Posted on January 5, 2012 by Karen Crawford
By: Karen Aldridge Crawford and Stacy Kirk Taylor
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough
On December 2, 2011, EPA proposed its fourth round of regulations governing industrial boilers and process heaters (i.e. the boiler MACT standards). [EPA Notice] Although additional changes are unlikely (given that this is EPA’s fourth set of revisions), EPA is providing a 60-day comment period and does not expect to finalize the regulations until spring (likely April) of 2012.
EPA maintains that the reworked regulations provide greater flexibility, reduce the number of boilers to which the regulations would actually apply, and will ultimately cut the cost of implementation by nearly 50% from the original 2010 proposed rules. Groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, however, remain opposed and continue to press for a legislative fix if EPA fails to sufficiently consider the added expense that even the newly proposed regulations will impose on goods manufactured in the United States. In response to EPA’s issuance of the proposed rules, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works stated that, although he appreciated EPA’s acknowledgment of the potential economic impacts and efforts to revise the rules, the revised rules would still have too great an economic impact on the United States. Sen. Inhofe then pressed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to allow a vote on the House-passed EPA Regulatory Relief Act.
[Inhofe’s Comment]
According to EPA, the major source proposal, which is the part of the proposed regulations that impose actual control technology, would now cover less than 1% of the boilers in the United States (approximately 14,000 boilers). For boilers located at smaller facilities, such as universities, hospitals, and commercial buildings, only a very small number would actually have to take any additional steps to comply with the proposed rule; the vast majority would simply be required to perform maintenance and routine tune-ups. Highlighting some of the specific changes, the proposed regulations:
• Set new emission limits for mercury, hydrogen chloride, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide (the last two of which serve as surrogates for metallic and organic pollutants), many of which, however, are as stringent or actually more stringent than the limits provided in the previous version of the regulations.
• Increase the number of boiler subcategories (for which subcategory-specific emissions limits are proposed) to fourteen.
• Eliminate the numeric emission limit for dioxins/furans, noting in the preamble that the level previously proposed could not be accurately measured with existing technology, and instead tackle dioxin/furan emissions by imposing work practice standards that include periodic tune-ups to ensure good combustion.
• Provide greater flexibility than was previously allowed by providing for the use of a variety of alternative emissions limits and compliance demonstration methods (for example, a facility with more than one boiler can now choose to average emissions as long as the source as a whole is less than 90% of the applicable standard).
• Eliminate requirement for continuous monitors for particulate matter.
• Revise the compliance deadlines, providing three years from publication of the final rule to comply (the June 4, 2010 date of the initial proposed regulations, however, will remain the date for determining whether a unit is considered a “new” or “existing” unit).
In conjunction with reworking the boiler MACT standards, EPA revisited the Commercial/Industrial Solid Waste Incinerators (CISWI) rules and the Non-Hazardous Secondary Material (NHSM) rules to provide greater clarity and flexibility as to what types of secondary materials constitute a non-waste fuel. The changes to the regulations also expressly classify a number of secondary materials as non-wastes when used as fuel and provide a mechanism for requesting such a determination from EPA for other materials.
Tags: boilers, EPA, air pollution