The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled Tuesday a series of changes to a core permitting program that requires facilities to install air pollution controls for major upgrades or new construction.
Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the updates are critical to improve certainty for businesses, but environmental groups have warned they could further weaken pollution controls.
Reforms to the program, known as New Source Review, have been a key ask of the industry across sectors, including utilities, oil and gas producers, and manufacturing facilities. Companies have long complained the NSR program is too strict and prohibits them from being able to make upgrades that would improve the efficiency of their facilities.
“NSR regularly discouraged companies from investing in and deploying the cleanest and most efficient technologies,” Wheeler said in a statement on the two new guidance documents. “Through the Trump Administration’s efforts, EPA is providing clarity to permitting requirements, improving the overall process, and incentivizing investments in the latest energy technologies.”
The NSR program requires power plants and other industrial facilities that undergo major upgrades or new construction to install pollution controls if the project increases annual emissions of air pollutants such as fine particulate matter and sulfur dioxide. Updates to the program were a top priority for former EPA air chief Bill Wehrum, who attempted several larger changes to the program during his stint in the Bush administration that were struck down in court.
The EPA released two guidance documents Tuesday that would make changes to how the agency interprets definitions under the air permitting program.
The first revises the EPA’s definition of “ambient air” under the Clean Air Act, allowing state and federal permitting agencies to exclude air surrounding a facility from air quality monitoring if the facility owner has precluded the public from being able to access the property.
Before the Trump EPA guidance, the agency had required a physical barrier, such as a fence, to be erected to qualify for the exclusion. But the EPA says in the final guidance there are “a variety of measures” used to keep the public off a facility’s property.
The second guidance document changes how the EPA interprets whether sources are “adjacent” and considered a single facility for the purposes of securing an NSR permit. The agency’s guidance finds “adjacent” to be based solely on whether the facilities are close in proximity, a narrower interpretation than what the EPA has previously used.
The EPA indicates both guidance documents are not mandates, but rather allow permitting authorities — largely in the states, which conduct the majority of the heavy lifting on NSR permits — discretion to consider the new interpretations on a case-by-case basis.
Environmental groups, however, were alarmed by both of the actions the EPA is finalizing, arguing they far diminish the scope of the NSR program and would allow facilities to increase emissions of air pollutants.
“You can’t make this up. EPA just redefined ‘ambient air’ to allow more air pollution and reduce health protection,” Paul Billings, senior vice president of advocacy for the American Lung Association, said in a series of tweets.
John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean air, climate, and clean energy program, called the EPA “ambient air” guidance “absurd,” adding in a tweet that the Trump administration’s move will lead to “intense pressure to reopen & strengthen rule to define ambient air as all air.”
The EPA, though, defended its actions as improving the program.
Both political appointees and career employees at the EPA recognize “there are a lot of issues with the NSR program,” an EPA official told the Washington Examiner. The official added EPA career staffers “are just as enthusiastic as we are really to provide clarity in a lot of these areas.”
“It’s truly to improve the thing on the margins and make for a better program, not to put a thumb on the scale to benefit any one individual industry,” the official added.
