Posted on April 2, 2012 by Eva O’Brien
If you live in Texas or have driven through the state, you know that our popular anti-litter campaign slogan is “Don’t Mess With Texas.” This slogan may have also been appropriate for the 5th Circuit’s recent decision in Luminant Generation Company, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 10-60891, slip op. (5th Cir. Mar. 26, 2012), where the court came down hard on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) for its very late disapproval of revisions to Texas’s State Implementation Plan (“SIP”) pertaining to standard permits for pollution control projects (“PCPs”).
In Luminant, the 5th Circuit noted that the federal Clean Air Act (“CAA”) “prescribes only the barest of requirements” for New Source Review (“NSR”) of minor new sources of air pollutant emissions. It found that EPA had not identified a single violation of the CAA or EPA’s regulations and thus had no legal basis for its disapproval of the PCP Standard Permit provisions, striking down as arbitrary and capricious the “three extra-statutory standards that the EPA created out of whole cloth.” Id. at 21. Two of those standards referenced Texas law and a third was based on too much agency discretion in permit issuance.
Noting that EPA failed to act until three years after the 18 month statutory deadline for EPA action had passed, the court ordered EPA to expeditiously reconsider the SIP revision submission made by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (“TCEQ”), and compared the “sweeping discretion” given to the states in developing their SIPS to EPA’s “narrow task” of “ensuring” that the Texas regulations “meet the minimal CAA requirements that govern SIP revisions to minor NSR, as set forth in 42 U.S.C. § 7410 (a)(2)(C) and § 7310(l).” Id. The court then stated that this limited review “is the full extent of EPA’s authority in the SIP-approval process because that is all the authority that the CAA confers.” Id. at 21-22.
For the past several years, the TCEQ and EPA have butted heads over various aspects of Texas’s SIP. This was the third of three cases heard by the 5th Circuit on SIP reviews, albeit the first in which a decision has been rendered. Oral arguments were held in the other two pending cases last fall – the first relating to Texas’ Qualified Facilities program, Texas Oil & Gas Association, et al. v. U.S. EPA, No. 10-60459 (5th Cir. filed Jun. 11, 2010), and the second relating to Texas’s Flexible Permit Program, Texas v. U.S. EPA, No. 10-10614 (5th Cir. filed Jul. 26, 2010).
Of these three cases, the EPA’s disapproval of Texas’s Flexible Permit Program has caused the most tension between the agencies. That program provides facilities with flexibility to reduce emissions by the most cost-effective means through allocation of emissions on a facility-wide basis rather than by source point, and has been a basic tenet of permitting in Texas since 1994. The end result of the Flexible Permit Program—which Texas considers akin to the federal Plantwide Applicability Limit (“PAL”) under the New Source Review program—not only gave facilities greater flexibility and control, but actually reduced emissions and provided for compliance with all state health standards, as well as all applicable federal Clean Air Act requirements.
Given that EPA’s delay in disapproving these last two aspects of the Texas SIP was even more egregious (effectively up to sixteen years), it is likely that the 5th Circuit will view the EPA’s actions in those cases with a similarly critical eye. We in Texas hope that the court continues to call EPA to task for its past unpopular and unwarranted decisions with respect to Texas’s SIP.
Tags: Air, Environmental Protection Agency, Litigation, emissions