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PM ACC Clips Report - March 5, 2018
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The End of Recycling
Mar 5, 2019 | The Atlantic
By Alana Semuels
After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities... -
TSCA CBI Proposal Heads to Interagency Review
Mar 5, 2019 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA has submitted a proposed rule outlining the procedure for reviewing confidential business information (CBI) claims under TSCA to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and approval. The... -
Chemours Faces First Notice of Violation Issued Under TSCA
Mar 5, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Lisa Martine Jenkins
The US EPA has issued its first Notice of Violation under TSCA to chemical giant Chemours, based on a variety of alleged reporting and notification failures. Issued on 13 February, the Notice of Violation (NOV) claims that Chemours... -
US Government Watchdog Says EPA Leadership Has Slowed IRIS Assessments
Mar 5, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin
A US government watchdog says that EPA leadership has delayed progress on producing assessments under the IRIS programme. And the Government Accountability Office report says that a failure to release timely chemical reviews... -
Industrial Chemical Releases Increased in 2017
Mar 5, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
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Clean Water: The Next Blue Wave for Congress
Mar 5, 2019 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) and Wenonah Hauter
Our drinking water has never been under greater threat. The water infrastructure for major U.S. cities is nearing a century old and is in urgent need of modernization. Lead pipes still deliver water to peoples’ homes and our children's ... -
Organic Foods Are the Only ‘Clean’ Packaged Option for Consumers
Mar 5, 2019 | Environmental Working Group (In EcoWatch)
Unlike organic packaged foods, conventional packaged food contains thousands of poorly regulated food chemicals, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Working Group. "Although many consumers choose organic to avoid... -
(ACC Mentioned) New Warnings on Plastic’s Health Risks as Fracking Industry Promotes New 'Plastics Belt' Build-Out
Mar 5, 2019 | Desmog Blog
By Sharon Kelly
A new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at every stage. Virtually all plastic — 99... -
Senate Energy Panel Sets up Thursday Vote on DOE Picks
Mar 5, 2019 | Politico Pro - Energy Whiteboard
By Darius Dixon
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a Thursday markup to advance four Energy Department nominees the White House initially tapped in the previous Congress. If the panel can reach a quorum... -
DOE Approves Calcasieu Pass LNG Exports
Mar 5, 2019 | Politico Pro - Energy Whiteboard
By Darius Dixon
The Energy Department approved Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass project to export liquefied natural gas to non-Free Trade Agreement countries today, less than two weeks after FERC authorized the terminal’s construction. “Today, I’m... -
Energy Panel to Forge Climate Alliance on Clean Fossil Fuel
Mar 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith
Two moderate lawmakers from fossil energy states say their partnership can prompt bipartisan climate policy, including boosting investment in cleaner, more efficient use of fossil fuels. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources... -
$680 Million Pipeline Gets Green Light to Move Natural Gas from Oklahoma to Gulf Coast
Mar 5, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa
A pipeline to move natural gas from Oklahoma to destinations along the Gulf Coast and southeastern United States got the green light from federal regulators and $680 million in financing for construction. Working in a joint venture... -
Chevron, Exxon Mobil Tighten Their Grip on Fracking
Mar 5, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Bradley Olson
Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. plan to significantly ramp up production in the oil field at the heart of the American fracking boom, the latest sign that the next era of shale drilling is likely to be led by the major oil companies. -
Exxon, Chevron Plan to Dominate Permian, Grow as Others Cut Back
Mar 5, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Jordan Blum
The nation's two largest oil companies said Tuesday they plan to significantly hike their activity in West Texas' Permian Basin and dominate the region, spending even more money while others cut back. Both Exxon Mobil and Chevron said... -
The Energy 202: Oil Giant Makes Business Case for Taking Climate Change Seriously
Mar 5, 2019 | Washington Post
By Steven Mufson
The chief economist of one of the world’s biggest oil companies is urging other companies to take climate change seriously — and sooner rather than later. If not, it might be bad for business. That’s the warning from BP’s Spencer... -
Pipelines Vulnerable under TSA's Watch
Mar 5, 2019 | Roll Call
By Gopal Ratnam
Nearly 3 million miles of pipelines that crisscross the United States carrying oil, natural gas and other hazardous liquids may be vulnerable to cyberattacks as the federal agency responsible for overseeing their security is... -
Post-Hurricane Harvey, NASA Tried to Fly a Pollution-Spotting Plane over Houston. The EPA Said No
Mar 5, 2019 | LA Times
By Susanne Rust and Louis Sahagun
In the weeks after Hurricane Harvey’s catastrophic sweep through the Houston area — which resulted in chemical spills, fires, flooded storage tanks and damaged industrial plants — rescue crews and residents complained of... -
Wheeler on Climate: 'I Don't See It as the Existential Threat'
Mar 5, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Maxine Joselow
Climate change isn't an "existential threat," EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said yesterday. Wheeler made the comments while guest hosting the Fox Business Network program "Making Money with Charles Payne." -
Murkowski: Climate Change 'Has Got to Be a Priority for All of Us'
Mar 5, 2019 | Politico Pro - Energy Whiteboard
By Zack Colman
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Lisa Murkowski said Congress needs to address climate change, pointing to the dire effects from a warming planet already being felt in her home state. "This has got to be a... -
Deal Sets Schedule for EPA Review of Industrial Emissions
Mar 5, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
EPA would take a fresh look at long-standing emissions standards for bulk gasoline terminals and five other industrial source categories under a tentative settlement. The proposed consent decree would require the agency to finish the... -
California Ready to Fight for States’ Rights on Air Pollution
Mar 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
California is going to fight the EPA’s move to strip states’ power to set more stringent air pollution standards for cars, a state official is expected to testify before a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. The Golden State... -
Ewire: The Latest in the Green New Deal Debate
Mar 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
Climate mitigation policy is earning a renewed focus in the national debate, thanks to the Green New Deal resolution floated by progressive lawmakers and Republicans' sharp critiques that occasionally stray beyond the outlines of the... -
New York’s Tonko Has Hand in Many Climate, Environment Debates
Mar 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) asked hundreds of scientists, economists, business leaders, and others to offer climate change policy ideas more than a year before Democrats could turn them into legislation that could move. -
Environmentalists Challenge ‘Force Majeure’ Refinery Air Waiver
Mar 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit over EPA’s recent revision to its refinery air rules, contesting the agency’s creation of a compliance reporting waiver for facilities facing “force majeure” events beyond their control including...
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Environment News
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Mar 5, 2019 | The Atlantic
By Alana Semuels
After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors find you haven’t recycled appropriately.
But now, much of that carefully sorted recycling is ending up in the trash.
For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods like shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
Most are choosing the latter. “We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can’t afford it,” said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastics in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 per ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin’s residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn’t want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there’s not much she can do. “Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for,” she said.
The same is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town prices would increase by 63%, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. “It almost feels illegal, to throw plastic bottles away,” the town manager, Kyle O’Brien, told me.
Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill.The town of Fort Edward, in New York,suspended its recycling program in July, and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.
This end of recycling is coming at a time when the United States is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5 percent from 2010 and 60 percent from 1985. That amounts to nearly five pounds per person a day. New York City collected 934 tons of metal, plastic, and glass a day from residents last year, a 33 percent increase from 2013.
For a long time, Americans have had little incentive to consume less. It’s inexpensive to buy products, and it’s even cheaper to throw them away at the end of their short lives. But the costs of all this garbage are growing, especially now that bottles and papers that were once recycled are now ending up in the trash.
One of those costs is environmental: When organic waste sits in a landfill it decomposes, emitting methane, which is bad for the climate—landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the country. Burning plastic may create some energy, but it also produces carbon emissions. And while many incineration facilities bill themselves as “waste-to-energy” plants, studies have found they release more harmful chemicals like mercury and lead into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants.
And as cities are now learning, the other cost is financial. The United States still has a fair amount of landfill space left, but it’s getting expensive to ship waste hundreds of miles away to those landfills. Some dumps are raising costs to deal with all this extra waste—according to one estimate, along the west coast, landfill fees increased by $8 a ton from 2017 to 2018. Some of these costs are already being passed on to consumers, but most haven’t—yet.
Americans are going to have to come to terms with a new reality: All those toothpaste tubes and shopping bags and water bottles that didn’t exist 50 years ago need to go somewhere, and creating this much waste has a price we haven’t had to pay so far. “We’ve had an ostrich-in-the-sand approach to the entire system,” said Jeremy O’Brien, director of applied research at the Solid Waste Association of North America, a trade association. “We’re producing a lot of waste ourselves, and we should take care of it ourselves.”
As the trash piles up, American cities are scrambling to figure out what to do with everything they had previously sent to China. But few businesses want it domestically for one very big reason: Despite all those advertising campaigns, Americans are terrible at recycling.
About 25 percent of what ends up in the blue bins is contaminated, according to The National Waste & Recycling Association. For decades, we’ve been throwing just about whatever we wanted—wire hangers and pizza boxes and ketchup bottles and yogurt containers—in the bin and sending it to China, where low-paid workers sorted through it and cleaned it up. That’s no longer an option. And in the U.S., at least, it rarely makes sense to employ people to sort through our recycling so that it can be made into new material, because virgin plastics and paper are still cheaper in comparison.
Even in San Francisco, often lauded for its environmentalism, waste management companies struggle to keep recycling uncontaminated. I visited a state-of-the-art facility operated by San Francisco’s recycling provider, Recology, where million-dollar machines separate aluminum from paper from plastic from garbage. But as Recology spokesman Robert Reed walked me through the plant, he kept pointing out non-recyclables gumming up the works. Workers wearing masks and helmets grabbed laundry baskets off a fast-moving conveyor belt of cardboard as some non-cardboard items escaped their gloved hands. Recology has to stop another machine twice a day so a technician can pry plastic bags from where they’ve clogged up the gear.
Cleaning up recycling means employing people to slowly go through materials, which is expensive. Jacob Greenberg, a commissioner in Blaine County, Idaho, told me that the county’s mixed paper recycling was about 90 percent clean. But its paper broker said it needed to be 99 percent clean for anyone to buy it, and elected officials didn’t want to hike fees in order to get there. “At what point do you feel like you’re spending more money than what it takes for people to feel good about recycling?” he said.
Then there’s the challenge of educating people about what can and can’t be recycled, even as the number of items they touch on a daily basis grows. Americans tend to be “aspirational” about their recycling, tossing an item in the blue bin because it makes them feel less guilty about consuming it and throwing it away. Even in San Francisco, Reed kept pointing out items that aren’t easily recyclable but that keep showing up at the Recology plant—soy sauce packets and pizza boxes, candy bar wrappers and dry cleaner bags, the lids of to-go coffee cups and plastic take-out containers.
If we can somehow figure out to better sort recycling, some U.S. markets for plastics and paper may emerge. But selling it domestically will still be harder than it would be in a place like China, where a booming manufacturing sector has constant demand for materials. The viability of recycling varies tremendously by locale; San Francisco can recycle its glass back into bottles in six weeks, according to Recology, while many other cities are finding that glass is so heavy and breaks so easily that it is nearly impossible to truck it to a place that will recycle it. Akron, Ohio is just one of many cities that have ended glass recycling since the China policy changes.
For now, it’s still often cheaper for companies to manufacture using new materials than recycled ones. Michael Rohwer, a director at Business for Social Responsibility, works with companies trying to be more environmentally friendly. He told me that recycled plastic costs pennies more than new plastic, and those pennies add up when you’re manufacturing millions of items. Items made of different types of plastic nearly always end up in the trash, because recyclers can’t separate the plastics from one another—Reed equates it to trying to get the sugar and eggs out of a cake after you’ve baked it—but because companies don’t bear the costs of disposal, they have no incentive to manufacture products out of material that will be easier to recycle.
The best way to fix recycling is probably convincing people to buy less stuff, which would also have the benefit of reducing some of the upstream waste created when products are made. But that’s a hard sell in the United States, where consumer spending accounts for 68% of the GDP. The strong economy means more people have more spending money, too, and often the things they buy—like new phones—and the places they shop—like Amazon—have figured out how to sell them even more things. The average American spent 7 percent more on food and 8 percent more on personal care products and services in 2017 than 2016, according to government data.
Some places are still trying to get people to buy less. The city of San Francisco, for instance, is trying to get residents to think of a fourth “R” beyond “reduce, reuse, and recycle”—“refuse.” It wants people to be smarter about what they purchase, avoiding plastic bottles and straws and other disposable goods. But it’s been tough in a place centered on acquiring the newest technology. “This is our big challenge – how do you take a culture like San Francisco and get people excited about less?” Debbie Raphael, director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, told me. The city passed an ordinance that required 10 percent of beverages sold be available in reusable containers and is trying to make reuse “hip” through an online campaign and dedicated website, Raphael said. San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have banned plastic bags and plastic straws, but that option isn’t available in many other parts of the country, where recently passed state laws prevent cities from banning products.
But even in San Francisco, the most careful consumers still generate a lot of waste. Plastic clamshell containers are difficult to recycle because the material they’re made of is so flimsy—but it’s hard to find berries not sold in those containers, even at most farmer’s markets. Go into a Best Buy or Target in San Francisco to buy headphones or a charger and you’ll still end up with plastic packaging to throw away. Amazon has tried to reduce waste by sending products in white and blue plastic envelopes, but when I visited the Recology plant, they littered the floor because they’re very hard to recycle. Even at Recology, an employee-owned company that benefits when people recycle well, the hurdles to getting rid of plastics was evident. Reed chided me for eating my daily Chobani yogurt out of small 5ounce containers, rather than out of big 32-ounce tubs, but I saw a 5-ounce Yoplait container in a trash can of the control room of the Recology plant. While there, Reed handed me a pair of small orange ear plugs meant to protect my ears from the noise of the plant. They were wrapped in a type of flimsy plastic that is nearly impossible to recycle. When I left the plant, I kept the earplugs and the plastic in my bag, not sure what to do with them. Eventually, I threw them in the trash.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/
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TSCA CBI Proposal Heads to Interagency Review
Mar 5, 2019 | Chemical Watch
The US EPA has submitted a proposed rule outlining the procedure for reviewing confidential business information (CBI) claims under TSCA to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and approval.
The 2016 amendments to TSCA require the agency to develop an approach for how it will review claims to withhold as confidential the identity of a chemical. The statute mandates that manufacturers and processors substantiate such claims, unless they have already done so within the last five years.
Approved CBI claims will generally remain valid for ten years.
The proposed rule was received at OMB on 28 February, which begins the standard interagency review process.
The statute requires that a final rule be in place within one year of the EPA’s compiling an updated inventoryof active and inactive substances. Published last month, the latest TSCA inventory includes 7,757 active substances with confidential identities.
https://chemicalwatch.com/74806/tsca-cbi-proposal-heads-to-interagency-review
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Chemours Faces First Notice of Violation Issued Under TSCA
Mar 5, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Lisa Martine Jenkins
The US EPA has issued its first Notice of Violation under TSCA to chemical giant Chemours, based on a variety of alleged reporting and notification failures.
Issued on 13 February, the Notice of Violation (NOV) claims that Chemours violated provisions under Section 5 and 8 of TSCA, including with regard to its use of the fluorinated compound GenX and its intermediate hexafluoropropylene oxide (HFPO).
The EPA told Chemical Watch that the NOV – a non-judicial enforcement action taken by the agency to stop or correct a behaviour – is the first it has issued for TSCA noncompliance.
The law requires companies to submit pre-manufacturing notices (PMNs) before manufacturing any new chemical substance, and significant new use notifications (Snuns) for use of a substance beyond what is permissible under a significant new use rule (Snur).
But the NOV cites several failures by the company to follow these and other requirements at two company facilities, one located in North Carolina and the other in West Virginia in 2017. These include: failure to submit a Snun for emissions of HFPO, which is subject to a Snur requiring it to be used in an enclosed process, and failure to notify a customer that the substance is subject to a Snur; failure to control effluent and emissions during the use of GenX as required by a 2009 TSCA Section 5(e) consent order; failure to submit a PMN for a substance that was manufactured for a commercial purpose and not listed on the TSCA inventory; failure to submit a Snun for a confidential substance that is subject to a Snur restricting its annual production to 10,000; and failure to include three substances, and to report "significant figures of accuracy" on four chemicals, under the 2016 Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) exercise.
When approached by Chemical Watch, the company said it "take[s] these matters very seriously."
"Based on an initial review we believe that we have already addressed many of the issues raised and have responses to address the others," said spokeswoman Lisa Randall.
‘Aggressive’ action
Bob Sussman, a former lawyer to the EPA, expressed surprise at the issuance of the NOV. He said in an interview that there are other, more informal actions the agency could take if they just want to levy fines for TSCA violations.'It’s certainly more aggressive than anything EPA has done for a while,' said Bob Sussman, former EPA lawyer.
"Maybe this is a shift in approach for just this one company, though we don’t know that yet," Mr Sussman said. "It’s certainly more aggressive than anything EPA has done for a while."
Following immediate action to correct the violations, the NOV has requested that Chemours submit to the EPA an outline of the actions it "has already undertaken and/or provide the time-frame for actions it will implement to come into compliance with TSCA."
The agency also reiterated an earlier request for documentation of when Chemours first learned of GenX-related contamination in and around its facilities.
The NOV says the EPA has not yet received this information, and its submission is "significant to Chemours’ compliance with substantial risk information required under TSCA Section 8(e)" – a provision of the law that requires companies to inform the agency upon learning that a substance it handles presents a "substantial risk" to the environment or human health.
No financial penalty is mentioned in the NOV, but according to Mr Sussman, NOVs are often, though not always, followed by civil or criminal action.
Criminal provisions of TSCA indicate that ‘knowing or willful’ notice or reporting violations can carry a penalty of one year in prison and/or a fee of up to $25,000 per day of violation.
GenX controversy
The EPA says a published discovery of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River – which the Fayetteville Works site abuts – prompted its investigation into Chemours.
And its action comes alongside state-level enforcement stemming from the company’s release of GenX into the watershed. This has resulted in a consent order requiring Chemours, among others, to pay North Carolina a penalty of $12m and to reduce its GenX emissions by 99%, in comparison with 2017 levels, by the end of this year.
Chemours told Chemical Watch that it has already invested $100m in emission control technology to work toward this.
GenX – a fluorinated chemical used for nonstick and other waterproof coatings – has been the subject of widespread controversy, amid concerns that the short-chain substance carries similar health concerns as the older, long-chain PFASs, like PFOA, that it replaced.
The EPA classifies the substance as an "emerging contaminant" in need of more research. The agency has indicated that oral exposure to GenX – such as through drinking water – could impact the thyroid, reproductive organs and tissues, developing fetuses, and the kidney.
A 2017 EPA fact sheet said the agency is using data from Chemours to update its risk assessment of the chemical.
https://chemicalwatch.com/74803/chemours-faces-first-notice-of-violation-issued-under-tsca
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US Government Watchdog Says EPA Leadership Has Slowed IRIS Assessments
Mar 5, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin
A US government watchdog says that EPA leadership has delayed progress on producing assessments under the IRIS programme. And the Government Accountability Office report says that a failure to release timely chemical reviews could threaten public health and the agency’s offices’ ability to meet statutory deadlines.
The GAO review of EPA’s chemical assessment programmes comes as the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) programme remains under the microscope since a critical review of the programme nearly a decade ago sparked concerns.
Last month, for example, a thinktank called for the programme to be abolished – despite more positive reviews of IRIS in recent years.
The GAO report agrees that IRIS has "made progress in addressing identified process challenges". This includes: adopting practices to improve the speed with which it completes assessments; tailoring its reviews to suit the needs of EPA programme offices; streamlining the peer review process; and addressing the need for increased transparency through implementing systematic review as the basis of its assessments.
But the watchdog says that between June and December 2018, EPA leadership "directed the programme to stop the assessment process during discussions about programme priorities".
More specifically, EPA leaders told the IRIS programme not to release assessment materials without a formal request from an agency office, and public release of information stalled during a multi-month survey of programme needs.
Following deliberation of priorities, the report continues, a December 2018 memo announced that IRIS would develop 11 chemical assessments, down from its normal workflow of 22, with "no indication of when more assessments could be requested or if IRIS’s workflow would remain at 11 chemicals for the foreseeable future." All assessments were requested by two offices: the Office of Water and the Office of Land and Emergency Management.
Four assessments in "the later stages of development", it adds, were excluded from the list, covering: formaldehyde, acrylonitrile, n-Butyl alcohol and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH).
"It remains to be seen," says the report, "when these assessments can be expected to move to the next step in the IRIS process or be completed."
The GAO notes that officials in almost all of the programme and regional offices use IRIS assessments to do their work as "it is the first place they look for chemical toxicity values."
"If the IRIS programme is unable to produce assessments, their offices would be challenged to meet statutory deadlines and there would be a generally negative effect on public health," it adds.
TSCA implementation
The report also looks at the EPA’s implementation of TSCA. In this respect, the GAO said that the agency has responded to initial statutory deadlines, including promulgating rules, developing guidance and releasing reports.
But it says that some environmental and industry organisations it spoke with said that they do not believe meeting deadlines is "a complete measure of how well EPA is implementing TSCA", citing such concerns as whether its implemented rules are consistent with the law or if it is meeting its 90-day deadlines for new chemical reviews.
And the GAO identified several further challenges. These include:ensuring adequate resources; managing the risk posed by ongoing litigation of three of its four framework rules; developing guidance documents; and ensuring that new chemical reviews are "efficient and predictable".
The report adds that IRIS staff have "been working increasingly" to support the development of TSCA risk evaluations, which are subject to statutory deadlines. Last October, 28 of IRIS’s approximately 30 staff were spending 25-50% of their time on this, it says.
TSCA assessments, it says, "will not necessarily be relevant to other EPA programmes that have relied on IRIS endpoint values in making their regulatory decisions."
https://chemicalwatch.com/74830/us-government-watchdog-says-epa-leadership-has-slowed-iris-assessments
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Industrial Chemical Releases Increased in 2017
Mar 5, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder
Total industrial chemical releases into the environment increased in 2017, EPA announced today.
The agency released its 2017 report on Toxics Release Inventory chemicals, which are documented by industry sectors such as mining, manufacturing, electric power generation and commercial hazardous waste management.
Recycling, energy recovery and treatment kept 87 percent of the nearly 31 billion pounds of TRI chemical waste from being released into the environment, according to EPA.
"This year's TRI results give proof that economic growth and an improved environment can go hand in hand," said Alexandra Dunn, the assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
The report breaks down releases into air, water and land and addresses if the releases were on facility grounds or elsewhere. The total amount of TRI chemicals disposed of or released in air, water or land for 2017 was 3.88 billion pounds, according to the report.
The metal mining industry was responsible for 50 percent of releases — or 1.95 billion pounds — that primarily came from on-site land disposal.
On-site releases into the air and water decreased from 2016 to 2017, but off-site disposal for the same categories increased.
Total releases into the environment increased by 13 percent, the report said. EPA attributes this number to a 21 percent — or 433 million pound — increase in on-site land disposal. Land disposal trends are largely driven by the metal mining sector, according to EPA.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/05/stories/1060123177
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Clean Water: The Next Blue Wave for Congress
Mar 5, 2019 | The Hill - Congress Blog
By Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) and Wenonah Hauter
Our drinking water has never been under greater threat. The water infrastructure for major U.S. cities is nearing a century old and is in urgent need of modernization. Lead pipes still deliver water to peoples’ homes and our children's schools, decades after the unearthing of the horrific dangers of lead. Millions of people lose water service every year simply because they cannot afford their constantly increasing rates. This is a direct result of continuously neglecting to reinvest in our crumbling infrastructure. A comprehensive legislative solution that will be introduced in Congress will address these crises—as well as provide relief for communities affected by dangerous chemicals contaminating our water supply as regulators turn a blind eye.
Earlier this month, the EPA unveiled an “action plan” for dealing with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that include PFOA and PFOS, two toxic chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health problems. For decades, these chemicals have been leaching into the water supplies of communities near industrial facilities or military bases where they are produced or used. The EPA’s “plan” was to take a wait-and-see attitude—and they failed to immediately set any enforceable limit on the chemicals in drinking water that would be the first step towards providing recourse for impacted communities.
PFAS are pernicious because they don’t break down easily, linger for decades, and are resistant to advanced water treatment technologies. These so-called “forever chemicals” are plaguing more than 170 communities in 40 states. In Michigan, 44 municipal water systems across the state are contaminated with PFASs, impacting over 1.6 million residents. In Parchment, Mich., residents were told to stop drinking the water in 2018—it was contaminated with PFAS levels over 25 times EPA’s health advisory level, which is the non-enforceable standard at which health problems are expected or known to occur. In Hoosick Falls, N.Y., many residents had PFOA levels in their blood that were 100 times the national average. In Cape Fear, N.C., ratepayers are facing a hike in water rates due to potential system upgrades needed to deal with PFAS contamination.
The PFAS problem is just one of many facing our water systems that the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (WATER) Act will address. It sets aside $35 billion annually for improvements to our drinking water and wastewater systems—money that would come from a rollback of a small portion (3.5 percentage points) of the corporate income tax cuts enacted under the Trump administration. It would expand grants to replace all lead piping and plumbing in public schools, and provide grants to homeowners to replace lead service lines on their property. It would help prevent water shutoffs by requiring the EPA to produce guidance to promote universal access to safe water and to establish a study about water affordability and shutoffs, discrimination and civil rights violations by water providers, and public participation in water regionalization efforts. It would provide much needed assistance to water systems in small, rural and indigenous communities. It would also provide funding to update treatment systems or find alternative water supplies when local water systems or household wells are contaminated with PFAS.
This legislation would accomplish all of these goals, while creating as many as 1 million jobs in the process, and modernizing our water systems to make us more resilient in the face of natural disasters. Both are an important piece of the fair and just transition for workers and vulnerable communities needed to cope with climate change.
This plan might seem like common sense, but in Washington, the devil is in the details. Federal funding for our water systems is at its lowest level since peaking in 1977, when the federal government spent $76.27 per person (in 2014 dollars); by 2014 that support had fallen to just $13.68 per person. This shows misplaced priorities, and the results speak for themselves: Flint, Mich.; Martin County, Ky. and many other places still don’t have clean water. Detroit and New Orleans pay disproportionately high rates for water service, forcing working families to choose between paying their water bill or putting food on the table. In 2016, 15 million people across the country lost water service to their homes due to nonpayment. In Detroit, public schools began the school year without access to drinking water after elevated lead and copper levels were discovered. Across the nation, our children are still attending schools serviced by aging lead pipes demonstrating that our crumbling water infrastructure does not discriminate across zip codes. The WATER Act would help realign our funding with the urgent need and help ensure the human right to water for us all.
Pundits often refer to the progressive “Blue Wave” that washed over Congress in the 2018 elections. Let’s hope this means Congress will finally, once again, prioritize our public water systems over Trump’s corporate tax cuts and provide another blue wave: clean, affordable water for all. We’ve done it before—and we will do it again.
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/432630-clean-water-the-next-blue-wave-for-congress
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Organic Foods Are the Only ‘Clean’ Packaged Option for Consumers
Mar 5, 2019 | Environmental Working Group (In EcoWatch)
Unlike organic packaged foods, conventional packaged food contains thousands of poorly regulated food chemicals, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Working Group.
"Although many consumers choose organic to avoid toxic pesticides, few know that federal rules dramatically limit the use of synthetic substances in organic food," said EWG nutritionist Dawn Undurraga, one of the authors of the report.
It is widely known that certified organic fruits and vegetables have far lower pesticide levels than conventionally grown produce, thanks to federal regulations. But many consumers do not realize that fewer than 40 synthetic ingredients are allowed in organic packaged foods like salad dressing, cereals and snacks.
By contrast, at least 2,000 chemical preservatives, colors and other chemicals are used in conventional packaged foods, EWG found.
What's more, many consumers are unaware that food manufacturers don't need approval from the Food and Drug Administration for many of the chemicals added to conventional packaged foods.
"The same companies that manufacture food chemicals are allowed to declare them safe," said Melanie Benesh, EWG legislative attorney, a report co-author. "It's like the fox guarding the hen house. For those consumers seeking 'clean foods' free from toxic chemical additives, organic is really your only option."
Substances added to organic food must be approved by government and independent experts every five years. Those substances approved for use in organic foods must be proven safe for consumption, with no adverse impact on the environment.
Since 2008, 72 substances have been rejected for use in organic food.
Many of the chemicals used in conventional food have been linked to serious health problems like cancer, including sodium nitrate and butylated hydroxyanisole. Many of these chemicals are not reviewed by independent experts but are instead deemed "safe" by chemical companies, food companies or industry trade associations.
Moreover, companies are not required to periodically rereview these additives so that new scientific research or changes in the diet may be considered.
"Consumers rightly assume their food is safe," Benesh said. "But many food chemicals with connections to cancer and other serious health concerns have been deemed safe by chemical and food companies, not by the FDA."
https://www.ecowatch.com/organic-vs-conventional-food-ewg-2630725070.html
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Mar 5, 2019 | Desmog Blog
By Sharon Kelly
A new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at every stage.
Virtually all plastic — 99 percent of it, according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) report — comes from fossil fuels. And a growing slice comes from fracked oil and gas wells and the natural gas liquids (NGLs) they produce.
The report concluded that plastics bring toxic or carcinogenic health risks to people at every stage.
“Until we confront the impacts of the full plastic lifecycle, the current piecemeal approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis will not succeed,” the report concludes. “At every stage of its life cycle, plastic poses distinct risks to human health, arising from both exposure to plastic particles themselves and associated chemicals.”
People can be sickened not only when plastics are produced, in other words, but also while plastic is actively used by consumers and then again after it’s thrown out, where plastic trash often breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that can contaminate the food chain and make its way into people’s bodies.
The scope of the risks requires an international response, the center said.
“Both the supply chains and the impacts of plastic cross and re-cross borders, continents, and oceans,” said David Azoulay, the center’s Director of Environmental Health. “No country can effectively protect its citizens from those impacts on its own, and no global instrument exists today to fully address the toxic life cycle of plastics.”
In the U.S., however, a major push is underway — and attracting hundreds of billions in investment, both foreign and domestic — to move in the opposite direction and produce more plastics and other petrochemicals.
The goal? To create new demand from industry for the raw materials produced by fracked shale wells.
Shale drilling industry officials have been busy organizing marketing efforts to encourage the production of more plastics and petrochemicals — not only along the Gulf Coast, where communities have long borne the brunt of toxic pollution from petrochemical manufacturing, but also in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Industry groups argue that a shale-fueled plastics boom is a positive thing for the world environment because plastic-makers in many other countries operate under less stringent environmental controls than American manufacturers. It’s better, in other words, to make plastic here than in places like China, with its infamous air pollution problems.
Plus, they add, constructing a new “plastics belt” in the Rust Belt will help diversify the industry and protect against the impacts of severe storms along the Gulf of Mexico, which are predicted to be strengthened by climate change.
New plastic manufacturing plants, however, are also being built in China, and on the Gulf Coast. All told, this new investment is driving the world’s cumulative production of new plastic up so far that analysts warn there may not be enough demand from consumers.
Meanwhile, a Chinese policy setting strict standards for importing used plastics there has shaken the world’s plastic recycling market. In some cases, newly made plastic has become cheaper than recycled — meaning that new cheap plastic manufacturing could wind up pushing recycled plastics further out of the market.
Forging a Plastic Future
The shale rush not only unleashed enormous supplies of fracked oil and gas, it also opened wide the taps for ethane, a colorless, odorless hydrocarbon at the center of the drilling industry’s plans to promote more plastic manufacturing. In 2008, America produced 701,000 barrels a day of ethane; by 2017, ethane production had more than doubled, reaching 1.426 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). It will reach 2 million barrels a day by 2021, IHS Markit predicts.
The shale rush produced so much ethane that — even though ethane can command a higher price on its own — drillers have been leaving it mixed in with natural gas sold to burn for heat and power. (That “rejected” ethane, which industry advisors estimated at “several hundred thousand barrels” per day in 2017, isn’t counted in EIA’s production figures).
But that ethane can transformed by chemical manufacturers into ethylene, and then on into the common plastic polyethylene. As a result, a wave of planned investments in infrastructure to make more plastics and petrochemicals has swept shale regions across the U.S. While most of the investment has gone to building up the chemical corridor (also known as “Cancer Alley”) along the Gulf Coast, the Marcellus shale drilling industry now touts ethane from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia as the lowest-cost ethane in the world and is seeking to attract petrochemical companies to the region.
Shell’s $6 billion ethane cracker, a massive petrochemical complex being built in Pennsylvania, will drink up 100,000 barrels a day of the state’s glut of ethane. And each day, the plant will churn out nearly 10 million pounds of polyethylene plastic pellets, a total of roughly 3.5 billion pounds of new plastic a year.
And the industry is just getting started.
Chevron describes itself as “one of the largest leaseholders in the Marcellus Shale,” holding drilling rights to 660 square miles of the state, an area nearly five times as large as the city of Philadelphia.
In October, Chevron, Peoples Gas, and a collection of business associations published a report called “Forge the Future: Ideas for Action.”
It lays out a roadmap for Pennsylvania to start consuming vast amounts of shale gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs).
Forge the Future argues that the state should build roughly 6,000 megawatts' worth of new natural gas power generation, convert half a million homes to use natural gas for their heating, and promote the construction of “6-8 major” data centers “preparing for the worldwide rollout of data-hungry Internet of Things.”
Its most ambitious plans to create new demand for fracked fossil fuels involve plastics and chemicals.
The report calls for construction of three to five new multi-billion dollar “ethane crackers” like Shell’s, another three to five plants to turn propane into propylene (used to make the plastic polypropylene), a few plants to make ammonia (used for fertilizer and also to make plastics), plus an unspecified number of other inorganic chemical plants.
And then there’s the infrastructure to support all that — like ethane storage “hubs” where NGLs can be stored underground and a massive pipeline network to connect all these sites.
The report calls on Pennsylvania to “streamline the permitting process for pipelines” (despite major problems with the state’s biggest NGL pipeline project, Energy Transfer’s Mariner East pipelines, currently the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation), to offer grants for “the last few miles” of more pipes, and to prepare “pad-ready sites” for chemical companies to start building on. (At the same time, the state should slash taxes, the report argues — not just for plastics manufacturers, but also specifically for drillers too, delving deep into the weeds of accounting rules it says should be changed).
“[T]here is urgency to act,” Forge the Future warns, “or we will lose out to more aggressive competitors.”
It contains just one full sentence on the environment.
Another marketing effort, Shale Crescent USA, was co-founded by the president of a private oil and gas drilling company, Artex Oil, and similarly spent much of the past year building a case for constructing new plastics and petrochemical plants in the Ohio Valley, namely West Virginia, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.
Shale Crescent USA cites not only the low price of ethane from the Marcellus and Utica shales, but also the risks associatedwith Gulf Coast hurricanes like Hurricane Harvey.
The Trump administration seems to be listening. Late last year, the Department of Energy published a 91-page report to Congress citing the risk of “severe weather events” on the Gulf Coast as a reason to support building an ethane storage hub in Appalachia.
Troubled History
As Hurricane Harvey inundated the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, with five feet of rain, first the power went out, at around 2:00 a.m. on August, 28, 2017. Then backup generators, which were keeping electrical power running inside the plant's last remaining refrigerated warehouse, filled with hazardous chemicals, flooded and cut out.
Aware it was still vital to keep the plant's organic peroxides chilled, workers scrambled to move a total of over 300,000 pounds' worth of the organic compounds — used in plastic manufacturing — from that warehouse onto nine refrigerated trailers (six of which they'd managed to move to higher ground before flooding had made truck driving impossible).
After forklifts also gave out, the dozen-person crew resorted to hand-carrying 2,000 individual gallon containers of the extremely reactive peroxides, trudging at night through high waters surrounding the chemical plant. When it became clear that the trailers' refrigeration would finally fail as well, workers abandoned the plant while managers arranged to evacuate people in a 1.5 mile zone around the site.
First responders at the evacuation perimeter reported vomiting from the fumes when trailers and their volatile contents finally reached critical temperatures and ignited, according to a later lawsuit. More than 200 people could not return for a week. Criminal charges were eventually filed against Arkema (which vigorously disputed any wrongdoing) and two top executives.
The petrochemical industry on the Gulf Coast has a troubled history of causing industrial accidents like this, as well as air pollution and water contamination — and climate change is likely to make many problems worse, according to the new CIELreport. The industry asked for federal help to protect Gulf Coast refineries and petrochemical plants from the impacts of climate change, CBS reported in August 2018.
When Hurricane Harvey struck coastal Texas in August 2017, it was “supercharged” by unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico linked to climate change, according to National Geographic, which reported “two separate teams of scientists have found humans’ fingerprints all over the storm.”
The 'Death Fog'
But petrochemical construction in the Ohio River Valley brings its own unique set of risks. Numerous local environmental groups have called attention to the region's hills and valleys, and in particular, a 1948 tragedy in the region that laid the groundwork for today's environmental laws: the Donora Death Fog.
Twenty people died in Donora, Pennsylvania, a town outside Pittsburgh in the Monongahela River Valley, after an unusual set of atmospheric conditions caused air pollution from a U.S. Steel zinc works (a toxic blend that included carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrofluoric acid, and particulates like zinc and lead) to become trapped near ground level in the river valley. More than a third of the 14,000 people living in the area were sickened. Investigators later discovered that “[i]f you looked at the X-rays of their lungs, they looked like the survivors of poison gas warfare,” said author Devra Davis, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Now, environmental groups are concerned that new petrochemical construction in Appalachian river valleys could bring pollution concerns that differ from those found along the Gulf Coast.
“I wouldn’t wish the Gulf Coast environment on anybody,” George Czerniak, who served as Chief of Air Enforcement for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 (covering Ohio and other states) from 1991–2012 and directed the region's Air and Radiation Division from 2012–2016, told DeSmog. “But yes, I think the public is probably right to be concerned about that.”
“Plants such as these emit carcinogenic pollutants,” he continued. “Benzene would be one of them, but they also emit a lot of other volatile organic compounds which are precursors for ground-level smog. And that, depending on the geographic configuration, certainly if you’re in a valley, yes, you could be impacted by that.”
Building new petrochemical plants in the Ohio River Valley also won’t stop the toll of pollution and industrial disasters on the Gulf Coast — in part because the Gulf Coast is also in the middle of a shale fueled-construction boom of its own. From 2016 to 2018, Texas and Louisiana approved 31 new petrochemical plants along the Gulf of Mexico. Just two of Exxon's recent Gulf Coast expansion projects, at the Beaumont hub and at its Mont Belvieu plant, will raise their polyethylene plastic output to a combined 4 billion pounds a year.
Expanding not just along the Gulf Coast but also into Appalachia might protect buyers of industrial chemicals and plastics against market disruptions in the event of a hurricane, as Shale Crescent USA argued — but it will also leave more people exposed to safety hazards, there and around the world.
The Ohio River Valley is expected to see serious consequences of its own from climate change. Petrochemical and plastics plants are often located near water, in part because massive equipment can be hauled in by barge and in part because operations and on-site power generation may require steam or cooling water. A December 2017 report by the Army Corps of Engineers predicts the Ohio River Valley will face a greater risk of storms causing major floods, droughts that could make barge travel and power generation more difficult, and other serious impacts from a warming climate.
In fact, pollution from the new construction is likely to make climate change worse everywhere. Scientists have concluded that a shale-driven construction boom is likely to drive the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions “dramatically” higher in the U.S.
“As ethylene production is one of the largest contributors to the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions within the chemical industry, the expansion of ethylene capacity is likely to dramatically increase the U.S. energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” the journal Advances in Engineering reported, citing a 2016 study and adding that even using state-of-the-art technology would not cut emissions enough to cancel out the rise from adding more plants.
Plastic — and specifically polyethylene — can even release greenhouse gases of its own as it degrades.
“Plastic represents a source of climate-relevant trace gases that is expected to increase as more plastic is produced and accumulated in the environment,” David Karl, senior author of a study documenting methane and ethylene gas emissions from degrading plastic, said when the research was published in 2018. “This source is not yet budgeted for when assessing global methane and ethylene cycles, and may be significant.”
Better to Build in the U.S. Than China?
Supporters of building new petrochemical and plastics plants in the U.S. argue that no matter if plants are built on the Gulf Coast or in the Rust Belt, the global environment benefits because America’s petrochemical industry is better regulated than manufacturing in China.
But China — already the world’s largest producer of many plastics — is on a construction binge of its own, seeking to make the raw materials for plastics from coal. A Shell Chemicals vice president, Olivier Thorel, has said those plants generate so much carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution, he calls them “massive CO2 machines that make chemicals as a sidestream.”
And that's the heart of the problem — the rush to make plastics from cheap fracked shale gas in America hasn't been driving more polluting plants out of business, it's been adding to the world's new plastics production.
“Growing U.S. exports are expanding, not replacing, plastics production in other regions,” the Center for International Environmental Law found in an earlier report published in 2017.
Instead, the new construction may add to the problems that the world’s plastic recycling industry is already experiencing. As mentioned earlier, in 2018, China began refusing to import dirty or hazardous shipments of recycled materials from around the world. “China and Hong Kong went from buying 60 percent of the plastic waste exported by G7 countries during the first half of 2017,” the Financial Times reported, “to taking less than 10 percent during the same period a year later.”
The disruption is so severe that half of Philadelphia’s recycling — 200 tons a day — was sent right to the incinerator in the last few months, The Guardian reported on February 21.
The International Energy Agency warned in the summer of 2018 that the amount of plastic waste in the world’s oceans is on track to double in just over a decade. Roughly 100 million metric tons of plastic waste has already found its way into the world’s oceans — and every year, between 5 million and 15 million tons are added.
From there, researchers say plastic may be getting into the food chain — and even potentially into each of us. “Microfibers and other plastic microparticles are increasingly being documented in human tissues,” CIEL’s new report observes.
An American Chemistry Council spokesperson told DeSmog that the council was reviewing the new CIEL report. As of publication time, the council had not yet responded to questions about its reaction to the report or about impacts that building new petrochemical and plastics manufacturing plants using raw materials from American shale wells will have on the climate, plastic recycling, or human health.
To be sure, a transition to renewable energy will very likely require petrochemicals and plastics, to build lighter vehicles, as components for solar panels and power storage, and to improve household energy efficiency.
Campaigns focus instead on the world's consumption of single-use plastics, like disposable bottles, packaging, bags, and even straws. In fact, more than half of the world's polyethylene production currently winds up in single-use products — and the industry projects that demand for single-use plastic will rise worldwide.
With all that in mind, some environmental groups are calling for the U.S. to tap the brakes on new plastic manufacturing — and on climate-changing pollution — by addressing both right at the nation's oil and gas wells.
“We know enough to justify taking immediate action to reduce our dependence on plastic,” said the FracTracker Alliance's Erica Jackson, “and that starts by keeping plastic feedstocks — oil and gas — in the ground.”
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/05/health-risks-fracking-shale-industry-plastics-belt-ohio-river-valley
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Senate Energy Panel Sets up Thursday Vote on DOE Picks
Mar 5, 2019 | Politico Pro - Energy Whiteboard
By Darius Dixon
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled a Thursday markup to advance four Energy Department nominees the White House initially tapped in the previous Congress.
If the panel can reach a quorum Thursday morning, lawmakers will vote on Rita Baranwal to be DOE’s top nuclear energy official, Bill Cooper to be general counsel, Science office director nominee Chris Fall, and Lane Genatowski to lead the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry thanked Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski this morning during remarks at the first meeting of his Secretary of Energy Advisory Board at DOE headquarters. “She has just given us notice that we’re going to get our last four nominees approved,” he said.
The markup is schedule for 10 a.m. in Dirksen 366, ahead of a committee “roundtable” discussion about public lands.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/whiteboard/2019/03/senate-energy-panel-sets-up-thursday-vote-on-doe-picks-2800310
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DOE Approves Calcasieu Pass LNG Exports
Mar 5, 2019 | Politico Pro - Energy Whiteboard
By Darius Dixon
The Energy Department approved Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass project to export liquefied natural gas to non-Free Trade Agreement countries today, less than two weeks after FERC authorized the terminal’s construction.
“Today, I’m pleased to announce that we are issuing a long-term order authorizing the export of domestically produced LNG to Venture Global Calcasieu LLC,” DOE energy undersecretary Mark Menezes told the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board at agency headquarters. “Under that order, the company will be able to export 1.7 billion cubic feet per day of LNG to any countries that do not have a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.”
Venture Global has had LNG export applications in with DOE since 2013. FERC approved the Louisiana project’s construction on Feb. 21 in a 3-1 vote.
In a statement, DOE says that they have authorized a total of 24.74 Bcf/d of LNG exports to non-FTA countries.
Read DOE’s order here.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/whiteboard/2019/03/doe-approves-calcasieu-pass-lng-exports-2801095
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Energy Panel to Forge Climate Alliance on Clean Fossil Fuel
Mar 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Abby Smith
Two moderate lawmakers from fossil energy states say their partnership can prompt bipartisan climate policy, including boosting investment in cleaner, more efficient use of fossil fuels.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s leaders held the panel’s first climate change-focused hearing since 2012 on March 5.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairman of the committee, has openly expressed concerns about the impact climate change is having on her state, which is a heavy oil and gas producer but increasingly vulnerable to global warming.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the panel’s ranking member, has often opposed national climate policies because of the damage he says they would have on his coal-heavy state. In a campaign ad, he once shot a copy of the 2009 cap-and-trade bill.
The March 5 discussion, which focused on the electricity sector and climate change, opens the door for incremental, bipartisan work on climate change in a Republican-led Senate battling with progressive Democrats over the Green New Deal.
But Manchin suggested in opening remarks the energy committee could offer an example for how to reach bipartisan agreement on climate solutions.
That agreement starts with acknowledging that fossil fuels won’t disappear from the U.S. or global energy mix any time soon—and that the United States should develop technology to burn those fuels more cleanly, the senators said.
“This does not mean we should set aside work on increasing efficiency or advancing nuclear, storage, or renewables such as solar, wind, and hydropower,” Manchin said. “But it does mean we have to double down on innovative solutions for the clean use of fossil energy in the electric, industrial, and transportation sectors, and we must do it today.”
‘Considerable Role’
As it tackles climate change, the Senate energy committee will focus on keeping the electric grid reliable and energy affordable, and work to advance cleaner energy technology to help reduce emissions, Murkowski said in opening remarks.
“We do not have complete jurisdiction over climate change, but we do have a considerable role to play in developing reasonable policies that can draw bipartisan support that I think will be a pragmatic contribution to the overall discussions,” Murkowski said, adding that the committee is likely to focus on innovation, research, and efficiency.
Utility representatives, tribal leaders, and energy experts also urged the committee to explore policies to boost investment in research and development for low-carbon technologies and increase the resilience of energy infrastructure to climate change.
Policy Support
Witnesses told senators that power-sector carbon dioxide emissions have declined, due in large part to market forces such as low-cost natural gas and falling prices for renewable energy. But some witnesses also stressed the need for additional policies to drive emissions down further.
“To maintain a diverse portfolio of energy technologies it is critical that Congress formulate and enact the stable, long-term policy frameworks that will support the deployment of the full scope of clean energy technologies in a meaningful way,” Lisa Jacobson, president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, said in testimony.
Susan F. Tierney, a senior adviser with the Denver-based consulting firm Analysis Group, cited in written testimony recent data from the Rhodium Group estimating that U.S. power sector greenhouse gas emissions increased from 2017 to 2018.
“Looking ahead, there is significant need for more urgent action to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions to levels consistent with avoiding the worst effects of climate change,” Tierney said in her testimony.
The Senate energy committee, with its jurisdiction over the Energy Department’s research and development, can help deepen cuts to greenhouse gases, Tierney added.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/energy-panel-to-forge-climate-alliance-on-clean-fossil-fuel
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$680 Million Pipeline Gets Green Light to Move Natural Gas from Oklahoma to Gulf Coast
Mar 5, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa
A pipeline to move natural gas from Oklahoma to destinations along the Gulf Coast and southeastern United States got the green light from federal regulators and $680 million in financing for construction.
Working in a joint venture, Houston liquefied natural gas company Cheniere Energy and Washington D.C. private equity firm EIG Global Energy Partners are moving forward with plans to build the 200-mile Midship Pipeline in Oklahoma.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials approved the 36-inch diameter natural gas pipeline on Wednesday. Cheniere and EIG issued a statement on Friday saying the two companies secured $680 million in financing for the project and issued a notice for contractors Strike LLC, M.G. Dyess, TRC Pipeline Services and Cenergy LLC to proceed with construction.
Expected to be placed in service by the end of the year, the Midship Pipeline is designed to move 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from Oklahoma's SCOOP and STACK shale plays to delivery point just north of the Red River near Bennington, Oklahoma.
The Midship Pipeline will connect to Kinder Morgan's Midcontinent Express Pipeline and the Boardwalk Pipeline Partners-owned Gulf Crossing Pipeline, allowing natural gas from Oklahoma to move to the TexOk Hub near Atlanta, Texas and the Perryville Hub near Tallulah, Louisiana.
Subsidiaries and affiliates of Cheniere, Devon Energy Corporation, Marathon Oil Corporation, and Gulfport Energy Corporation have secured commitments on the Midship Pipeline, Cheniere and EIG reported.
Founded in 1983, Cheniere Energy has nearly 1,400 employees in Texas and Louisiana. With 273 export cargoes in 2018, the company has become the largest buyer of natural gas and the largest exporter of LNG in the United States.
Cheniere closed 2018 with a $471 million profit on $8 billion of revenue.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/680-million-pipeline-gets-green-light-to-move-13661263.php
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Chevron, Exxon Mobil Tighten Their Grip on Fracking
Mar 5, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Bradley Olson
Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. plan to significantly ramp up production in the oil field at the heart of the American fracking boom, the latest sign that the next era of shale drilling is likely to be led by the major oil companies.
In the next five years, Chevron expects to more than double its production in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico to 900,000 barrels of oil and gas a day, the company announced at an investor event Tuesday. That’s a nearly 40% increase from its previous forecast.
“The shale game has become a scale game,” Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth said in an interview. “The race doesn’t go to the one who gets out of the starting blocks the fastest. The race goes to the one who steadily builds the strongest machine.”
Not to be outdone, Exxon on Tuesday announced plans to increase its Permian output to 1 million barrels of oil and gas a day by as early as 2024, a day before it was expected to disclose growth at its own investor meeting Wednesday. BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell PLC andOccidental Petroleum Corp. are also focusing on the region.
“We’re increasingly confident about our Permian growth strategy due to our unique development plans,” Neil Chapman, Exxon’s senior vice president, said in a statement.
Big oil’s growing ambitions for the Permian follow a long-established pattern in the oil patch: Wildcatters and small exploration companies find ways to tap new reservoirs, then the big companies move in.
Five years ago, Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and Occidental collectively made up about 9% of crude production from modern fracking techniques in the Permian. In October, the latest period for which relevant figures are available, they made up about 16%, according to data on ShaleProfile, an industry analytics platform.
Those numbers are likely to grow significantly in the coming years, and it wouldn’t be a surprise for the big five to produce far more of the booming area’s crude within a decade, said Ed Hirs, who teaches energy economics at the University of Houston.
“It’s going to be extremely difficult for smaller companies to compete with the oil giants,” Mr. Hirs said.
As the energy giants continue their shale expansion, many have gained favor with investors. Chevron is up 14% in the past year even as crude prices have fallen, and all the biggest oil companies have outperformed the S&P 500.
Chevron, which now has the lowest debt relative to its size than any of its peers, says it can pay for its new spending and dividends at a price of about $51 a barrel. The company said that is the lowest among the big oil companies, citing data from analytics firm Wood Mackenzie.
Chevron plans to avoid major spending increases in coming years even if prices rise, executives said. It said it would hold annual spending this year and next year between $18 billion and $20 billion, and allow it to grow slightly from 2021 to 2023 to a range of $19 billion to $22 billion.
Many of the smaller companies that pioneered new technology to help make the U.S. the world’s top crude producer have begun to struggleas they attempt to rein in spending and move closer to a goal that has so far largely eluded them: profitability.
Dozens of companies including Continental Resources Inc. andPioneer Natural Resources Co. have reduced spending plans in response to investor pressure. Collectively, spending among the smaller companies is set to fall by 11% this year, according to Citigroup.
Many smaller oil firms face the challenge of having to drill more to keep production rising, since shale wells produce a lot in the beginning but then taper off quickly.
The spending cuts, coupled with the fact that some companies have tapped a large proportion of their best wells, mean that returns from shale drilling may have already peaked as wells increasingly are less productive, according to Evercore ISI.
Meanwhile, the big companies are just getting started. Exxon is now the largest operator in the Permian, with almost 50 rigs. The company estimates its Permian wells can generate a 10% rate of return at an oil price of $35 a barrel. While many companies reduced fracking activity in the fourth quarter of last year, Exxon increased it significantly to over 80 wells, more than double the total in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to Rystad Energy.
Chevron is raising its production guidance to 900,000 barrels of oil and gas a day by 2023. Last year, it predicted 650,000 barrels a day by 2023. The company is boosting production without adding to its rig count, a testament to how size can lead to greater efficiencies.
Chevron employed what could be described as a tortoise-and-hare strategy in the Permian. While smaller companies at times paid more than $40,000 an acre to gain rights to prime drilling opportunities, Chevron held on to land it already owned in the region, which decades ago was one of the world’s biggest traditional oil fields, without having to join in the buying frenzy.
The company’s land is now recognized as having unrivaled value. Its shale portfolio, which includes its Permian holdings, is worth more than $70 billion, the largest of any operator, according to Rystad Energy. Chevron says the value has doubled in the past two years.
Chevron built a database of more than 25,000 wells to study the best techniques for drilling. That helped it avoid “downspacing,” a practice in which companies drill wells in close proximity that has been linked to reductions in productivity per well, Mr. Wirth said.
Because of its size, Chevron has the ability to obtain commitments for pipeline space, drill longer horizontal wells across its huge swaths of land in the Permian, and keep a lid on labor and other materials costs. The company can also apply new technology and use techniques mastered in the Permian on land in Canada, Argentina and Pennsylvania, he said.
“At times, we were criticized for not going faster,” Mr. Wirth said. “We were steadily building up the knowledge to do this well, not to do it fast.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-oil-moves-to-tighten-its-grip-on-fracking-11551789120
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Exxon, Chevron Plan to Dominate Permian, Grow as Others Cut Back
Mar 5, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Jordan Blum
The nation's two largest oil companies said Tuesday they plan to significantly hike their activity in West Texas' Permian Basin and dominate the region, spending even more money while others cut back.
Both Exxon Mobil and Chevron said they will each churn out close to 1 million barrels of oil equivalent a day just from the Permian by 2024. That's nearly triple Chevron's current output and about quadruple what Exxon Mobil is pumping out. Both already rank near the top of Permian producers.
The two Big Oil giants are advantaged because of their scale with large acreage positions, greater access to pipelines and guaranteed sales to their own refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.
"We're increasingly confident about our Permian growth strategy due to our unique development plans," said Neil Chapman, Exxon Mobil senior vice president. "We will leverage our large, contiguous acreage position, our improved understanding of the resource and the full range of Exxon Mobil's capabilities in executing major projects."
Exxon said it plans to achieve 1 million barrels a day in the Permian as soon as 2024 - way up from a 2025 projection of 600,000 barrels just a year ago. Chevron said it aims to hit 600,000 barrels daily by the end of 2020 and get to 900,000 barrels by 2023.
That would, for instance, represent almost one-third of Chevron's current global output.
Chevron's unique position in the Permian is "characterized by long-held acreage, zero-to-low royalty on more than 80 percent of our land position, and minimal drilling commitments," said Jay Johnson, Chevron's upstream executive vice president.
Exxon is currently producing less than 300,000 barrels from the Permian, while Chevron is nearly at 350,000 barrels a day.
Lower oil prices since last fall have caused most independent oil and gas companies to cut back on their spending, although most Permian players still project production hikes. Overall, the Permian is currently churning out about 4 million barrels of oil a day, roughly one-third of the nation's record-high output.
Exxon, for instance, said its Permian output can still prove profitable with oil prices at $35 a barrel. Most companies struggle to turn a profit with oil below $50. The U.S. benchmark is currently trading near $57 per barrel.
Chevron said it will hike its 2019 capital spending by 9 percent up to $20 billion and go as high as $22 billion through 2023. That represents continued growth, but at a modest pace.
In January, Chevron agreed to buy the Pasadena oil refinery near Houston from Brazil's Petrobras to help it process more crude coming from the Permian and the Gulf of Mexico.
Likewise, Exxon Mobil recently announced an ambitious expansion of its Beaumont refinery to make it one of the two largest refineries in the country.
As the Permian's most active driller currently, Exxon Mobil said it has a whopping 48 drilling rigs operating just in the Permian with plans to expand that rig count to 55 rigs by the end of 2019.
https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Exxon-Chevron-plan-to-dominate-Permian-grow-as-13663733.php
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The Energy 202: Oil Giant Makes Business Case for Taking Climate Change Seriously
Mar 5, 2019 | Washington Post
By Steven Mufson
The chief economist of one of the world’s biggest oil companies is urging other companies to take climate change seriously — and sooner rather than later.
If not, it might be bad for business.
That’s the warning from BP’s Spencer Dale, who made the rounds in Washington last week explaining the business case for finding a solution for the warming planet.
“All the climate arguments are real, urgent and important,” Dale said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Despite working for one of the world’s biggest producers of fossil fuels, Dale said the longer the world waits to address rising emissions, the more “draconian” the changes in the global economy will have to be.
“How do I run a business, how do I make a business plan if I know that the path I’m on is unstable?” Dale asked.
For a multinational energy firm operating in dozens of countries, that could mean having to scrap assets, Dale said.
The provocative economist spent more than a decade working for the Bank of England before joining the oil giant. At the end of February, Dale led the publication of BP’s annual energy outlook, which is widely anticipated among energy industry followers.
At the center of the report’s most likely scenario for the future is the tension between the pressing need to slash carbon emissions and the growing demand for energy as the global population grows and seeks better livelihoods.
The best way to deal with that, Dale said, is to boost the energy efficiency of buildings and other systems.
Still, in all of BP’s scenarios, oil would still be widely used in 2040. The amount could vary from 80 million barrels a day to 130 million barrels a day — a huge gap. Yet even the low-end scenario would require trillions of dollars of investment just in petroleum over the next 20 years.
Indeed, history shows how hard it has been for societies to move from one form of power production to another, Dale said. Previous energy transitions have taken about four or five decades, he said.
It took almost 45 years, for example, for oil to go from 1 percent of world energy in the late 1800s to 10 percent. It took natural gas more than half a century to catch on.
Renewables will penetrate the global energy system faster than any fuel in history, Dale said, going from 1 percent to 10 percent in just 15 years.
But BP’s analysis suggests that is not fast enough to stem the growth of climate-warming emissions. Even though new renewable energy will satisfy about half of the new energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions are likely to increase by about 10 percent instead of falling sharply as needed to stem climate change.
Overall, global energy demand probably will grow by around a third by 2040, slower than the previous 20 years but still enough to make it difficult to lower greenhouse gas emissions as needed.
Around 80 percent of that increase in demand will come from the developing world, yet a substantial proportion — two-thirds — of the world’s population will still consume low amounts of energy 21 years from now.
BP has said it wants the federal government to take action, having endorsed a $40-a-ton nationwide tax. But that doesn't mean the company always supports carbon taxes in practice. BP spent more than any other company last year to defeat a carbon-fee ballot initiative in the state of Washington that the company said was "poorly designed." The proposal ultimately fell short with voters in November.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/03/05/the-energy-202-oil-giant-makes-business-case-for-taking-climate-change-seriously/5c7db0c81b326b2d177d5fc7/?utm_term=.3a4ba5cc4206
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Pipelines Vulnerable under TSA's Watch
Mar 5, 2019 | Roll Call
By Gopal Ratnam
Nearly 3 million miles of pipelines that crisscross the United States carrying oil, natural gas and other hazardous liquids may be vulnerable to cyberattacks as the federal agency responsible for overseeing their security is overburdened with other responsibilities, lawmakers, government auditors and regulators say.
The Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, better known for pat-downs of passengers heading to their flights, is also in charge of securing about 2.7 million miles of pipelines. Most are buried underground in remote and open terrain, but others run through densely populated areas, the Government Accountability Office said in a recent report.
At times in the past few years, the TSA managed that responsibility with just one person, according to the GAO.
The TSA was short on cybersecurity expertise, made only recommendations for voluntary compliance that pipeline operators could ignore and hadn’t reviewed the security practices of pipeline operators for more than five years to assess if they followed the agency’s recommendations, the GAO found in a little noticed report published a week before Christmas.
Terrorists have threatened pipelines before. The GAO report highlighted instances when terror groups targeted pipelines for physical destruction in Colombia, Nigeria and Canada. The report noted that U.S. law enforcement had identified in 2006 what appeared to be an al-Qaida plan to blow up the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and arrested individuals for planning to blow up natural gas pipelines in Oklahoma and Texas.
Since the report came out, lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have held hearings to address pipeline security.
The GAO found that operators of at least 34 of the nation’s top 100 pipeline systems deemed highest risk had not identified their most vulnerable and important facilities. The agency said the disparity may be because TSA’s guidelines didn’t spell out exactly what constituted a critical facility.
Staffing at TSA’s Pipeline Security Branch has seesawed over the years, going from 14 full-time staff in fiscal year 2012 to just one individual in fiscal 2014, the GAO said, noting that the agency had no long-term plan to identify the kind of cybersecurity experts it would need to get the job done.(Courtesy U.S. Government Accountability Office)
‘Weird calmness’
The dire assessment of cybersecurity efforts in the pipeline sector stands in contrast to warnings by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that the U.S. energy grid at large is a prime target of hackers tied to foreign governments.
In March 2018, the FBI and DHS said Russian-government-backed hackers had targeted energy companies “where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks.”
Once the hackers gained access, they conducted reconnaissance, moved into other adjacent networks and collected information on computers that control industrial systems, the warning said.
At a recent Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, several lawmakers were alarmed at what appeared to be a lackadaisical approach to cybersecurity in the energy sector and the agency responsible for pipeline security.
“There’s a weird calmness about this hearing,” Sen. Angus King of Maine said. “This is not calm. The Russians are already in the grid, are they not?” he said raising his voice.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat who’s also a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wondered why TSA was in charge of pipelines.
“Is TSA the right place … and I appreciate they’re putting more focus on this, and they seem to have a pretty big job at the airports I have noticed, so is it the right place for that to live?” Heinrich asked.
Across Capitol Hill, in the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Lou Correa, chairman of the committee’s panel on transportation and maritime security, raised a similar question last week.
“Some have questioned whether DHS has paid enough attention to pipeline security and have raised the idea of moving responsibility of securing pipelines to another department,” the California Democrat said.
Neil Chatterjee, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told Heinrich that he too wondered if TSA was the best agency to oversee pipelines. FERC regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas and oil.
Natural gas
“Is the entity responsible for aviation, for railroad, for highways, also responsible for this, particularly when reports indicated that they had four or six people?” Chatterjee told the Senate panel, referring to the staffing problems at the TSA that the GAO had highlighted.
Chatterjee said FERC was helping by sending its experts to work with TSA. He also urged lawmakers to tell TSA to use its authority to impose mandatory security requirements on pipeline operators, as opposed to issuing voluntary guidelines.
Sonya Proctor, director of the division at TSA that oversees pipeline security, told House Homeland Security lawmakers last week that voluntary guidelines are better because cyberthreats are constantly changing and therefore fixed regulations may become obsolete.
Of the 2.7 million miles of pipelines, 2.2 million miles of pipes carry natural gas from transmission sites to consumers, the GAO said. About 319,000 miles of pipes carry natural gas from sources to communities. And about 216,000 miles of pipes carry hazardous liquid, including crude oil, diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, anhydrous ammonia and carbon dioxide.
Operators of natural gas pipelines see cybersecurity as a “top operational risk and take the management of this risk very seriously,” Rebecca Gagliostro, director of security, reliability and resilience at the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, told the House panel last week.
The 28 companies that are members of the trade group operate about 200,000 miles of interstate gas pipelines and follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology standards on cybersecurity as well as guidelines provided by the TSA, Gagliostro told the committee.
The companies conduct table-top exercises to test security programs, share information with other companies, and plan for how to work with other sectors in case of an attack, she said.
But the pipeline industry needs a “cooperative relationship with our government partners to facilitate rapid information sharing,” she said.
TSA steps
TSA is taking steps to address gaps identified by the GAO, Proctor told Roll Call.
The agency committed to the GAO that it would conduct 10 cybersecurity reviews in fiscal 2019 and already has completed one and is in the process of scheduling three more, according to Proctor.
The reviews are conducted along with the newly formed Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, within the Homeland Security Department because the agency has the cybersecurity expertise that TSA lacks, she said.
The reviews compare “what was agreed upon and published and what they’re actually doing in the companies,” Proctor said, referring to the agency’s cybersecurity guidelines and pipeline companies’ practices.
At a minimum, pipeline operators abide by the cybersecurity standards published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But TSA’s assessment of companies’ cybersecurity measures goes well beyond the basics and is “much more comprehensive and much more in-depth,” Proctor said.
Once TSA completes the 10 cybersecurity assessments, TSA and CISA will work with pipeline operators to come up with ways to lower cybersecurity risks, Bob Kolasky, head of the National Risk Management Center at CISA, told the House Homeland Security panel last week.
How TSA ended up overseeing pipeline security is an artifact of the bureaucratic shuffle following the 9/11 attacks, said Chris Currie, one of the authors of the GAO report.
When the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, it was made responsible for security of the country’s critical infrastructure, and pipelines were considered both critical and a form of transportation, landing them in TSA’s basket of responsibilities, Currie said.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/pipelines-vulnerable-under-tsas-watch
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Post-Hurricane Harvey, NASA Tried to Fly a Pollution-Spotting Plane over Houston. The EPA Said No
Mar 5, 2019 | LA Times
By Susanne Rust and Louis Sahagun
In the weeks after Hurricane Harvey’s catastrophic sweep through the Houston area — which resulted in chemical spills, fires, flooded storage tanks and damaged industrial plants — rescue crews and residents complained of burning throats, nausea and dizziness.
Fifteen hundred miles west in the high desert city of Palmdale, NASA scientists were preparing to fly a DC-8, equipped with the world’s most sophisticated air samplers over the hurricane zone to monitor pollution levels.
The mission never got off the ground. Both the state of Texas and the EPA told the scientists to stay away.
“At this time, we don’t think your data would be useful,” Michael Honeycutt, Texas’ director of toxicology, wrote to NASA officials, adding that low-flying helicopters equipped with infra-red cameras, contracted by his agency, would be sufficient.
EPA deferred to Honeycutt, a controversial toxicologist who has suggested air pollution may be beneficial to human health.
The response stunned NASA scientists, many of whom had flown similar missions in the past, including over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
An EPA spokesman said the decision to wave off the Hurricane Harvey mission was made by Texas state officials, whose own pollution monitoring efforts included mobile bus units and crews with hand-held devices on the ground.
But NASA scientists say that, had the DC-8 been deployed, it would have provided the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of air quality in the region, allowing for a more thorough understanding of the situation.
“It’s totally possible we’d have found nothing at all to be concerned about,” said Tom Ryerson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher who had previously been part of the Deepwater Horizon mission. “But at least we’d have known that,” he said, “without a doubt.”
Some see the EPA decision as part of a pattern.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has rejected and suppressed established science, partnered with fringe researchers and embraced industry-backed views — including appointing a former coal lobbyist as its new EPA administrator.
At the time of the hurricane, the agency was run by Scott Pruitt, who during his tenure targeted dozens of environmental regulations for rollback, including several focused on air pollution.
“This is a very clear illustration of the politics of knowledge,” said Scott Frickel, an environmental sociologist at Brown University, referring to the rejection of the NASA jet. “The EPA Region 6 and Texas authorities don’t want to know, so they are passing on something really important about urban-scale disasters.”
Clouds of benzene over Houston
On Aug. 25, 2017, Harvey stalled over the Texas coast, unleashing record rainfall on Houston and Galveston.
The area is one of the most heavily concentrated industrialized hubs in the nation, home to thousands of petroleum refineries, chemical manufacturing plants and Superfund sites. Over the next eight days, the storm dumped more than 60 inches of rain on some areas of the region, pummeling it with wind gusts in excess of 150 mph, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and EPA.
On Aug. 28, Gov. Greg Abbott suspended state emission rules, including those governing air pollution, after the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality argued they would impede disaster response. The rules remained suspended for the next seven months.
When the storm finally moved north and east on Sept. 4, the level of environmental destruction and confusion on the ground was unprecedented.
Smokestacks, pipelines and generators had been damaged or destroyed. Storage tanks filled with toxic chemicals were battered and leaking. Superfund sites were flooded, spilling hazardous waste into nearby rivers, streams and neighborhoods.
Officials from the EPA and the state environmental agency, which had shut down their stationary air monitors to avoid storm damage, maintained the air quality was fine. In addition to using ground technology, they flew in a single-engine prop plane that took photos and used infrared technology to detect chemical plumes in the area.
Despite EPA claims that pollutants were “well below levels of health concern,” residents and rescuers complained of the fumes. Clouds of benzene and other cancer-causing chemicals floated over the city, according to analyses by environmental groups and news reports.
As those reports spread, researchers with NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography Mission program thought they could help.
Since 2016, the chemistry laboratory has flown more that 197,000 miles around the globe, sampling hundreds of unique airborne gases or particles.
The team was about to embark on its fourth and final mission around the globe and had planned a six-hour test flight for Sept. 14 that would take them east to Lamont, Okla., where they’d carry out compass measurements, before heading back to Palmdale.
The laboratory inside the DC-8, when running at full capacity, hosts roughly three dozen scientists and engineers and a crew of eight. Tubes, spigots and flasks on the aircraft’s exterior guzzle in air samples as the jet bobs up and down between its lowest altitude of 500 feet and its ceiling at 40,000 feet.
“When fully equipped … it bristles like a porcupine with probes, tubes and laser equipment sticking out of the hull and windows and dangling off the wings — all of them plugged into instruments on board,” said Chris Jennison, the DC-8 mission manager, during a recent tour of the plane.
It is the most precise and comprehensive airborne air quality lab on the planet, according to scientists familiar with the equipment. Where the EPA’s air pollution single-prop plane can gather some basic chemistry of about two dozen species of air-pollutant compounds, the NASA jet can analyze more than 450.
As the team watched the disaster unfold, Paul Newman, chief scientist of NASA’s Earth Science Division, suggested they divert their test run and fly over Houston. The timing was serendipitous. The DC-8 was fully equipped and ready to go.
“We agreed this would be a good opportunity to support the Hurricane Harvey recovery effort,” Lawrence Friedl, NASA’s director of Applied Sciences wrote in a Sept. 8, 2017 email to the agency’s then-acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and others. Indeed, NASA’s press shop was touting its coordination with the hurricane emergency response.
But over the next few days, it became clear neither the EPA nor the state of Texas saw this particular offer in that same light.
Emails detail how EPA officials fretted about ‘overlaps’
On Sept. 9, David Gray, the EPA’s deputy regional administrator in Texas and leader of the agency’s emergency response, wrote to NASA and Texas officials that he was “hesitant” to have the jet “collect additional information that overlaps our existing efforts” until he learned more about the mission. He noted that media and nongovernmental organizations were releasing data that was “conflicting” with the state and EPA’s.
NASA scientists tried to reassure Gray and Honeycutt that they wouldn’t do anything to hinder the data collection efforts. They said they wouldn’t focus on particular facility emissions but instead assess whether large changes in air quality had occurred following the disaster. They also promised not to deliver their data to the media, although they underscored it would eventually be made public.
In addition, they noted, similar interagency missions had succeeded in the past. In 2010, a NOAA plane with a similar payload aided the EPA in assessing air quality over the Deepwater Horizon spill. The data showed Gulf air was OK to breathe, assuaging the concerns of rescue operators and emergency responders.
Jane Lubchenco, the former NOAA administrator who oversaw the Deepwater Horizon mission, said the cooperation and tone of discussion then “was set at the highest level: The president made it clear he wanted teamwork throughout.”
“There is no good reason why that cannot happen most of the time,” she said.
But the NASA scientists’ assurances didn’t work.
The key decision-maker was Honeycutt, known for his energy industry-friendly views on toxic chemicals and pollutants. Six weeks later, Trump’s EPA would appoint Honeycutt chairman of the agency’s Scientific Advisory Board, an independent panel of scientists charged with providing advice to the agency’s administrator.
On Sept. 11, Honeycutt wrote in an email to NASA and EPA officials that state data showed no sign for concern, and “we don’t think your data would be useful for source identification while industry continues to restart their operations.”
Gray agreed with Honeycutt: “EPA concurs with your assessment and we will not plan to ask NASA to conduct this mission.”
The NASA team was stupefied.
“NASA does NOT need EPA approval,” Newman wrote to the team’s project coordinator, Barry Lefer. “We certainly should notify and potentially coordinate, but we don’t need approval.”
His superiors disagreed, and that evening Michael Freilich, the director of NASA’s Earth Sciences division, called off the flight. Freilich retired on Feb. 28.
The agency had “received emails from both TCEQ and EPA stating unambiguously that they do not want NASA to use the DC-8 for any data acquisition,” he wrote. “I am personally sorry.”
In recent interviews, EPA and Texas officials maintained the NASA flight would not have provided useful information.
“NASA is equipped to gather atmospheric chemistry data, not ground-level data, which is why we declined their offer,” Honeycutt wrote in an email.
“I did not tell NASA they could not fly their DC-8,” he said. “I don’t have that kind of authority; I’m just a state employee.”
John Konkus, an EPA spokesman, said the EPA didn’t deny the offer, either.
“This is EPA facilitating the decision-maker, which in this case was the state,” he said. EPA, he said, was “satisfied with the air monitoring technology that EPA had and [that the state] requested we deploy.”
An investigation from the Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle showed there was widespread, unreported pollution and environmental damage in the region. The team identified more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases, most of which were never publicized or vastly understated, including a cloud of hydrochloric acid that leaked from a damaged pipeline and a gasoline spill from an oil terminal that formed “a vapor cloud.”
Even if the DC-8 flight had not detected that pollution, it is unsettling that NASA was prevented from even looking, Newman said.
“Science is about numbers,” he said. “And if you’re unwilling to look, you’re not doing science.”
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-nasa-jet-epa-hurricane-harvey-20190305-story.html
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Wheeler on Climate: 'I Don't See It as the Existential Threat'
Mar 5, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Maxine Joselow
Climate change isn't an "existential threat," EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said yesterday.
Wheeler made the comments while guest hosting the Fox Business Network program "Making Money with Charles Payne."
Payne asked the newly minted EPA chief: "Do you see [climate change] as the existential threat that within 12 years, if we don't do anything, that's it, we've crossed the Rubicon, kiss Earth goodbye?"
Wheeler responded: "No. You know, as far as the largest environmental issue facing the planet today, I would have to say water. The fact that a million people still die a year from lack of potable drinking water is a crisis."
He continued: "Is climate change the existential threat? I don't see it as the existential threat, no. We have a lot of environmental threats. We have a lot of environmental problems. But we're working to address all of them."
A recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 or the world will see catastrophic consequences, with millions of people exposed to extreme heat waves and flooding from sea-level rise (Climatewire, Oct. 9, 2018).
Most climate scientists agree that global warming poses a severe threat to life on Earth, although some remain optimistic that humans will be able to avert the worst impacts if governments take strong action to rein in emissions.
Wheeler's words struck a sharp contrast with those of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who said at a news conference yesterday announcing a clean energy proposal: "Climate change is an existential threat. We must take immediate action."
Since his Senate confirmation last week, Wheeler has been making the rounds among conservative news outlets.
The Senate confirmed Wheeler to lead EPA on Thursday. The 52-47 vote was largely split along party lines (Greenwire, Feb. 28).
In an interview with the Breitbart News Network at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Wheeler bashed the Green New Deal resolution from Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"When I looked at it, I thought it was not ready for prime time," the EPA chief said of the progressive climate resolution. "There wasn't enough detail or explanation; there was a lot of contradictory things."
He added later, "The interesting aspect for the Green New Deal is that, in addition with doing away with aviation, in addition with doing away with cows, and it basically does away with the internal-combustion engine — the engine that powers our cars — within 10 years."
Wheeler appeared to be conflating the actual text of the Green New Deal resolution with an erroneous fact sheet that was initially circulated by Ocasio-Cortez's office and was later withdrawn.
The fact sheet called for getting rid of "farting cows" and stressed the need to "build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary." But the resolution took a more scaled-back approach (Climatewire, Feb. 12).
Wheeler also granted an interview to The Daily Caller at CPAC, saying the Green New Deal would sink the U.S. economy.
"If you look at their deal, it would shut down the U.S. economy, so that would reduce CO2 emissions, but I don't think that's what most Americans want," he said.
Wheeler also gave an interview to The Daily Signal yesterday in which he praised President Trump's "energy dominance" agenda.
Despite speaking to four conservative news outlets, Wheeler has not granted an interview to any mainstream outlets since his confirmation.
That's problematic, said Bobby Magill, president of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
"I would invite him to answer questions from reporters from all different media outlets," Magill said. "You know, as EPA administrator, he serves the public at large. And reporters from all different outlets should have their questions answered."
He added, "Again, all reporters from all different outlets, regardless of bent or ideology, should have access to the EPA administrator. And on that note, I invite him to come and speak at SEJ this year if that's possible."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/05/stories/1060123179
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Murkowski: Climate Change 'Has Got to Be a Priority for All of Us'
Mar 5, 2019 | Politico Pro - Energy Whiteboard
By Zack Colman
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Lisa Murkowski said Congress needs to address climate change, pointing to the dire effects from a warming planet already being felt in her home state.
"This has got to be a priority for all of us. Certainly in Alaska we view that there is no choice here. In the Arctic we’re seeing warming at twice the average of the rest of the lower 48. It is directly impacting our way of life," she said.
Murkowski detailed several ways rising temperatures have affected her state's economy and residents today during a committee hearing. She said sea ice has rapidly diminished, permafrost is melting, communities need relocating, fisheries are dwindling, wildlife migration patterns are shifting, food security is at risk and drought has swept through Alaska's normally temperate southeast — which includes Tongass National Forest, a rainforest.
The Alaska Republican said climate change's fingerprints are evident in the state's most iconic annual event, the Iditarod dog sled race, which she attended this past weekend. Murkowski said the race has rerouted because the Norton Sound area no longer freezes, so sled teams can't cross it.
"It’s not just things like a sled dog race. We’ve got a number of communities that need to relocate in order to survive the encroaching seas," she said. "Our reality is that we don’t at this point in time have a clear or effective federal plan to ensure that that can happen on a timely basis."
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/energy/whiteboard/2019/03/murkowski-climate-change-has-got-to-be-a-priority-for-all-of-us-2800568
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Deal Sets Schedule for EPA Review of Industrial Emissions
Mar 5, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
EPA would take a fresh look at long-standing emissions standards for bulk gasoline terminals and five other industrial source categories under a tentative settlement.
The proposed consent decree would require the agency to finish the reviews — aimed variously at gauging whether updates are needed for New Source Performance Standards or air toxics limits for the sources in question — on a schedule running from 2021 to 2023.
Other pollution sources covered by the proposed settlement to a lawsuit brought by a California environmental group include iron and steel foundries, electric arc furnaces and pipeline facilities. EPA today launched a 30-day public comment period on the proposed deal, which still needs a judge's signature.
The draft agreement would settle a suit brought last summer by Our Children's Earth Foundation, which alleged that EPA had failed to meet a string of statutorily required deadlines for assessing the adequacy of the original standards, which date as far back as 1983 (Greenwire, Aug. 8, 2018).
Starting in mid-2020, if the agreement is made final, EPA would have to report to the foundation every six months on whether it is making "reasonable progress" toward meeting the terms of the deal.
"The backstop of court oversight is especially critical now to ensure that EPA does its job," Christopher Sproul, the foundation's attorney, said in an email yesterday.
"At a time when EPA has repeatedly rolled back environmental protections and otherwise sought to shirk its mission of protecting human health and the environment from air and water pollution, this is a step the other way," Sproul said. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Under the Clean Air Act, EPA is supposed to conduct "residual risk and technology reviews" for air toxics standards eight years after the original limits are set, both to account for any advances in pollution control measures and to gauge whether there is any remaining risk to public health. The agency is also supposed to review New Source Performance Standards every eight years, according to the foundation's suit.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/03/05/stories/1060123167
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California Ready to Fight for States’ Rights on Air Pollution
Mar 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Amena H. Saiyid
California is going to fight the EPA’s move to strip states’ power to set more stringent air pollution standards for cars, a state official is expected to testify before a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee.
The Golden State and like-minded others are prepared to challenge any move to prevent them from adopting emissions standards stricter than the national standard, according to Craig Segall, California Air Resources Board’s assistant chief counsel. The Trump administration has sought to freeze fuel economy limits nationwide at 2020 levels.
Calling the federal proposal unacceptable and illegal, “California and states representing more than one-third of the U.S. auto market stand ready to take all legal action necessary to block the rule,” Segall said in his written testimony March 5 to the GOP-led Senate panel on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety.
The EPA has deemed California’s rules too stringent, arguing that tougher emissions standards run counter to lower vehicle prices and improved road safety.
Th clean air panel is examining the progress the Environmental Protection Agency has made in giving states a role in protecting air quality—a role the Trump administration has mostly eroded, according to Segall.
The most egregious example is the federal government’s proposal to “nearly flatline” federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and to attack California’s separate vehicle authority, he said.
Protecting Public Health
The Clean Air Act gives California special authority to enact stricter air pollution standards for motor vehicles, compared to the federal government. The same law also allows states to adopt California’s more stringent standards if they find them more protective of public health.
The EPA, which regulates vehicle emissions, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with jurisdiction over fuel efficiency, sought to impose softer emissions requirements in an August 2018 proposal.
A coalition of 13 states and the District of Columbia want to follow California’s strong fuel economy program in order to address climate change.
The majority of large automakers—including Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., and American Honda Motor Co. Inc.—have urged the Trump administration to come to a national agreement. They fear a patchwork of state limits on greenhouse gas emissions will cause uncertainty brought on by years long litigation.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/california-ready-to-fight-for-states-rights-on-air-pollution
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Ewire: The Latest in the Green New Deal Debate
Mar 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
Climate mitigation policy is earning a renewed focus in the national debate, thanks to the Green New Deal resolution floated by progressive lawmakers and Republicans' sharp critiques that occasionally stray beyond the outlines of the proposal.
The debate is on display in various opinion pieces buzzing around the internet. Here are some of the best takes from the past few days:
First, USA Today's editorial board says “parts of the plan lend themselves to mockery,” but challenges GOP critics to provide constructive solutions. They “own this and future generations more than scorn. They have an obligation to put better ideas and solutions on the table.”
The board suggests a carbon tax “high enough to level the playing field in power generation so green energy sources can gain traction.” It also urges a “recommitment” to nuclear power, remaining in the Paris Agreement, as well as a research and development program that includes climate adaptation policy and efforts to reduce emissions from heavy industry and agriculture.
Speaking of agriculture, don't miss Emily Atkin's piece in the New Republic where she takes a critical look at Republicans' overheated claims, such as those from former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, who claimed that the plan would take away your hamburgers. The great hamburger confiscation is something “Stalin dreamt about, but never achieved,” he told the Conservative Political Action Committee earlier this month.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her staff are pushing back on the attacks, calling them “absurd” because her resolution does no such thing. But Atkins notes that “there’s a grain of truth to the Republicans’ hyperbole. Any serious plan to slow global warming must call for reducing the carbon output of the meat industry. That won’t require banning hamburgers entirely, but it does mean producing (and thus, eating) less meat.”
Over at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer responds to a prior call from Andrew Sullivan in New York for a “radically moderate answer to climate change” -- a massive build-out of nuclear power.
“Let there be no mistake: Nuclear power plants can generate enormous amounts of carbon-free electricity,” Meyer writes. “But you can’t put a nuclear reactor in a tractor-trailer or a steel plant.”
He quotes Sam Ori of the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute as saying that nuclear can only reduce power sector emissions, but “the energy system is bigger than just electricity.”
Meyer notes that “we still have no electrified way of moving around freight. Electrified air travel remains notional. All the nuclear plants in the world could not reduce the importance of oil in steel production. Solving all of these problems will require some kind of public policy, Ori said. Even electric cars won't replace their gas-powered brethren without a regulatory nudge.”
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/ewire-latest-green-new-deal-debate
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New York’s Tonko Has Hand in Many Climate, Environment Debates
Mar 5, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto
Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) asked hundreds of scientists, economists, business leaders, and others to offer climate change policy ideas more than a year before Democrats could turn them into legislation that could move.
Now Tonko, a former engineer and chief executive officer of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, aims to use those ideas to help craft comprehensive climate change legislation.
He can address climate and other related issues on multiple fronts: as chairman of the Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change and a member of both the Natural Resources and Science, Space and Technology committees.
Overseeing regulatory rollbacks that contribute to climate change and crafting a range of legislative policy options the full Energy and Commerce Committee could consider are top priorities for the subcommittee, Tonko, 69, told Bloomberg Environment.
Tonko’s staff is preparing a report summarizing the responses Tonko received to a Jan. 4, 2018 letter and a website survey.
Another aim of Tonko’s is protecting people and the environment from chemicals in drinking water, consumer products, communities, and the workplace. The subcommittee plans to focus on “putting consumers as a high priority,” Tonko said.
Tonko works “very closely” with Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to set the subcommittee’s agenda, Pallone said.
“It’s a close, collaborative partnership, one I feel lucky to have,” Pallone said. “Paul’s command of environmental issues is second to none.”
Both Sides Look to Technology
Tonko, first elected in 2008, has long put his policy expertise to use. He got a bill through the House in 2009 creating an $800 million research program for wind-energy technologies.
Republicans see room to work with Tonko and other Democrats, according to an aide to Rep. John Shimkus (Ill.), ranking Republican on the subcommittee Tonko chairs. The aide pointed to a recent article Shimkus and other House Republicans wrote highlighting support for renewable energy and other technologies.
Shimkus’ emphasis on such technologies squares with the two-track approach that Tonko said he plans to take on climate change.
Tonko envisions first a near-term focus on energy efficiency incentives and performance standards, expanding the federal Weatherization Assistance Program, modernizing the nation’s electric grid, electrification of transportation, and similar technology-enabled solutions.
“There’s a lot of room for nonpartisan discussions on technologies that are available now that we could be using,” said Aimee Curtright, a senior scientist with the RAND Corp., a nonprofit research organization.. “They won’t break the bank, but will help us address climate change.”
Modernizing the grid is not only essential given its age but would help it accommodate intermittent energy sources including solar and wind, Curtright said.
Second TrackThe second, longer-term focus needs to be on comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation, including carbon pricing, Tonko said.
He isn’t among the more than 80 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal resolution (H.Res. 109) championed by many progressive Democrats, though he has said he backs its principles.
Oversight also will play a role in the subcommittee, Tonko said. The Trump administration’s “rollback of clean power plant, clean car, and clean air regulations are troublesome,” he said.
“We’re going to want answers, and we’re going to respect science. It can’t be about creating your own set of facts,” he said.
Tonko described his approach to working with the administration as asking nicely and then asking again. “Subpoenas should be our last resort,” he said.
Chemicals
Examining the EPA’s efforts to address per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a large group of emerging contaminants that states are regulating, but the agency hasn’t, is the first chemicals issue Tonko expects the subcommittee to look into.
The agency’s failure, so far, to restrict methylene chloride—a solvent that has killed consumers and workers—is another high priority, he said.
Tonko recalled meeting last year with the families of individuals who died. They wondered why they could buy paint and coating strippers with the solvent at their local retailers, he said.
They said they’d been warned by the retailers to where protective gloves. Yet no one warned them the product could be deadly, Tonko said.
“In the midst of their grief, they tried to move the former leadership, and it just didn’t happen,” he said.
Tonko referred to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s May 10, 2018, pledge to restrict some applications of methylene chloride.
A final rule to do that hasn’t been issued, although one is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Lessons Learned from TSCA
The subcommittee will oversee the EPA’s implementation of the 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act amendments that passed both chambers with broad bipartisan support, Tonko said.
“We don’t want to hand implementation over to industry types,” he said.
The concerns Tonko has on the EPA’s implementation of the nation’s primary commercial chemicals law will affect legislative language the subcommittee may recommend for future chemical and climate change bills, he said.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/new-yorks-tonko-has-hand-in-many-climate-environment-debates
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Environmentalists Challenge ‘Force Majeure’ Refinery Air Waiver
Mar 5, 2019 | Inside EPA
Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit over EPA’s recent revision to its refinery air rules, contesting the agency’s creation of a compliance reporting waiver for facilities facing “force majeure” events beyond their control including natural disasters such as hurricanes.
In a March 4 statement of issues filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, environmental groups suing EPA in Air Alliance Houston, et al. v. EPA, et al., outline their legal arguments against the compliance waivers included in EPA’s Nov. 26 rule that completed its reconsideration of air rules for oil refineries.
The revised national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants (NESHAP) and related new source performance standards (NSPS) rules contain exemptions from electronic emissions reporting requirements, and eased compliance requirements for refinery flares and pressure relief devices (PRDs).
Groups including Air Alliance Houston, California Communities Against Toxics, Environmental Integrity Project, Sierra Club and others say EPA’s exemptions are unlawful.
The groups say they will test whether “EPA’s rules granting an unlimited extension of and de facto exemption from compliance reporting requirements -- due to a refinery’s claim of ‘force majeure’ or of an outage of the electronic reporting system -- violate Clean Air Act requirements for timely and ‘continuous’ compliance with emission standards.” The court has “has repeatedly held unlawful” such malfunction exemptions, the groups say.
Environmentalist sources have previously told Inside EPA that exemptions for force majeure events in air regulation are unusual and inappropriate, and their inclusion in the refinery air rules was an unwelcome new policy departure by the Trump EPA.
The D.C. Circuit has previously found air emissions standards to be continuously applicable, and has vacated regulatory exemptions for periods of industrial facility startup, shutdown and malfunction.
The groups further suggest the exemptions are “arbitrary and capricious,” the air law standard to vacate EPA rules, because the provisions are “vague, overbroad, and give EPA unconstrained discretion,” with “no rational basis.”
Also, the groups say that “elimination and weakening of certain requirements for flares” and PRDs is arbitrary, unlawful or contrary to the requirement that emissions standards apply at “all times."
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/environmentalists-challenge-%E2%80%98force-majeure%E2%80%99-refinery-air-waiver
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