Posted on 08/27/2003 1:46:42 PM PDT by PeaceBeWithYou
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Wednesday exempted thousands of older power plants, refineries and factories from having to install costly clean air controls when they modernize with new equipment that improves efficiency but increases pollution.In a major new revision to its air pollution rules, the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) will allow up to 20 percent of the costs of replacing each plant's production system to be considered "routine maintenance" that doesn't require costly antipollution controls, according to agency documents obtained by The Associated Press.
A typical power plant has more than one "process unit" containing a boiler, generator, turbine and other equipment. In the case of a 1,500-megawatt plant with two 750-megawatt units that cost $1 billion to replace, each could be upgraded $200 million at a time, agency officials and outside experts say.
The new rule signed Wednesday by EPA's acting administrator, Marianne L. Horinko, represents a fundamental shift away from a long-problematic 1971 maintenance standard.
"We're going to really, I think, create certainty going forward for industrial facilities, by spelling out what specific replacement is exempt," Horinko told the AP.
Until now, operators have been required to add more pollution-cutting devices if they do anything more than "routine maintenance" on a plant that causes emissions to increase significantly. The electric utility and oil industries have been lobbying the administration for the changes, saying the costs prohibit them from making energy-efficiency improvements.
The White House-led reworking of the maintenance standard essentially allows industries including manufacturers, chemical plants and pulp and paper mills to modernize a fifth at a time each of a facility's essential production systems.
They can do so even if the upgrades increase pollution, with no apparent restrictions on time intervals between modernization, though Horinko and other top EPA officials insist the plants still must comply with overall permit limits and other state and federal programs for pollutants.
Congress put the Clean Air Act's "new source review" program into law in 1977. Since then the agency has had mixed success in enforcing the maintenance provision.
"We can say categorically that pollution will not increase as a result of this rule," said Jeff Holmstead, EPA's assistant administrator in charge of air quality.
Environmentalists said that was untrue, however, since emissions can increase within a plant's permitted limits, and most plants are not now operating near those limits. They described the new changes as disastrous for people's health, especially those living near or downwind of some 17,000 industrial plants affected. And they said EPA ignored concerns expressed by hundreds of thousands of Americans opposed to the new regulations.
"It's an accounting gimmick that eliminates any possibility of pollution controls," said John Walke, director of Natural Resources Defense Council's clean air program. "It's a total disaster. It's the effective repeal of this clean air program, through illegal administrative means."
Last November the administration proposed an annual allowance for power plants, factories and refineries. The allowance would have let plant operators treat as maintenance any replaced equipment or other capital investment that cost up to 20 percent of a plant's total value. That proposal was dropped, agency officials say, because it was considered unworkable and cumbersome.
The new rule adopted Wednesday is based on another proposal from November to create an equipment replacement exemption. White House and EPA officials initially considered letting businesses replace up to 50 percent of a "process unit" before settling on the 20 percent figure.
More power from less resources equals less pollution, not more. It also means lower power production cost.
This draconian requirement has been retarding modernization for over 25 years, about time it got scrubbed.
Let the modernization begin.
LOL! You must have been on Compuserve at one time.
As opposed to the 270,000,000 of us who would prefer to have reliable power.
The judge in this case was a total idiot, and obviously has no clue about what "routine maintenance" consists of in a coal-burner. To repair a failed superheat tube, for instance, takes months. You have to cool down the boiler, ventilate it, install scaffolding and lighting, then send the boilermakers in there to repair the damage. It is expensive and time-consuming.
With a blast at both parties, a federal judge has ruled against an Ohio utility in a suit brought by the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce emission-control regulations. EPA supporteras say the decision could reinforce efforts to require owners of old, coal-fired powerplants to install emission-control equipment or shut them down. Opponents claim that it may scare investors away from making needed investments in baseload generating capacity.
Ohio Edison Co., Akron, violated the Clean Air Act of 1970 by not including emission control upgrades when it performed 11 projects between 1984 and 1998 totaling $136.4 million, said federal district court Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. in Columbus on Aug. 7. The utility performed the work on the seven-unit, 2,233-Mw W.H. Sammis Station, a 40-year-old, coal-fired powerplant on the Ohio River near Steubenville.
Ohio Edison claims the work was routine maintenance, repair and replacement, which is exempt from the Clean Air Act’s "New Source Performance Standards," requiring owners to install the best-available pollution controls when there is a modification to a plant’s generating capacity.
The projects included redesigning and replacing horizontal reheaters, secondary superheater outlet headers and furnace ash hopper tubes on various units. Boiler tubes also were replaced as well as economizers, coal pulverizers and piping.
"The regulation at issue does not exempt any ‘maintenance repair or replacement,’" Sargus said. "The general rule is that any physical changes to a unit which results in an increase in emissions constitutes a ‘modification’ triggering compliance with the Clean Air Act." He added, "When coal-fired generating plants undertake activities at a unit which are not frequent, which come at great cost, which extend the life of the unit and which require the unit to be placed out of service for a number of months, such activities can hardly be considered ‘routine.’"
Sargus also blasted EPA. "While the law has always been clear, the enforcement strategies of the EPA have not," he said. He condemned EPA as "an agency unwilling to enforce a clear statutory mandate."
The ruling is the first by a federal court in lawsuits brought by EPA in 1999 against seven electric utility companies (ENR 11/15/99 p. 14). The decision is "precedent-setting," says Kurt Waltzer, clean air program associate at the Ohio Environmental Council, Columbus.
But others are not so sure. "It seems unlikely at the moment that it’s going to have the big, searing impact on other cases that people have been saying," says Dan Riedinger of the Edison Electric Institute, Washington, D.C.
Under a 1981 consent decree, Ohio Edison and EPA agreed that the Sammis plant’s site was too constrained to fit scrubbers, says Ralph DiNicola, spokesman for Ohio Edison parent FirstEnergy Corp., Akron. Under that agreement, Ohio Edison built $426 million worth of baghouses and other particulate control equipment on a platform over the neighboring highway, he says.
"Even without this decision, there has been little interest in investing in baseload facilities," DiNicola says. "Deregulation makes it hard to justify money for older facilities." A separate trial next March will determine civil penalties and injunctive relief.
The entire Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 need to be re-visited and rolled back. (Many will never forgive George H. W. Bush for breaking his "No New Taxes" pledge. I will never forgive him for the CAAA of 1990.)
There are any number of industries, from bakeries to printing plants to fabric coaters to refineries to dry cleaners to chemical manufacturers, and many many others, who could benefit from a relaxation of the threshold for New Source Review requirements.
The REAL pain is Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) requirements. Man! Now there's something that will drive a plant to Mexico.
No, he LIED about it. He also LIED about 'plant improvements that increase pollution'. The law is specific to 'plant improvements that increase efficiency' which by their nature will reduce pollution.
The Clinton rules (which are being replaced) forced plants to add pollution controls even if they just painted the floors. The new rules just allow the plants to make improvements that do not negatively affect pollution without adding new pollution controls.
Liberals always lie.
All else being equal, this statement is correct. But "All else being equal" is a much abused phrase.
Say I have a plant that burns coal. Say the coal contains sulfur. The sulfur in the form of some kind of noxious sulfur compound is released from the burner. Fortunately, I have a scrubber designed to remove the sulfur compounds released by the burning coal, so this pollution is not released to the environment.
Now I change my plant. It produces 20% more power while burning 5% less fuel. Here we have a jump in efficiency, and a lowering of the amount of sulfur compounds produced by the burning coal. So you would think that since the plant is more efficient, less pollution will be released, right? That's just common sense, isn't it?
However ...
Because of a change in how the burner works, the sulfur compounds released are now of different chemical types, and possibly of different physical types as well (a gas-in-gas solution rather than a solid-in-gas colloid, for example). The old scrubbers don't work on this, and unless those are changed more pollution will be released into the environment, even though there's less sulfur in the initial effluent from the plant's burners.
Or maybe not; maybe the sulfur compounds are all the same as they were before and the scrubbers will work fine still and there's actually, as well as theoretically, going to be less pollution released into the atmosphere than before.
But it's not an automatic presumption - it has to be checked. If it's truly "routine maintenance", then there should be no problem. But if we're talking changing the process being used to produce the power, then the process needs to be reviewed, and possibly tested, to make sure no extra pollution will be actually released, as opposed to what's being initially produced.
Let the technology begin to make us ARAB oil free. Next step, drilling and refineries to match the need here in "MERICA.
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