Congress expected EPA to act promptly to mitigate these risks by specifically authorizing it to issue rules pursuant to section 6(a) of TSCA. But now we’re seeing some in industry take aim at these needed health protections,” EDF says, noting industry efforts seeking more limited restrictions of some of the targeted uses of trichloroethylene, methylene chloride and n-methylpyrrolidone.
“Initiating rollbacks of, or installing roadblocks to, these early actions -- as some are now demanding -- would fly in the face of this Congressional intent, and would set us all back to the very conditions of instability and unpredictability in the chemical regulatory landscape that led industry to seek reform of TSCA in the first place,” EDF argues.
Industry's Comments
The Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) agrees with some of the environmentalists' general claims about the benefits of regulations, according to the group's May 15 comments to EPA.
“CSPA does not support a wholesale rollback of safety and environmental regulations. Various federal agencies such as EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provide important protections and safeguards for consumers and ensure a level playing field for responsible companies,” the group writes. It adds that TSCA implementation “should continue to be a priority and should not be scaled back.”
CSPA also offers its support for “other transparent, voluntary labeling programs such as the EPA’s Safer Choice program should also remain in place as they encourage marketplace innovation with minimal governmental action. If anything, this country needs and greatly benefits from regulatory certainty. Repealing or replacing such programs would only create costly uncertainty throughout the value chain and have a negative impact on American business.”
CSPA does indicate several areas of EPA regulation that it says should be modified, but not repealed, including EPA's draft rule for reporting on nanomaterial production, pesticide recordkeeping rules, and updates to EPA's “universal and hazardous waste components” of policies required under federal waste law.
ACC, meanwhile, in its May 15 comments says that it “is strongly committed to the effective implementation of LCSA,” and addresses a number of the issues raised by environmentalists.
ACC urges EPA to resolve the PMN backlog as quickly as possible, and says that EPA “efforts appear to have nibbled at the backlog, but more needs to be done, and quickly, to restore the expeditious review of PMNs.” The trade group urges EPA to update and publicize guidelines for PMN submitters, among other suggestions.
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/environmentalists-fear-regulatory-reform-push-may-hinder-tsca-reform
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SEMI Will Host Webcast on New TSCA Requirements for Nanoscale Materials
May 19, 2017 | National Law Review
By Lynn L. Bergeson and Carla N. Hutton
On June 1, 2017, in concert with industry partners, SEMI will host an information-sharing webcast concerning the new regulatory requirements for nanoscale materials under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Jim Alwood, Program Manager in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Chemical Control Division, will provide a summary and answer questions about the new TSCA Section 8(a) record-keeping and reporting requirements for nanoscale materials. The final rule requires one-time reporting for existing discrete forms of certain nanoscale materials, and a standing one-time reporting requirement for new discrete forms of certain nanoscale materials. Manufacturers, processors, and end-users of substances, chemicals, formulations, and mixtures considered to be nanoscale materials by EPA, are affected by the enacted regulation. As reported in our May 17, 2017, blog item, EPA is currently seeking comment on a draft guidance document entitled “Guidance on EPA’s Section 8(a) Information Gathering Rule on Nanomaterials in Commerce.” The promised guidance provides answers to questions EPA has received from manufacturers (includes importers) and processors of certain chemical substances when they are manufactured or processed at the nanoscale as described in the January 12, 2017, final rule. The industry partners for the SEMI webcast include the NanoBusiness Commercialization Association.
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/semi-will-host-webcast-new-tsca-requirements-nanoscale-materials
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(ACC Mentioned) Common Chemical Found to Change Behavior, Sex Organs of Turtles
May 21, 2017 | Columbia Daily Tribune
By Rudi Keller
New findings from University of Missouri research showing a common chemical changes the behavior and sex organs of turtles will be the cover feature for a major academic journal.
The research, the latest in a series studying Bisphenol A, or BPA, used painted turtles, a semi-aquatic species common in Missouri and across the United States. Embryonic turtles were exposed to concentrations of BPA similar to levels found in the environment, said Cheryl Rosenfeld, associate professor of biomedical sciences, and research faculty member in the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurobehavioral Disorders.
When researchers examined juvenile turtles, they found males with sex organs that resembled females. The males also engaged in behaviors more typical of females, including improved memory and spatial navigation, Rosenfeld said.
“If you think of sea turtles, they have to return to their natal beach where they hatched, many, many years later to lay eggs,” Rosenfeld said. “The females have to have a memory, while males don’t have to have that ability because they don’t engage in that behavior.”
BPA is a chemical added to plastics in products as varied as compact discs to food can linings. It is banned for use in infant formula packaging. Because it is not broken down, BPA is entering the environment through sewer systems, said Rosenfeld, one of eight scientists from MU, Westminster College and the St. Louis Zoo listed as authors of the latest research.
Rosenfeld also has worked on research that found male deer mice indirectly exposed to BPA in the womb had poorer navigation skills and less success mating.
The latest research will become a cover feature of the journal Physiological Genomics’ website. BPA producers have disputed research from Rosenfeld and others and the American Chemistry Councilhas a website devoted to countering public concerns. Spokesman Steve Hentges, in an email, wrote that numerous government studies have determined BPA is safe. The turtle research doesn’t change that conclusion, he wrote.
“This single study conducted at the University of Missouri provides little information or data relevant for human health,” Hentges wrote.
Painted turtles can warn humans of potential health risks because they are an indicator species that shows what is happening in the environment, Rosenfeld said.
“It does raise the issue, if it is happening in a turtle, it may be happening in people,” she said. “The same brain spaces that control spatial learning in turtles control it in us as well.”
Better spatial navigation can sound like a good thing, Rosenfeld said, when it means finding a car in a parking lot. For turtles, it could be a danger sign for the species.
“If the males are showing female behaviors now, they are not going to show classic male behaviors they need to do to attract females,” she said.
Because of the long time it takes for them to reach sexual maturity, researchers were unable to study mating in the altered turtles.
Rosenfeld and her fellow researchers studied how genes work in turtles exposed to BPA. Painted turtles do not have sex chromosomes; instead the sex of each individual is determined by temperature during incubation, with cooler temperatures producing male turtles and warmer temperatures resulting in females.
All animals of a species have the same genetic makeup. Individual characteristics depend on how those genes are expressed through creation of proteins. A skin cell becomes a skin cell instead of a liver cell because of the particular genes expressed, Rosenfeld said.
Turtles exposed to BPA were incubated at temperatures that would produce males in normal conditions. By studying the way the genes were expressed a year after exposure, researchers could identify individuals exposed to BPA with no difficulty, Rosenfeld said.
Whether the chemical should be banned is a question for policymakers, Rosenfeld said. But products containing BPA in the packaging, especially food and drink products, should be labeled so people can limit their exposure, she said.
Painted turtles are exposed to BPA because it gets into surface water through sewage systems. That means it also gets into drinking water taken from surface sources, Rosenfeld said.
“That is the problem. That is what I am trying to tell you,” Rosenfeld said. “It is not breaking down in the environment. They have looked over time and the concentrations are building.”
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/20170521/common-chemical-found-to-change-behavior-sex-organs-of-turtles
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Endocrine Society Praises New Push to Regulate Chemicals
May 21, 2017 | Healio
The Endocrine Society applauds the reintroduction in the U.S. Senate of the Personal Care Products Safety Act, which attempts to ensure that consumers are protected from hazards associated with chemical exposure, according to a press release from the organization.
The bill, backed by U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Susan Collins, would set safety standards and provide more information to consumers about the chemicals in everyday household products, such as cosmetics and lotions.
The bill calls for review of some chemicals found in personal care products, including propyl paraben, a potential endocrine-disrupting chemical linked to reproductive disorders.
The Endocrine Society believes “this legislations will effectively and efficiently ensure a safer marketplace for personal care products and reduce harms from exposure to [endocrine-disrupting chemicals] and other toxic chemicals,” according the press release.
http://www.healio.com/endocrinology/practice-management/news/online/%7B0b0c1a39-d7f9-4189-ba9c-a64ac6297675%7D/endocrine-society-praises-new-push-to-regulate-chemicals
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(ACC Mentioned) US ACC Report Supports Appalachian Petrochemical Development
May 18, 2017 | ICIS News
The US Appalachian region could become a centre for petrochemical and plastic resin manufacturing similar to the US Gulf Coast, according to statements made on Thursday by the American Chemistry Council (ACC) during a press event for legislation aimed at studying the area’s potential.
“The Appalachian region has distinct benefits that could make it a major petrochemical and plastic resin-producing zone,” ACC President and CEO Cal Dooley said while presenting the report at a press event in Washington, DC.
The “Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act of 2017" outlines the conducting of a feasibility study for establishing a subterranean ethane storage and distribution hub in Marcellus, Utica and Rogersville shale formations.
According to Dooley, several companies have already announced investment projects in the area, led by proximity to a “world-class” raw materials supply from the shale formations, as well as access to nearby markets.
“The right policies are critical to realising this opportunity,” Dooley said, specifically citing the legislation as an example.
According to the report, one of the main barriers to development in the region is uncertainty around financing.
The ACC’s analysis projects a $32.4bn investment in petrochemicals and derivatives in the area, as well as a $3.4bn investment in plastic products. The investments are going toward the construction of five ethane crackers and two propane dehydrogenation (PDH) facilities, the ACC said.
https://www.icis.com/Dashboard/logon?returnurl=/subscriber/news/2017/05/18/10108012/us-acc-report-supports-appalachian-petrochemical-development/
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC Report Says Appalachia Could Become Second US Petchem Hub
May 18, 2017 | Chemical Week
By Clay Boswell
The Appalachian region of the United States could become a center of petrochemical and plastic resin manufacturing similar to the US Gulf Coast, but financing the necessary energy infrastructure could be challenging, according to a report issued by ACC on 18 May.
“Uncertainty around financing is a key barrier to the development of energy infrastructure in the Appalachian region,” says ACC president and CEO Cal Dooley. “Policymakers can help by affirming that NGL storage and distribution projects are eligible for existing private-public financing programs.” The Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act of 2017 (S. 1075), a bill sponsored by Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and co-sponsored by Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) “is an important step forward,” Dooley says.
ACC’s report considers a scenario that includes the development of a storage hub for natural gas liquids (NGLs) and olefins, a 500-mile pipeline distribution network, petrochemical and plastics manufacturing facilities, and potentially other energy and manufacturing infrastructure in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky. ACC’s analysis projects a $32.4 investment in petrochemicals and derivatives and a $3.4 billion investment in plastic products. The investments would include five ethane crackers, three of them tied to polyethylene plants and two to petrochemical derivatives. Two propane dehydrogenation (PDH) facilities would each be associated with a polypropylene plant.
Under this scenario, the region would see 100,000 permanent new jobs by 2025, including 25,700 new chemical and plastic products manufacturing jobs; 43,000 jobs in supplier industries; and 32,000 payroll-induced jobs in communities where workers spend their wages. The investments would also generate $2.9 billion/year in new federal, state and local tax revenue, according the report.
“As Congress and the Administration consider infrastructure modernization legislation, the Appalachian Hub should be a priority,” says Dooley. “And a timely and efficient regulatory permitting process is essential.”
https://www.chemweek.com/CW/Document/Unauthorized/86817/ACC-report-says-Appalachia-could-become-second-US-petchem-hub
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(ACC Mentioned) Storage Hub Carries Big Concept, Price, But Enormous Economic Potential
May 20, 2017 | Observer-Reporter
By Michael Bradwell
For most of the past year, the biggest story in energy in the Appalachian Basin has been the advent of the Shell ethane cracker plant, which is now under construction in Beaver County.
But details on the concept of a midstream hydrocarbon storage system at an upcoming conference next month could be the catalyst for attracting additional petrochemical investment and growth in the region, from more crackers to additional chemical and plastics manufacturing.
The Appalachian Storage Hub conference, the first of its kind in the region, to be held June 15 at the Hilton Garden Inn, Southpointe, will discuss efforts already under way to build a hub for storing raw material hydrocarbons like ethane and butane.
The hub can also include storage for manufactured chemical intermediates such as ethylene.
According to sources in the petrochemical industry, the proposed Appalachian Storage Hub is a big idea with a big price tag, but the concept is one that has been successfully implemented in many locations around the world. The largest example is the Mont Belvieu, Texas, storage hub on the Gulf Coast. Other global examples exist in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and in Saudi Arabia, all of which have operated for decades.Catalyst for growth
According to Tom Gellrich, Chief Executive of TopLine Analytics in Devon, a chemical engineer who consults the energy industry on the downstream impacts of shale gas, and a featured speaker at the next month’s conference, sees the hub as a catalyst for attracting more petrochemical and plastics businesses to the region.
“It’s a critical next step” in transforming the Appalachian Basin and its Marcellus/Utica natural gas assets into a petrochemical production center, Gellrich said in a recent telephone interview with the Observer-Reporter.
According to Gellrich, Shell’s decision to build an ethane cracker plant to produce polyethylene pellets is based in large part on its recognition that with a massive local supply of ethane, it can crack the raw material at a large economic advantage.
Other companies are looking at the possibility of bringing additional crackers to the region for the same reason, he added. A study commissioned by the state Department of Community and Economic Development and released this spring by IHS Markit, concluded that the Appalachian Basin could support multiple ethane crackers, given the abundance of the raw material being produced here. A storage hub would serve the crackers and provide access to ethane as well as other petrochemicals.
Gellrich said the storage hub has been estimated at around $10 billion. The storage locations are either in below ground in salt domes, natural gas caverns or other non-porous formations. A storage hub also includes a backbone of pipelines from source locations to key manufacturing locations as well as associated monitoring equipment and pumps or compressors to move the materials.
There is also some above-ground infrastructure, but Gellrich said the footprint for the topside is around 2 acres plus some perimeter fencing.Multi-purpose potential
While most storage hubs act as a materials storage and transportation network, some also act as or include financial exchange structures with price-setting based on local or regional supply and demand.
According to Gellrich, producers of hydrocarbons or chemicals link to the pipeline system and flow their material to the storage locations. Consumers of the materials similarly link to the pipeline system and withdraw materials. The flow of materials in and out of the system is governed by a set of contracts. An independent third party operator of the hub keeps track of the flows by the various customers and suppliers.
“You can create a chemical industry based on the hub,” he said, adding that the investment in the hub could come from ethane cracking companies, midstream operators or a consortium of partners.
According to an analysis of the American Chemistry Council, released in December, U.S. chemical industry investment linked to shale gas amounts to $164 billion. Forty percent of the investment for the 264 projects — new facilities, expansions and factory re-starts — is completed or underway, while 55 percent is in the planning phase. ACC analysis shows that $164 billion in capital spending could lead to $105 billion per year in new chemical industry output and support 738 000 permanent new jobs across the U.S. economy by 2023, including 69 000 new chemical industry jobs, 357 000 jobs in supplier industries and 312 000 jobs in communities where workers spend their wages.Multi-state interest
Interest in the storage hub project is growing in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. According to materials provided by TopLine, the system would handle ethane, methane, ethylene, propane, propylene and chlorine in an environmentally sound way, handling 100 million barrels of natural gas liquids, and liquid chemicals. It would include about 3,000 miles of underground pipelines to move the chemicals to industries along a 454-mile corridor in the four states.
The Appalachian Storage Hub was first proposed several years ago, and remains in the conceptual stage. According to Gellrich, researchers from West Virginia University and Ohio State University, as well as the states of West Virginia and Ohio have been analyzing possible sites for the underground storage.
Those two states, along with Pennsylvania and Kentucky, are working on the project, along with a public-private partnership that includes the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Commerce and private companies. The hub proposal is also backed by a $100,000 matching grant from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.
Last week, U.S. Senators Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio introduced the Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act, to help encourage construction of more petrochemical plants such as crackers and keep more ethane in the region.
“The Appalachian Ethane Storage Hub Study Act will help us figure out the best way to utilize the region’s resources and improve our infrastructure,” Capito said. “No only will this legislation inform future projects and policies, but it will also help attract private dollars to ensure Appalachia remains an important player in America’s energy and manufacturing strategy.”
Gellrich acknowledged that the hub, as well as additional crackers that would also use it for storage probably wouldn’t occur until the middle of the next decade, around 2025. He added that despite its high price tag, the creation of another large storage hub in the U.S., separate from the Mont Belvieu hub, would lead to the formation of a petrochemical complex geographically distant from the Gulf, but would provide increased security from any single terrorist activity, as well as from potential weather disasters, especially hurricanes. He noted that hurricane Katrina forced a shutdown of many Gulf Coast complexes and resulted in price escalations of both feedstock and finished petrochemical products.
In addition to Gellrich, the June 15 Appalachian Storage Hub Conference will feature Joe Barone, CEO of Shale Directories and other executives from the chemical industry, including Steve Hedrick, president and CEO of MATRIC, an independent partner to the industry with expertise in chemical product research and development; Kevin DiGregorio, executive director of the Chemical Alliance Zone; and Jason Lankford, vice president and site director of West Virginia operations for Dow Chemical and a speaker from U.S. Methanol.
Speakers from state governments will include Denise Brinley, special assistant to the Secretary for Strategic Industry Initiatives for the state Department of Economic and Community Development; Joshua Jarrell, West Virginia Deputy Secretary and General Counsel for the Department of Commerce; and Dana Saucier, director, Jobs Ohio. A midstream panel to discuss the role in development, operation and management of a hub will include Marc Halbritter, senior vice president for business development at Blue Racer; and David Hooker, general manager at Mountaineer Midstream; Jim Crews of MarkWest Energy; and a speaker representing Baker Hughes. An E&P Panel, which will discuss access how the hub can provides access to downstream customers will include George Stark, director of External affairs for Cabot Oil and Gas Corp.; as well as speakers for Southwest Energy and Eclipse Resources.
http://www.observer-reporter.com/20170520/storage_hub_carries_big_concept_price_but_enormous_economic_potential
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May 20, 2017 | Charleston Gazette-Mail
By Howard Swint
West Virginia is on the threshold of profound economic changes that will greatly impact the state for generations to come. Chief among these changes is the revolution in natural gas exploration and production that is literally rewriting the industry’s history in the very state where it all began.
This seismic shift is underscored by the fact that this year, for the first time, natural gas from West Virginia fields will be exported internationally, predominately to Japanese, Indian and European markets.
And perhaps even more importantly, natural gas liquids (NGL) will also start flowing this year to exporting terminals through a separate pipeline system with far-reaching implications for downstream industrial development within the state.
That these milestones have now been reached demonstrates the degree that the Marcellus and Utica Shale plays have reordered the United States natural gas industry and the international energy market. The two most compelling examples are the Cove Point and Marcus Hook industrial complexes that were both built originally as import facilities along the Atlantic Coast but today have been repositioned as export terminals.
In the case of Cove Point on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, Dominion has invested $3.8 billion in natural gas liquefaction facilities that will supply a new class of liquefied natural gas carriers commissioned by conglomerate GAIL India Ltd.
The Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in eastern Pennsylvania, that was effectively mothballed five years ago, will soon complete a $2.5 billion pipeline expansion resulting in such a dramatic increase of capacity that a new generation of tankers know as Very Large Gas Carriers will be used to export natural gas liquids to Norway.
These massive infrastructure investments extend deep into rural West Virginia where, last year, there was more capital investment — $120 million — in just one Wetzel County gas processing plant than in all of Charleston.
This year, the $200 million upgrade of MarkWest’s Sherwood complex in Doddridge County will likely eclipse all the capital investment in the entire Kanawha Valley. That both of these massive projects are just expansions of existing facilities is indicative of the scale of ongoing infrastructure investment across the Marcellus and Utica Shale plays.
And once export-bound takeaway capacity is fully secured, the entire region could experience a dramatic increase in exploration and production. These developments represent an inflection point for West Virginia, especially in regard to the natural gas liquids that are the feedstock for a dizzying array of downstream products centered on the petrochemical and plastics value chain.
From a commodities perspective, even though natural gas liquids have significant industrial worth, their true market value is determined by contract delivery points where futures are traded on exchanges, such as the Henry Hub in Louisiana. Accordingly, because Marcellus and Utica Shale natural gas liquids have to be transported such great distances, their market value is greatly diminished when compared to near-source product.
Yet, paradoxically, back closer to the wellhead, they remain a barrier for future development due to the lack of logistical infrastructure coupled with the massive quantities being produced (estimated at 1 million barrels a day; 1.6 million barrels a day in 2022).
The lynchpin for West Virginia’s optimization of natural gas liquids may prove to be the creation of a new trading hub founded on bulk storage in depleted salt caverns comparable to those in Watkins Glen and Bath, New York, that hold 3.8 million barrels. Technical and commercial validation plans for a 3.2-million-barrel facility along the Ohio River across from Marshall County have already been completed, and state and local permits have been filed based on a five-mile wide 3-D seismic grid test well.
If proven successful, additional storage facilities could complete the natural gas liquid infrastructure capacity requirement that, according to the American Chemistry Council, could support “$35.8 billion in new chemical and plastics industry investment [based on] 5 ethane crackers” by 2025.
Howard Swint is a commercial property broker in Charleston.
http://www.wvgazettemail.com/gazette-op-ed-commentaries/20170520/howard-swint-natural-gas-storage-manufacturing-poised-to-fuel-some-good-times-ahead#sthash.5oQBVxya.dpuf
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How Rollbacks at Scott Pruitt’s E.P.A. Are a Boon to Oil and Gas
May 20, 2017 | The New York Times
By Hiroko Tabuichi and Eric Lipton
In a gas field here in Wyoming’s struggling energy corridor, nearly 2,000 miles from Washington, the Trump administration’s regulatory reversal is crowning an early champion.
Devon Energy, which runs the windswept site, had been prepared to install a sophisticated system to detect and reduce leaks of dangerous gases. It had also discussed paying a six-figure penalty to settle claims by the Obama administration that it was illegally emitting 80 tons each year of hazardous chemicals, like benzene, a known carcinogen.
But something changed in February just five days after Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general with close ties to Devon, was sworn in as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Devon, in a letter dated Feb. 22 and obtained by The New York Times, said it was “re-evaluating its settlement posture.” It no longer intended to move ahead with the extensive emissions-control system, second-guessing the E.P.A.’s estimates on the size of the violation, and it was now willing to pay closer to $25,000 to end the three-year-old federal investigation.Continue reading the main storyRELATED COVERAGEdocumentDevon Energy’s Fight Against Environmental Regulation MAY 20, 2017COURTING FAVOR: A HIDDEN COALITIONEnergy Firms in Secretive Alliance With Attorneys General DEC. 6, 2014A MEASURE OF CHANGEShift on Executive Powers Let Obama Bypass Congress APRIL 22, 2012
Devon’s pushback, coming amid an effort to ease a broad array of federal environmental rules, is the first known example under the Trump administration of an accused polluter — which has admitted violating the law — backing away from a proposed environmental settlement. It is already being hailed by other independent energy companies as a template for the future.
“Not in our wildest dreams, never did we expect to get everything,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based association of independent oil and gas companies. “We were kind of used to getting punished.”
The extraordinary about-face reflects the onset of an experiment in President Trump’s Washington that is meant to fundamentally reorder the relationship between government and business. Across the federal government, lobbyists and lawyers who once battled regulations on behalf of business are now helping run the agencies they clashed with.
Mr. Trump and his team believe that loosening the regulatory grip on business will help the economy, create jobs and allow Americans “to share in the riches,” as he said during the campaign. But in the energy field, environmentalists, Democrats and even some in the industry fear the efforts will backfire, harming health and safety without creating much economic benefit.
The E.P.A. has not yet made a public response to Devon’s new posture, and Mr. Pruitt declined to comment for this article. But the new approach follows a series of important victories for the energy industry in Washington that could reshape environmental policy on a national scale and undermine the Obama administration’s campaign to combat climate change.
In just the last three months, with Mr. Pruitt in charge, the E.P.A. postponed a long-planned rule requiring companies like Devon to retrofit drilling equipment to prevent leaks of methane gas — a major contributor to climate change — and to collect more data on how much of the gas is spewing into the air.
The Interior Department, meanwhile, announced this month that it would reconsider a separate rule limiting the burning of unwanted methane gas from wells drilled on federal and Indian lands, a process called flaring. That announcement came the same day the Senate narrowly rejected industry calls to repeal the same rule.
Interior officials have also announced their intention to repeal or revise a contentious rule requiring companies like Devon to take extra steps to prevent groundwater contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, a drilling technique in which chemicals and water are forced into rock formations.
Environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund are outraged by these moves, and have vowed to fight any rollbacks in court.
”Devon is doing to the oil and gas industry what Donald Trump did to the Republican Party, pushing the whole agenda into a world of extremes,” said Mark Brownstein, a vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund.
The rollbacks cap a carefully coordinated campaign over the last eight years led in part by Devon, which is based in Oklahoma City and is the nation’s eighth-largest natural gas producer, and Mr. Pruitt, who served six years as Oklahoma attorney general before Mr. Trump named him E.P.A. chief.
Devon and Mr. Pruitt, while he was still attorney general out West, teamed up to block new federal rules imposed by the Obama administration that required fossil fuel companies to more closely monitor oil and gas wells for leaks, and disclose chemicals used in hydraulic fracking. Devon also poured millions of dollars a year into lobbying — and hundreds of thousands into campaign contributions to Mr. Pruitt and other Republicans — as it pushed regulators and lawmakers in Washington to do away with the restrictions.
For Devon and its industry allies, the turnaround is as startling as it is long-sought.
“We are so used to not being able to move an agenda forward that it has been very surprising how quickly things have changed,” Ms. Sgamma said.
In Riverton, Wyo., a frontier city of dusty roads and squat brick buildings a half-hour drive from where Devon operates its gas field, a fossil fuel revival could not come quickly enough.
Well-paying jobs in oil and gas — drilling wells, managing roustabouts — are fast disappearing, as production in the state declines because of a slump in energy prices. Government agencies are bracing for cuts to basic services, including children’s health programs and security at the county jail, because of declining tax revenues from fossil fuel companies.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Trump’s defiant promises to free fossil fuels from their regulatory shackles have resonated here and across Wyoming, the country’s second-biggest energy producing state after Texas. Mr. Trump scored his biggest margin of victory in Wyoming, beating Hillary Clinton by 46 percentage points.
In Fremont County, home to Riverton, seven in 10 voters chose Mr. Trump; in Campbell County, the heart of Wyoming coal country, it was nine out of 10. And there is a palpable disdain toward outsiders — especially those in Washington — who local officials say are quick to vilify fossil fuels without a full understanding of local economic realities.
“At the end of the day, we all just want to make sure we can prosper and raise our families,” said Holly Jibben, a local councilwoman, a former rig worker and a mother. “When oil and gas profits, everybody profits.”A Mutually Beneficial Friendship
The invitation to lunch at the towering new Devon Energy Center in downtown Oklahoma City came to Mr. Pruitt in June 2012 — 18 months into his tenure as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official — from Larry Nichols, a co-founder of what had become the city’s biggest independent oil and gas company.
Mr. Nichols and his father, John, had created Devon in 1971, starting with four employees and a negative net worth of several million dollars, while sharing a receptionist at an office building not far from their new tower, an early company history says.
Now, there was no denying Devon had reached extraordinary heights.
The Devon tower, 50 stories high, was unlike anything ever built in Oklahoma. It was an Empire State Building of this fossil-fuel town, visible from miles away. It could even be seen far west of Oklahoma City, out toward the 430,000 acres in the center of the state where Devon’s rigs were drilling new wells.
Devon was riding a tremendous boom in oil and gas production in the United States that was fueled by the revolutionary new technologies that it had helped establish, like so-called coal-bed natural gas, which uses advanced drilling techniques to extract methane gas from underground coal deposits.
There was just one complication threatening Devon’s ascent. President Barack Obama, unable to move many of his environmental goals through Congress, had adopted a new slogan: “We Can’t Wait,” a blunt statement that he intended to start using his executive powers to combat climate change.
That’s where Mr. Pruitt came in.
“We’ll meet Scott in the lobby when he checks in at our concierge desk,” William F. Whitsitt, then the head of Devon’s fast-growing public relations and lobbying operations, wrote in an email to Mr. Pruitt’s executive assistant.
Mr. Pruitt, a folksy, deeply religious former state legislator and minor-league baseball team general partner who was largely unknown on the national political stage, had won an upset victory in 2010. He had vowed to challenge Washington’s intervention in Oklahoma’s affairs.
“There’s a mentality emanating from Washington today that says, ‘We know best,’” Mr. Pruitt said during the campaign, which was supported by a donation from Mr. Nichols, as well as Devon’s political action committee. “It’s a one-size-fits-all strategy, a command-and-control kind of approach, and we’ve got to make sure we know how to respond to that.”
Devon, historically, had been a minor player in Washington. But that changed in the first year of the Obama presidency, when Devon’s spending on lobbying jumped nearly 350 percent to $2.5 million. Devon brought on a team of politically connected lobbyists, including Anthony Ferate, known as A. J., a lawyer with close ties to Mr. Pruitt, as well as Rebecca Rosen, a former Capitol Hill staff member who had worked on the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.Trump Rules
Articles in this series examine the reshaping of regulations under the Trump administration.
The first major target was an E.P.A. data-collection effort that had determined methane emissions caused by oil and gas operations were much larger than Devon’s own calculations. Air pollution from the then-booming oil and gas industry was now being blamed for extreme declines in air quality in rural areas of Wyoming and Utah. One sparsely populated stretch of northeastern Utah had a worse ozone problem than Los Angeles during the peak of the energy boom.
Devon initially participated in a voluntary program to capture leaking methane, or close off leaks, but was so suspicious of the Obama administration’s intentions that it dropped out.
And indeed, the administration soon announced a major expansion of federal regulations aimed at cutting overall industry methane emissions by 45 percent. The oil and gas industry estimated just one of the new rules could cost more than a $800 million a year in new compliance costs.
Devon, furious, turned to Mr. Pruitt for help in pushing back.
“Just a note to pass along the electronic version of the draft letter to Lisa Jackson at E.P.A.,” said one early request for help in 2011 from Devon to Mr. Pruitt. Devon suggested that Mr. Pruitt follow up with Mr. Ferate, the company’s Washington lobbyist and a fund-raiser for Republican causes, if he had questions.
Mr. Pruitt did just as Devon asked, sending along the draft letter to Ms. Jackson, on his own stationery and under his signature, with only a few word changes.
The interventions by Devon also targeted the Interior Department and its Bureau of Land Management, which controls 260 million acres of public land and leases out large chunks to oil and gas companies for drilling, including the land here in Fremont County.
The bureau was pushing ahead with plans to require that Devon and other companies take extra steps to prevent chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing from contaminating groundwater, including a demand that Devon disclose the ingredients in millions of gallons of chemical-laced water it pumped into the federally managed land.
Devon has a total of about 1,500 wells on bureau-controlled land, representing about 15 percent of its oil and gas production.
Devon and Mr. Pruitt called the rules redundant in letters to federal officials, including the secretary of the Interior and Mr. Obama, while they also worked to challenge them in court and in Congress.
Devon made targeted contributions to sympathetic Republican lawmakers, who introduced legislation to block the rules or collected signatures among their colleagues on letters pressing federal agencies to back down. Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, was a particular favorite of Devon, as he repeatedly co-sponsored bills with names like “Fracturing Regulations Are Effective in State Hands Act” that would block federal intervention.
Each of the pieces of this campaign fell into place as planned. But Mr. Obama and his aides were hardly about to fold.
“Every day this was not attended to was a day we got closer to the tipping point — when it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to prevent the kind of climate change damage we are worried about,” said Janet McCabe, who led the air pollution enforcement division at the E.P.A. under Mr. Obama.
Devon Energy, Ms. McCabe said, was among the most determined opponents of the agency’s work, far more so, for example, than international giants like Shell.
“In any regulated industry, there are companies that are more aggressive than others in pushing back at every turn and trying to stop the policy,” she said. “Devon was one of those.”The Lifeblood of Riverton, Wyo.
Riverton’s mayor, John Baker, known as Lars, turned carefully onto a dirt road that winds through Devon’s sprawling oil and gas fields just outside the city limits, a source of both pride and frustration in a frontier town the “Marlboro Man,” Darrell Winfield, once called home.
Since the early 1900s, oil and gas have been pulled from the ground here, a vast stretch of arid plains in a valley that runs down from Yellowstone National Park — an almost lunar landscape dotted with dry clumps of sagebrush, and rock formations adorned with the petroglyphs etched by Native American tribes, which have inhabited the area for centuries.
But production from the area’s wells had slowed over recent decades, and Devon, known for its emphasis on new technologies, had a solution: It would inject carbon dioxide into the ground, putting pressure on underground oil deposits and pushing them to the pump.
The new method would allow Devon to ramp up production at the site from 100 barrels a day to 5,000, the company said. Statewide, drilling surged, with gas production more than doubling from 2000 to 2010.
The roaring minerals economy filled state coffers with billion-dollar annual surpluses and brought jobs that kept the unemployment rate for much of that decade below the national average.
“It was gangbusters,” said Mr. Baker, a former weed and pest control man, who points out the oil and gas rigs as fondly as he does the local flora and fauna, like the Indian paintbrush plant that was just starting to show its red flowers.
Mr. Baker is not alone. In Riverton, a city of 11,000, the fading road signs — Gas Hills, Oil Field Road — underline the importance of fossil fuels. Local officials talk of companies like Devon as good corporate citizens.
For the last six Thanksgivings, Devon has helped a local group give food baskets to the needy. For years, the company has also donated to youth educational programs at local state parks.
But even as production was rising, tensions were brewing with Washington. The Obama administration had made cracking down on fugitive emissions from oil and gas sites a national priority.
By 2014, Devon stood accused by the E.P.A. of releasing 80 more tons a year of the harmful gases from its Beaver Creek plant in Wyoming than its permit allowed. The extra emissions amounted to a fifth more than the company’s stated emissions of 361 tons in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available.
This class of chemicals — known as volatile organic compounds — is extremely potent and is blamed for helping create blankets of smog. Several of the chemicals are known carcinogens.
“You can smell it in the air,” said John Fenton, a former Devon contract worker turned environmentalist who monitors oil and gas facilities scattered across Fremont County using an infrared camera.
At Devon, Mr. Fenton repaired heating equipment and did general maintenance jobs. He later worked elsewhere in the gas fields welding pipes for as much as $50 an hour. But he stopped when wells started cropping up close to residential areas, including about 200 feet from his Fremont County ranch. His neighbors’ water turned black. His wife, Catherine, complained of losing her senses of smell and taste.
“These companies are emboldened by this remoteness to not do anything,” he said.
But Mr. Fenton’s concerns have not gained wider traction. Residents fret mostly about the crackdown on energy companies under Mr. Obama, which coincided with a downturn in oil and gas production brought on largely by a glut in the market and lower energy prices. That has made his tough approach a scapegoat for the downturn, and it is difficult to overstate the animosity toward federal environmental agencies.
Wyoming was one of around two dozen states that sued to block regulations imposed by the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Obama’s effort to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. On the campaign trail, Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the state’s sole member of the House of Representatives, repeatedly called for a reduction in the size and authority of the E.P.A.
“The E.P.A. is the evil empire here,” said Steven R. Peck, publisher of The Ranger, Fremont County’s daily newspaper. “But the regulatory game hasn’t changed as much as the oil and gas industry itself,” he said.
“People think, ‘If we could just drill more wells a year,’” he said, “but we also need clean energy and jobs.”
In Riverton, empty houses dot the city. The unemployment rate hovered around 7 percent earlier this year before dropping in March to 6.4 percent as seasonal jobs kicked in. The area’s largest private employers are casinos.
“Everything’s gone down, down,” said Frenchie Warren, 59, a member of the Arapaho tribe, who sat killing time one recent afternoon on a bench next to a Shell gas station.
Mr. Warren lost his $23-an-hour job at the SST Energy Corporation earlier this year after he mangled his hand in a chain, he said. He is bitter toward Washington politicians, who he said were squeezing the life out of Riverton.
“They aren’t helping us,” Mr. Warren said. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot them.”Tacking Hard in Another Direction
They gathered in the Rachel Carson Green Room at the E.P.A.’s headquarters in Washington, about 75 agency employees in a high-ceiling conference room named after the famed environmentalist whose book “Silent Spring” helped inspire the modern environmental movement.
Mr. Pruitt, who a few days earlier had been confirmed as the new E.P.A. administrator, stood on the stage and tried to calm the nerves of the agency’s staff in the room, as well as thousands more watching remotely.
“You don’t know me very well,” Mr. Pruitt said. “In fact, you don’t know me hardly at all other than maybe what you’ve read in the newspaper and seen on the news. … I look forward to sharing the rest of the story with you as we spend time together.”
Catherine McCabe, the outgoing acting administrator, presented Mr. Pruitt with a baseball cap that featured the agency’s iconic logo of a blooming flower surrounded by a sphere that represents blue sky, green earth and blue-green water.
But it quickly became clear that a new day had arrived at the E.P.A. as Mr. Pruitt offered a hint of his priorities at the agency. “I believe that we as an agency and we as a nation can be both pro-energy and -jobs, and pro-environment,” he said. “That we don’t have to choose between the two.”
Within weeks, the dismantling of the Obama-era rules was set in motion, first through broad proclamations from the White House as Mr. Trump signed executive orders, and later through specific administrative actions by Mr. Pruitt.
In April, Mr. Pruitt notified the oil and gas industry that he was granting its wish to at least temporarily suspend the agency’s new rule. “American businesses should have the opportunity to review new requirements, assess economic impacts and report back, before those new requirements are finalized,” he said in a statement then.
Devon Energy was poised to be a major beneficiary of the changes.
Killing the methane rule would save Devon an estimated $430,000 a year in the four states where it operates wells, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, although if industry estimates of the actual costs are accurate, the savings may be much higher.
A month earlier, Mr. Pruitt had squelched a request from the E.P.A. that 15,000 oil and gas companies nationwide collect data on methane emissions to help the agency fine-tune its regulations. Devon and other companies feared the data would be used to justify even tighter controls, so Mr. Pruitt canceled the requirement.
Devon has other allies on the Trump team.
A Devon lobbyist, Michael Catanzaro, resigned from his post and now is the top White House adviser on energy policy. His lobbying disclosure report filed on Jan. 19 — the day before Mr. Trump was sworn in — lists his lobbying work for Devon as targeting “methane emissions from oil and gas production.”
Ms. Rosen, the former Romney campaign worker who until late last year was Devon’s top in-house lobbyist in Washington, was spotted walking into transition team meetings hosted by Mr. Trump’s advisers after the election.
The industry also has important allies in Congress, like Senator John A. Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which oversees the E.P.A. and the Interior Department.
On the day the Senate voted, 54-46, to move ahead with Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation, Mr. Barrasso walked off the Senate floor and headed to Charlie Palmer Steak, just across the street from the Senate side of the Capitol. Mr. Barrasso would not say who his guests were, but campaign finance records show that within roughly a month of that event, donations came in from Devon, as well as Chevron, Shell, Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute. Mr. Barrasso has collected more than $500,000 in contributions from the oil and gas industry in the last two years.
Some Democrats in Congress have questioned whether Mr. Pruitt is taking actions explicitly to benefit Devon and other financial supporters.
In a letter last month, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and three other Senate Democrats pressed Mr. Pruitt to explain why he canceled the data-collection effort on methane — suggesting it might be a favor to industry friends.
After a barrage of such questions, Mr. Pruitt agreed in early May to recuse himself from taking part in the agency’s response to the lawsuits he had filed as attorney general, including one challenging the E.P.A.’s methane rule.
Oil and gas companies are hoping that Mr. Pruitt’s business-friendly approach will extended to enforcement issues. Devon was first targeted by the E.P.A. in 2014, after it was accused of illegally discharging 80 tons a year of volatile organic compounds into the Wyoming air. The company had been close to reaching a settlement with the federal government.
Devon disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, on Feb. 15, that negotiations with the E.P.A. “may result in a fine or penalty in excess of $100,000.”
But two days after that disclosure, Mr. Pruitt was confirmed as E.P.A. administrator, and by the next week, Devon was changing its tune.
Instead of the proposed leak-detection system, the company was now planning to replace an older gas-fired compressor with an electrically powered unit, reducing volatile organic compound emissions by about 5 tons a year. Devon also says that, after revisiting aspects of the case, it now “does not believe that a six-figure civil penalty is justified.”
Tim Hartley, a Devon spokesman, acknowledged that the company had laid out a shift in its negotiating position. But he attributed the change to “simple economics.”
The plant, he said, was marginal and had been considered for shutdown, and adopting a sophisticated leak-detection program there was not economically feasible, especially at a difficult time for the oil and gas industry. Devon’s stock surged after Mr. Trump won the election, but has since dipped as oil prices have remained depressed.
The cost of the leak-detection program would amount to about 20 percent of the plant’s annual operating budget, the company said in its letter.
Mr. Hartley said that the violations stemmed from a misinterpretation of complicated regulations and that Devon had not intentionally circumvented the rules. He said that Devon had not contacted Mr. Pruitt about the case.
The E.P.A. has not yet made public the investigation, or its decision on a settlement. Andrew Mutter, a spokesman for the agency’s Colorado regional office, which covers Wyoming, said that talks on the matter remained active. The Justice Department attorney in charge of the case did not return requests for comment.
Mr. Hartley declined to comment on the effects for Devon of the wider regulatory rollback, saying it would be “pure speculation” to consider how the company might benefit.
But Ms. Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance, which includes Devon, said that Devon is among several independent oil and gas companies now taking a tougher stand with the E.P.A.
“I am not going to settle with you now, when this new administration has such a different philosophy,” she said, explaining the new approach. “It makes sense to do a wait-and-see.”Correction: May 20, 2017
An earlier version of this article misidentified James Lankford as a senator of Utah. He is a senator of Oklahoma.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/business/energy-environment/devon-energy.html
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A Surprise Victory for Environmentalists on Methane
May 19, 2017 | The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
THE SENATE last week delivered a surprise victory for environmentalists. Three Republicans joined with several energy-state Democrats to slow the Trump era’s wave of deregulation, preventing Congress from killing one of the Obama administration’s most rational global warming rules. Now the action turns to the Interior Department, which is reviewing the same regulation that just survived Congress’s scrutiny. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who insists he shares Teddy Roosevelt’s commitment to stewardship, should show similar restraint.
The Methane and Waste Prevention Rule concerns methane emissions from oil and gas drilling on federal land. As the primary component in natural gas, methane is a valuable commodity. When drillers allow it to waft uselessly into the air, national resources are wasted and the government loses royalties that belong to the taxpayer. Uncombusted methane is also an extremely potent greenhouse gas. Controlling unnecessary methane emissions — and, therefore, the net impact that using natural gas has on climate change — is essential to ensuring that the nation’s recent gas boom does more good than harm to the environment.
The centrists who stopped Congress from withdrawing the Obama-era rule focused on the concern that the Treasury would be shortchanged absent federal effort to stop methane leaks. “Between 2009 and 2015, oil and gas wells on federally-owned lands vented or flared approximately 462 billion cubic feet of natural gas into the atmosphere, a substantial loss of royalties to the American taxpayer,” Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) wrote in a letter to Mr. Zinke.
But these senators do not favor keeping the rule as it stands. In the same letter, they complained that some of the rule’s requirements duplicated state-level regulations and that Native American authorities were not properly consulted. They asked Mr. Zinke to modify the regulation through administrative action.
This is the better path, if the rule must change: Reform through executive, not congressional, procedures means that future administrations will be able to revisit whatever determinations Mr. Zinke ends up making. Moreover, using the Congressional Review Act would have barred Mr. Zinke from issuing a “substantially similar” replacement rule. Now Mr. Zinke has flexibility to adjust the rule modestly rather than aggressively.
Modesty on Mr. Zinke’s part would be wise. The existing rule not only ensures that the government receives more in royalties but also controls damaging emissions. If methane leaks were environmentally costless, drillers should only be expected to prevent leaks up to the point past which doing so would cost them money. Because drillers’ methane leaks exact environmental costs on society at large, it is reasonable to ask them to tighten up their operations beyond that point. Mr. Zinke should aim to write a rule that reflects both direct monetary concerns and society’s broader interest in preventing environmental degradation.
Increased use of natural gas in the country’s power plants has led recently to surprisingly deep greenhouse- gas emissions cuts in the United States — on paper, at least. If lots of methane leaks in the process of obtaining the fuel, the country’s natural gas renaissance will look more like a dark age.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-surprise-victory-for-environmentalists-on-methane/2017/05/19/1a304468-3c07-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?utm_term=.2893cb76db0b
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Colorado Governor Declines Fracking Case Appeal; AG Appeals Anyway
May 22, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Tripp Baltz
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) said he does not want to appeal a recent ruling saying oil and gas development is subject to the protection of health, safety and the environment, but state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman (R) disagreed and filed the appeal anyway.
Hickenlooper does not have the authority to countermand the unanimous decision of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to seek state Supreme Court review of a Colorado Court of Appeals ruling in March in favor of six teenage activists seeking to halt hydraulic fracturing until it can be proved the practice does not harm human health and the environment, Coffman said in a May 18 letter to the governor.
The appeal “raises issues of great significance to the state,” and the Supreme Court is the “proper body to resolve them,” Coffman said. In the case, “a group of litigants has called into question an interpretation of the law that has governed the Commission's function for 25 years,” she said.
The March 23 ruling was the first time a higher Colorado court has said the commission has the authority to promulgate and enforce rules prioritizing public health, safety and the environment over oil and gas development, an attorney for the youths said. The case has drawn intense interest in the oil and gas sector (Martinez v. Colo. Oil and Gas Conservation Cmm'n, Colo. Ct. App., No. 16CA0564, 3/23/17).
‘Subject to’
The Court of Appeals reversed the commission's decision not to hear the youth's petition, saying it disagreed with the commission's interpretation of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Act.
The commission interpreted the Act as “requiring a balance between oil and gas production and public health, safety, and welfare.” The youth's petition would “have required the Commission to readjust the balance crafted by the General Assembly under the Act, and is therefore beyond the Commission's limited grant of statutory authority,” the court said.
However, the Act does not create a balancing test weighing safety and public health interests against development of oil and gas resources, but rather, it “indicates that fostering balanced, nonwasteful development is in the public interest when that development is completed subject to the protection of public health, safety, and welfare, including protection of the environment and wildlife resources.”
This is not the first time Hickenlooper, a Democrat, and Coffman, a Republican, have disagreed on an issue of statewide environmental concern. In October 2015 Hickenlooper petitioned the state Supreme Court in an effort to block Coffman from joining a multistate effort to challenge the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. The court ultimately refused to hear Hickenlooper's petition.
No Authority
In this dispute Hickenlooper said he didn't want to pursue an appeal of the Martinez ruling because he believes the Act does not give the commission the authority to do so.
“While we understand and respect the commission's desire for further clarity from the Supreme Court, we believe the court of appeals’ decision does not represent a significant departure from the commission's current approach,” he said in a March 18 statement. “The commission already elevates public health and environmental concerns when considering regulating oil and gas operations.”
Coffman disagreed. State law expressly grants the commission the power to pursue an appeal to defend “its own order disposing of a request for rulemaking.”
“The commission is an independent agency with independent powers,” she wrote in her letter to Hickenlooper. “While the Act gives you appointment and removal authority over the Commissioners, it does not permit you to disregard the independent judgment of the Commission and direct its decision-making,” she told the governor.
Industry Grateful
The Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA) said it was grateful Coffman filed a petition for review with the state Supreme Court, saying that if the Martinez ruling were to stand, it would “have far-reaching impacts on oil and gas development and Colorado's economy.”
The ruling “disrupts decades of regulatory precedent,” COGA said in a May 18 statement. The Act directs the commission to balance development interests with the environment. “Those who filed this lawsuit have said they want to ban oil and gas in our state,” it said. “That irresponsible position, funded by the same out-of-state groups that have relentlessly tried to ban our industry via the ballot box, must be met head on.”
Julia Olson, executive director of Our Children's Trust and the attorney for the teen activists in the Martinez case, said she disagreed with the attorney general and agreed with Hickenlooper. “The commission should do its job to protect people and the environment from the dangers of fracking,” she said.
The Colorado General Assembly has already decided the issue, Olson said. “The public health of Colorado is a top priority for the state,” she said. “The people's health and welfare and the environment are more important than the economic interests of a particular industry.”
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=112052106&vname=dennotallissues&fn=112052106&jd=112052106
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(ACC Mentioned) U.S. Chemical Safety Board Faces Death Sentence
May 22, 2017 | Chemical & Engineering News
By Jeff Johnson
The future of the U.S. Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board is in doubt now that President Donald J. Trump is proposing to abolish the small agency.
CSB is the world’s only independent body dedicated to investigating chemical-related industrial accidents to find their root causes and, in hopes of preventing similar incidents, pass this information on to companies, regulators, workers, and communities.
Trump’s plan to eliminate CSB by defunding it, announced in March, has generated an outpouring of support for the board. The backing comes mainly from residents living near large U.S. industrial plants and refineries, unions, local officials, and safety experts. Several companies that have been investigated by CSB as well as the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry trade association, are tight-lipped and reluctant to comment on the impact of the proposed elimination of the board.
Ultimately, the fate of CSB will turn on whether Congress decides to provide funding for it. The board took on several of its most significant investigations, including into the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, at the behest of lawmakers. Members of Congress have not yet indicated whether they will support CSB’s continued existence. Lawmakers funded CSB for $11 million this year.
The proposal to shut down CSB is part of Trump’s blueprint to slash nonmilitary federal spending for fiscal year 2018, which starts on Oct. 1. The reductions are needed, the President says, to increase defense spending by $54 billion and build a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Trump’s proposal to defund the board surprised CSB Chair Vanessa Allen Sutherland. As in previous years, she expected the board to have to fight for annual funding when she was called to the White House Office of Management & Budget in mid-March, Sutherland says. This year, however, she was told CSB would be eliminated, with its funding pruned in fiscal 2018 to a minimal level needed to shut it down.
Defunding CSB would return the U.S. to a time in which there was little, if any, federal investigation into major industrial accidents.
CSB was created through a provision in the most recent major legislative overhaul of the Clean Air Act, which took place in 1990. Controversial from the beginning, CSB was opposed by then-President George H. W. Bush because of its independence, according to a statement he released when signing the legislation.
Former president Bill Clinton also did not support the board. Instead, Clinton directed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration to investigate accidents.
As incidents continued, the two agencies fell far behind in their probes. The agencies had little incentive to investigate because they were likely to be partially at fault because of a lack of enforcement of existing regulations, says Gerald Poje, one of the first CSB board members.
An April 1995 explosion and fire at Napp Technologies in Lodi, N.J., changed the situation, Poje says. The accident killed five workers and destroyed most of the facility and surrounding businesses.
The blast was just a few kilometers from the home of Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who had been instrumental in inserting the CSB provisions in the Clean Air Act. When OSHA’s and EPA’s investigation of the disaster stalled, pressure from Lautenberg, unions, community groups, the New Jersey governor, and others led Clinton to support funding CSB.
In response to Clinton’s request, Congress appropriated $4 million, and in January 1998, CSB opened its doors.
CSB’s annual budget has never exceeded $12 million, which is one-tenth of that of the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates transportation accidents and on which CSB is modeled.
Despite its small budget, CSB has investigated some 130 accidents and produced more than 90 accident reports and some 40 safety videos based on specific accidents. It has influenced industrial and chemical safety in the U.S. and across the world through its recommendations, according to industrial accident experts contacted by C&EN.
For instance, the U.K. Health & Safety Executive (HSE) that regulates industry in Britain uses insights and findings from CSB investigations to back up its regulations, says Ian Whewell, former HSE director of offshore safety.
“We all must learn the lessons of the past,” he says. “Without CSB carrying out independent, nonjudgmental investigations, U.S. chemical and petrochemical industries would be without one of the key tools they need to reduce the risk of catastrophic accidents.”
Poje agrees.
“Trump’s proposal is unwise,” he states. “The next major incident in 2017 will prompt a catalytic change in thinking about CSB. Its budget is tiny, far less than the property loss from a single industry accident.”
He adds, “CSB is a bargain for helping protect the homeland, save lives, and better ensure continuity of businesses.”
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i21/US-Chemical-Safety-Board-faces.html
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Meanwhile, These Americans Are Being Poisoned
May 19, 2017 | Esquire
By Charles P. Pierce
Out in the country, far from the feeding frenzy, and at some remove from those now media-drenched Rust Belt hamlets where a huge percentage of the elite political media have set up shop to take the pulse of the unfortunate suckers therein, there are places where the policies of this administration—and its general attitude toward some of the fundamental responsibilities of the national government, which has also been the attitude of conservative politics toward those same responsibilities for the past four decades—are making people very, very sick.
Start in Torrance, in California, where, two years ago, a massive explosion in an ExxonMobil Refinery scattered toxic dust over a populated area. It could have been infinitely worse. From TruthOut:
A hulking 40-ton chunk of debris from the refinery's Electrostatic Precipitator narrowly avoided hitting a tank containing tens of thousands of pounds of highly toxic modified hydrofluoric acid. The damning findings of a Chemical Safety Board (CSB) review of the accident were made public earlier this month. Among some of the problems identified in the report: the refinery repeatedly violated ExxonMobil's corporate safety standards leading up to the incident, while multiple gaps existed in the refinery's safety systems. "It was only sheer luck that the hydrofluoric acid tank wasn't hit," said Dr. Sally Hayati, president of the Torrance Refinery Action Alliance. If it had been hit, the collision could have released a toxic ground-hugging cloud with the potential to kill for nine miles and cause serious and irreversible injuries for up to 16 miles under worst-case scenario projections, she added.
President Obama tried to do something about that, and to protect our brave first responders, whom we honor until it starts costing us real money, but a proposed EPA rule got lobbied into paralysis and then the election happened.
Now, with energy industry sublet Scott Pruitt running the EPA, it looks like the regulation is pretty much dead.
The new rule -- the first significant updates to the RMP in some 20 years -- impacts roughly 12,500 facilities, including oil refineries, large chemical manufacturers, pulp and paper mills, and even wastewater treatment plants and food packing plants. And it addresses plant safety in a number of critical areas, such as emergency response, accident prevention and information disclosure. After an accident occurs, for example, facilities are required to conduct more thorough investigations to better understand what caused them. In some cases, an independent third party must be brought in to conduct its own audit. Facilities must be more transparent about certain information critical for first responders and local residents, such as what chemicals are stored on site. And as is pointed out in the amendment, "one of the factors that can contribute to the severity of chemical accidents is a lack of effective coordination between a facility and local emergency responders." As such, facilities are required to better coordinate with first responders and local emergency planning committees.
But…jobs!
Or you can stop by St. John the Baptist Parish, where some fine reporting by Sharon Lerner of The Intercept brought us the story of how one plant poisoned a whole hunk of Louisiana, and all the people in it, from the air.
For years, many of the people living on this little square of land between the train tracks and the Mississippi River levee have felt they suffered more than their share of illnesses. Troyla Keller has a rash and asthma that abate every time she leaves the neighborhood and worsen when she returns. Augustine Nicholson Dorris had breast cancer and seizures. And David Sanders has trouble breathing, a tumor on his thyroid, and neurological problems. "It took a lot away from me," said Sanders, whose speech is slurred, when I visited the area a half-hour west of New Orleans in February. Several people spoke of shuttling their children and grandchildren to the nearby ER for asthma treatments. And many residents also frequent the neighborhood's two busy dialysis centers. A third is under construction. "Everybody felt there was too much sickness," said Robert Taylor, 76, whose wife had breast cancer and is now struggling with multiple sclerosis. Taylor's daughter Raven suffers from gastroparesis, a relatively rare autoimmune disorder that has left the 48-year-old unable to digest food and bedridden, after an attempt to treat the condition surgically led to a staph infection. But there were plenty of other unusual conditions, too. Trollious Harris, who has spent most of her life a few blocks from the Taylors, suffers from myasthenia gravis, another autoimmune condition, which has caused her muscles to weaken. Kellie Tabb has a rapid heartbeat and recently met two other people in the area who have the same condition.
(As an aside, I'm sure all these folks can't wait for the sweet breeze of freedom that will descend upon them with Paul Ryan's healthcare plan.)
Maybe we all don't see how having the Environmental Protection Agency confirm that you're living in a massive shooting gallery for diseases can be a relief, but we don't live in St. John the Baptist Parish, where minds are eased by the thought that what's happening to you isn't some cosmic body blow.
But for the people living in the census tract within St. John the Baptist that is home to the Taylors, Kellers, Sanders, and Gerards, the risk is dramatically higher. According to the EPA's most recent National Air Toxics Assessment, which was published in December 2015, the lifetime risk of cancer from air pollution in this area, which is less than 2 square miles, is a staggering 777 per million people, by far the highest in the country and more than 800 times the national average. Other census tracts near the plant had risks that were more than 200, 300, and 400 times higher. No one I spoke to in this patch of the parish seemed surprised by the idea that the synthetic rubber plant just over the chain link fence from their houses might have a role in the community's health problems. DuPont opened the factory on a former sugar plantation called Belle Point in 1964, and its smokestacks have been pumping out chloroprene over this mostly African-American neighborhood since 1969. Many of the people living here can trace their roots back to slavery, when their ancestors worked on nearby plantations, and some of their homes are former slaves' quarters. And now the giant property next door looms over their lives in other ways. Most can see the stacks from their windows. And the residents I spoke with said that at times, odors wafted from the factory that smelled "pungent and rotten," "almost like a singed plastic" — or, as Mary Hampton put it simply, "like poison."
The states can't keep up with this kind of thing, and many of them don't even want to try. The average large American corporation has the civic conscience of a snail and, absent a very large federal hammer waved above its head, will cut as many corners as it can until some disaster hits, and then it will cut corners on its response to it.
I know things are tough in Ohio, and Michigan, and all those de-industrialized Rust Belt states. But at least those people have the narcotic hope that the president* can bring back coal mining and heavy machinery. Can't we have a few cameras down in St. John the Baptist Parish, where hard lives are becoming even harder specifically because of who was elected last fall?
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55169/epa-regulation-corporations-poison/
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Chemical Board Hands Anadarko Fire Inquiry to Transport Board
May 22, 2017 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Sam Pearson
The U.S. Chemical Safety board has dropped its probe into Anadarko Petroleum, the operator of a natural gas pipeline thought to have caused an explosion that leveled a Colorado home last month.
The board said in a post on its website that investigators decided to yield to the National Transportation Safety Board after determining the other agency has jurisdiction over the incident. CSB sent investigators from its Western Regional Office in Denver to the site May 5.
Local authorities told the Denver Post the explosion is thought to have started when an abandoned Anadarko gas line leaked into the basement of a Firestone, Colo., home. When the gas ignited, the explosion destroyed the home and killed two residents while critically injuring another.
The CSB and NTSB perform similar functions in that they investigate serious industrial accidents and issue safety recommendations—not citations, fines or regulations. However, the agencies said NTSB should take the lead because of the pipeline's connection to the national transportation system.
In fiscal 2017 NTSB is funded at $105 million while CSB is funded at $11 million, giving the transport board more resources to draw from in the inquiry.
The NTSB is charged with investigating civil aviation accidents as well as significant railroad, highway, marine and pipeline events. Like the CSB, the NTSB seeks to determine the cause of the events and issues safety recommendations to prevent them in the future.
NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said in an email to Bloomberg BNA the board wants to see if the explosion has broader implications for pipelines at the national level.
NTSB previously investigated a natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Calif., in 2010 in which eight people were killed.
On its website, CSB updated a news release describing the deployment May 7 to note that it met with a team of NTSB investigators who also were probing the incident. After touring the site together, investigators “determined that jurisdiction for the investigation was more properly with the NTSB,” the CSB notice said.
The update did not specify when the decision was made or when the announcement was posted, but CSB spokeswoman Hillary Cohen said it was issued May 15.
Holloway said the NTSB's investigation is likely to take 12 to 18 months.
“It is very early in the NTSB's investigation and no conclusions have been drawn,” Holloway said. “There are not many details available at this time.”
A spokesman for Anadarko did not respond to a request for comment May 19.
http://news.bna.com/deln/DELNWB/split_display.adp?fedfid=112052101&vname=dennotallissues&fn=112052101&jd=112052101
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Trump Urged to Exit Climate Deal as Scandals Stall Derugulatory Agenda
May 19, 2017 | Inside EPA
By Dawn Reeves
President Donald Trump, with his deregulatory agenda stalled by scandals related to alleged campaign ties to Russia, is facing a barrage of conservative pressure to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, just as he is leaving on his first overseas trip that will include the annual G7 meeting where many foreign leaders will be pressing him to remain in the deal.
Free-market and other advocates, who fear that remaining in the agreement will undermine administration efforts to roll back EPA's climate rules, worry that the chaos surrounding the administration may play a role in the president's ultimate decision on whether to stay in the deal but it is unclear in which direction it will drive the decision.
“It seems to me that you could argue that [the chaos] helps us or hurts us. It could be pointed out to him this solidifies supporting the conservative movement, and [that] fulfilling a major campaign promise is a big deal for a lot of people who voted for him,” says Myron Ebell, an official at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) who lead the Trump transition at EPA, told Inside EPA May 18.
But on the other hand, if Trump is in a weak position and feels like people are “banging away on you, if you give in and say we'll stay [in Paris] . . . then that is one less group of people banging away on you,” Ebell adds, though noting he leans “to the former” argument.
As a result, groups like CEI are stepping up pressure on Trump to pull out of the deal. CEI is running a television ad on cable networks Trump and White House officials are known to watch urging the president to withdraw from the deal as the president promised during his campaign. The ad urges Trump to not “listen to the swamp. Keep your promise. Withdraw from the Paris climate treaty.”
“We want to make sure people in the White House notice the conservative movement is firm and supports the president's campaign promise” to exit the climate agreement, says Myron Ebell, the CEI official who headed Trump's EPA transition team.
Trump was originally slated to announce a direction on Paris by the May 26 start of the G7 meeting, but he has since delayed any final decision. During the G7 summit, Trump is likely to face intense pressure from other world leaders to stay in the deal, though Ebell says such pressure may backfire.
Ebell and many others also fear that the scandals that have enveloped the White House over the past week, including Trump's firing of then-FBI Direct James Comey and the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign's alleged involvement with Russia, have further delayed the administration's deregulatory push and its already slow pace in appointing key personnel at EPA and other agencies.
For example, top chemical industry executives warned May 18 that the administration's failure to nominate officials at EPA is threatening to delay the administration's broad review of existing rules slated for repeal, replacement or modification.
“I've said many times their whole agenda is threatened with freezing up and stopping if they don't get some people nominated and confirmed to second-, third- and fourth-tier” positions at EPA, because career staffers and acting office heads are hostile to Pruitt's rollback effort, Ebell says.
“The whole bandwagon is going to slow and eventually stop, and they won't be able to make any more progress in the direction they want to go,” he says.
Continuing Fallout
Another conservative source agrees that Trump's decision on Paris could go either way -- an exit to shore up support from Trump's base, or a decision to stay to avoid provoking moderates. This source also expresses frustration with the Trump administration's inability to focus on its agenda amid the chaos.
Regarding Trump's broader agenda, this source argues that if the president could ignore “official Washington for a moment in favor of the rest of the country, . . . he could do all sorts of things right now he [is] holding off on . . . and it would never register amid the current frenzy.”
However, if Trump believes “he can get love from the people who did not want him to succeed and don't, and he wants to try and buy friends (in the Washington sense), then yes this compulsive foot-shootery will likely lead to pumping the breaks on his agenda for a while, which in the end means forever.”
The source adds that the “most likely outcome is that this bodes ill for him getting anything through that requires rounding up or holding marginal support (most things). So count me among those who wish he'd learn a little, cut the crap and do his job.”
One environmentalist predicts the continuing scandals will consume the White House's attention and make “it more difficult for Pruitt to gain their attention and approval” for anything he wants to move at EPA.
The scandals will also undermine Trump's political capital and public image, “making controversial measures more difficult to ram through and making Congress more emboldened to resist,” the source says, citing a bipartisan rejection of the Trump White House's proposed EPA budget cuts for the remainder of fiscal year 2017. That occurred “even before the worst scandals began to emerge.”
This source also expects Pruitt to be “more gun shy about going out on a limb for especially controversial rollbacks . . . because at some point the president's unpopularity and scandals (and possibly worse) will taint his Cabinet officials, and their reputations and their political ambitions. The last factor appears to be especially relevant to a politician as seemingly ambitious as Pruitt,” who is said to be interested in running for office in Oklahoma.
CEI's Ebell says Pruitt cannot advance his agenda, even if he wants to, without people in place to write the rules -- and so far the White House has only nominated one sub-Cabinet political staffer: Susan Bodine to lead the enforcement office.
“At the end of the day, Pruitt can sign a lot of stuff, but the people in the water office charged with rewriting [the Clean Water Act jurisdiction rule] are the people who wrote it in the first place. It is hard to see how that is going to turn out well,” he says.
While Pruitt has brought on staff to serve in his inner circle, “if you want something signed off on, it's got to be the acting assistant administrator or the acting general counsel or the administrator, so I think it creates huge problems until people are in place.”
Ebell adds that Trump's prior claims that he may not need to fill all political positions is a sign of “arrogance or misplaced confidence that smaller and leaner is better.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-news/trump-urged-exit-climate-deal-scandals-stall-deregulatory-agenda
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Trump Budget Would Cut E.P.A. Science Programs and Slash Cleanups
May 19, 2017 | The New York TImes
By Coral Davenport
President Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal would cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Science and Technology nearly in half, while paring by 40 percent funding for E.P.A. employees who oversee and put in place environmental regulations, according to a White House document that was shared with The New York Times.
And while the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, has vowed to prioritize the agency’s cleanup of hazardous waste sites, the president would cut funding for the program, known as Superfund, by about 25 percent. And spending for a program to restore former industrial sites contaminated by pollution, another stated priority of the administrator, would shrink by about 36 percent.
Those cuts are part of an overall E.P.A. budget reduction of about 30 percent, as outlined originally in March, when the White House unveiled the top-line budget requests for the fiscal year that begins in October. The agency’s budget would drop to $5.7 billion — its lowest level in 40 years, adjusted for inflation — from its current $8.2 billion.
On Tuesday, the White House will fill in the details with a full budget release. White House officials did not respond to requests for comment Friday on the E.P.A. budget request.
But Liz Bowman, an agency spokeswoman, said the proposal “prioritizes federal funding for work in infrastructure, air and water quality, and ensuring the safety of chemicals in the marketplace.”
“The budget aims to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies and focus on our core statutory mission,” she said.
The White House document was circulated by the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a group of state and local pollution control officials.
Mr. Trump has made clear that he wants to increase military spending by 10 percent, and spend more on the border with Mexico, including building a wall. He would also not touch the largest drivers of the budget deficit, Medicare and Social Security.
To do all of that, deliver what he has called the largest tax cut in the nation’s history and make good on his campaign pledge to balance the budget, virtually every other aspect of government would have to be significantly cut back. Those cuts would hit the E.P.A. especially hard.
The proposed cuts to the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health appear explicitly aimed at slowing or stopping some of its ability to regulate several forms of pollution, including the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. The proposed reductions would carry out Mr. Trump’s campaign pledges to drastically reduce the size and scope of the E.P.A., and his subsequent push to roll back major Obama-era environmental regulations.
In particular, the budget appears to reflect Mr. Trump’s efforts to repeal rules aimed at tackling climate change, as well as a major regulation to limit pollution in waterways and wetlands. Mr. Trump has called such rules “stupid” and “job killers.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill are unlikely to approve reductions at the levels envisioned by the White House.
Last year, the House spending subcommittee that controls the E.P.A.’s budget proposed funding the agency at $8 billion, cutting just $291 million from President Barack Obama’s request.
Representative Ken Calvert, the California Republican who is chairman of that appropriations panel, said in an interview this year that he did not anticipate cutting the E.P.A.’s popular state grant programs, which fund projects like restoring the Great Lakes and cleaning and redeveloping former industrial sites. All of those programs are targeted for severe cuts or elimination under Mr. Trump’s budget proposal.
The draft reflects what critics have called the diminished priority Mr. Trump places on science. This month, that criticism increased as the E.P.A. declined to renew the terms of several academic scientists who sit on a key agency review panel, the Board of Scientific Counselors, and signaled that the agency might be interested in replacing them with representatives from regulated industries.
The president’s request would shrink the budget for the Office of Science and Technology to $450 million, from about $740 million now.
It would cut grants to states to conduct their own environmental programs by about 19 percent, to $2.9 billion from $3.6 billion.
Among the few state-level programs it would leave intact is a $20 million revolving fund to help states and communities build safer water infrastructure, a program aimed at helping municipalities prevent disasters like the lead contamination crisis that sickened thousands in Flint, Mich.
But the proposed budget would eliminate all spending on nearly a dozen state-level programs aimed at researching and protecting local watershed ecosystems, including programs on the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Champlain, Lake Pontchartrain and Puget Sound.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/climate/trump-epa-budget-superfund.html
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Report Details Sweeping Impact of Trump's Proposed Cuts
May 19, 2017 | E&E News PM
By Sean Reilly
A report released this afternoon by state air pollution regulators spells out how the across-the-board cuts in the Trump administration's upcoming budget proposal could affect virtually every facet of U.S. EPA's operations next year.
Funding for the clean air program, for example, which includes greenhouse gas reporting and stationary source regulation, would be slashed by almost half, from almost $273 million this year to $143.2 million in fiscal 2018, says the summary by an organization that represents state air pollution regulators.
The brownfields redevelopment program would be cut by 37 percent, from $25.5 million to $16.1 million, while a lead risk reduction program that's receiving $13.3 million this year would get nothing in 2018. Not all programs would be similarly hard hit: The agency's revolving funds for drinking water and sewage treatment infrastructure, for example, would get close to the same amount of money they're receiving this year. The proposed budget also includes a new $11 million line item for "workforce reshaping."
But enforcement programs overall would be cut 19 percent; state and local air quality management grants would take a 30 percent hit.
The draft numbers, spanning 15 pages, were released by the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. The group, whose members include some 40 state regulatory agencies, said in a news release that the data came directly from an administration document and are "an accurate reflection" of the budget request that the White House is expected to release Tuesday as part of a governmentwide spending plan for next year.
If enacted, the proposed cuts would "devastate state and local governmental air pollution control agencies" and lead to more unnecessary illnesses and premature deaths, said Bill Becker, the association's executive director, in a statement.
"While the Trump Administration has been touting its commitment to 'cooperative federalism,' these proposed cuts belie that assertion," Becker said.
Asked in an email this afternoon whether they disputed the numbers' accuracy, EPA spokespeople did not reply. They also did not respond to a request for comment on Becker's statement.
But in a "skinny" outline of its 2018 request released earlier this year, the White House already signaled its plan for a 31 percent cut to EPA's total budget, taking it from about $8.4 billion this year to $5.7 billion, while slashing some 3,200 jobs (Greenwire, May 18).
The draft plan, which needs congressional approval, is highly unlikely to become law, if only because some of the stiffest cuts would fall on parochial programs fiercely protected by lawmakers. Funding for initiatives aimed at cleaning up specific geographic areas, for example, would be eliminated under President Trump's plan. Those initiatives are receiving almost $427 million this year and include funding for Chesapeake Bay and Great Lakes restoration efforts.
The targeted airshed program, which doles out grants to help communities grapple with severe ozone or particulate matter pollution, is getting $20 million this year; under the administration's proposal, it would be zeroed out in fiscal 2018. Funding for an infrastructure program for Alaska Native villages, which is also getting $20 million, would similarly be erased.
Both proposals, however, are likely to meet resistance from Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who chairs the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee. Among the beneficiaries of the targeted airshed program is Fairbanks, Alaska's second-largest city (Greenwire, May 9).
https://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2017/05/19/stories/1060054862
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Hearing to Focus on Bills Targeting Ozone Standard, Clean Air Act
May 22, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Sean Reilly
A Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee will hold a hearing tomorrow on two bills that share a common purpose: delay implementation of U.S. EPA's 2015 ground-level ozone standard and revamp a keystone requirement of the Clean Air Act.
The hearing by the Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee will focus on S. 263, introduced in February by the panel's chairwoman, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), and S. 452, unveiled a few weeks later by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).
The lineup of five witnesses features representatives of state and local governments likely to voice compliance worries, along with a prominent physician speaking in the standard's defense on public health grounds.
Both bills would roll back enforcement of the 70 parts per billion threshold until the middle of the next decade; they would also permanently stretch the Clean Air Act's broader cycle for future reviews of the standards for ozone, particulate matter and four other "criteria pollutants" from once every five years to once every decade.
Capito's bill, however, would go several steps further, allowing EPA officials to take "technological feasibility" as a secondary factor into account when deciding among a range of options for a new standard and requiring the agency to take any "adverse" economic effects into account.
The measure is a companion bill to H.R. 806, sponsored by Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) and now awaiting action by the House Energy and Commerce Committee after a March hearing (E&E Daily, March 23).
Ozone, a lung irritant that is the main ingredient in smog, is produced by the reaction of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds in sunshine. The previous standard, set in 2008, had been 75 ppb; in lowering it in October 2015, then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy cited the need to protect public health in light of recent research on the pollutant's effects.
States turned in their nonattainment recommendations last fall; by law, EPA is supposed to make the final determinations by this October. The new standard is meanwhile facing lawsuits from both businesses groups, which argue that the 70-ppb limit is unlawfully stringent, and environmentalists who say it's too lax.
Under the Trump administration, however, EPA officials have won a pause in the litigation while they decide whether to keep defending the standard.
In states like Arizona, businesses and regulators have expressed concern about the impact of background ozone on their efforts to comply. Because a prime source of nitrogen oxides is coal combustion, producers in states like West Virginia fear that the tighter limit could become another inducement to reduce fossil fuel use. Proponents of a delay also note that EPA issued formal implementation guidance for the 2008 standard two years ago.
S. 263 "will provide more clarity, more regulatory certainty, and ease the economic burden of never-ending overreach," Capito said in a February statement noting the bill's introduction. Last month, however, 16 Democratic attorneys general from various states and the District of Columbia urged opposition to the measure, saying that ozone pollution "remains a serious and persistent problem" (Greenwire, April 26).
Capito sponsored a similar measure last year, but after a hearing, it never moved out of committee. Among those expressing concern at the time was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is now the Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee's ranking member (E&E Daily, June 23, 2016).
Schedule:: The hearing is Tuesday, May 23, at 2:30 p.m. in 406 Dirksen.
Witnesses:: Misael Cabrera, director, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality; Kyle Zeringue, senior vice president, Baton Rouge Area Chamber; Ahron Hakimi, executive director, Kern Council of Governments; Dr. Monica Kraft, former president, American Thoracic Society, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson; and Shawn Garvin, secretary, Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/2017/05/22/stories/1060054875
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GOP Pushes Rulemaking Reform; Dems Showcase Fired Scientists
May 22, 2017 | E&E Daily
By Arianna Skibell
A House panel this week will review the relationship between U.S. EPA and state environmental quality departments on how they implement federal environmental regulations.
The House Science, Space & Technology Subcommittee on Environment meets tomorrow for the hearing titled, "Expanding the Role of States in EPA Rulemaking."
Democrats, however, will likely focus on pushing back at what they see as the Trump administration's attempts to weaken the agency. They will also showcase the recent dismissal of science advisers.
The majority plans to question state regulators on their implementation of three key environmental mandates: ozone rules, regional haze standards and cross-state air pollution guidelines.
While states are charged with formulating implementation plans, the Obama administration often imposed federal plans when EPA found state programs inadequate.
"We believe the original intent of the statutes and the way those rules are written, the state is the actor that has the power to come up with the way they will reach the particular standards, rather than the EPA," said a committee aide.
"What we've seen with the Obama administration, the EPA was continually overruling the states in regard to their implementation plan," the aide said.
Under President Obama, more than 50 federal air quality plans were implemented instead of state plans, a separate committee aide said.
Lawmakers are concerned EPA implementation plans aren't state specific and do not take into account regional differences. The goal of the hearing is to find a way for EPA to cooperate more with states.
EPA is not scheduled to appear. However, Democrats invited Deborah Swackhamer, chairwoman of EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors. The agency recently dismissed many of that body's members.
Schedule: The hearing is Tuesday, May 23, at 10 a.m. in 2318 Rayburn.
Witnesses: Misael Cabrera, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality; Becky Keogh, director of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality; and Deborah Swackhamer, chairwoman, EPA Board of Scientific Counselors.
https://www.eenews.net/eedaily/stories/1060054877
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Chemical Found in NASA Site Wells That Supply Chincoteague
May 19, 2017 | AP (in The Washington Post)
NASA is providing extra drinking water for Chincoteague after chemicals used in firefighting foam were found in some wells on the Wallops Flight Facility property that supply the town.
Chincoteague and NASA worked out the arrangement after testing in recent weeks found the chemicals in four of the town’s seven wells, officials said.
The town’s drinking water comes from a mix of the wells, and all tests of the finished product have shown it is safe to drink, according to NASA. But some wells with higher levels of the chemicals were taken offline, so NASA is supplementing the town’s supply while more testing is ongoing.
The chemicals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl, are referred to as PFAS. They were used in a wide variety of consumer products since the 1950s but have mostly been phased out. The potential health effects of human exposure to the compounds are not fully understood, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued health advisory limits for them last year.
Wallops said in a statement that firefighters previously conducted training on the north-central side of the main base with a firefighting foam that contained PFAS compounds.
After the EPA advisory was issued last year, NASA decided to conduct water-quality testing, Wallops spokesman Jeremy Eggers said. The testing was conducted by an independent lab, and the results are being shared with state and federal health agencies, he said.
Initial tests of the town’s drinking water detected PFAS but at levels below the advisory set by the EPA. Tests of individual wells detected PFAS in one of four deep wells and three shallow ones. In two of the shallow wells and the deep well, it was detected at a level above the health advisory, according to a NASA statement.
The town then began using only the three deep wells where no PFAS was found to produce drinking water. The second round of drinking water testing showed a lower level of PFAS and the third round showed none at all, Eggers said.
Chincoteague already had a water system hookup to Wallops, so getting the augmented supply going wasn’t difficult, Town Manager Jim West said.
He said he felt fairly certain that with the extra supply the town could make it through the busy summer tourist season. NASA is not charging Chincoteague for the extra water, he said.
The small town sits on Chincoteague Island on the state’s Eastern Shore. It is best known for the annual crossing of wild ponies from Assateague Island memorialized in Marguerite Henry’s novel “Misty of Chincoteague.”
Testing of both the town and NASA’s water supplies will continue biweekly “for the foreseeable future,” and NASA will work with the EPA and state Departments of Health and Environmental Quality on a long-term plan, Eggers said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/chemical-found-in-nasa-site-wells-that-supply-chincoteague/2017/05/19/e0d91faa-3cb5-11e7-a59b-26e0451a96fd_story.html?utm_term=.1da21b5f0cca
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