With CAMR Dead What Is There to Post On?

Well, the world of mercury emission regulations has been put on hold for a while. Everyone remotely involved in this subject, myself included, doubts very much if the EPA will appeal their loss in the Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court. It just does not make any sense, and for that reason alone it still may happen.

Short that possibility the Federal Clean Air Mercury Rule is dead. This leaves everyone with a stake in the issue a lack of direction, or maybe more correctly, a lack of urgency. The mere fact that CAMR was ruled illegal does set some direction. It is clear what the law (The Clean Air Act) does require and a MACT standard for mercury for coal fired EGUs will be forthcoming. But when that will happen, and what it will entail as far as reduction targets, monitoring, compliance timetables and such is left only for speculation.

I will try to stay on top of the debate and keep all of you posted as to the rumblings and grumblings when and if they happen. Meanwhile some immediate fallout from the vacatur is already upon us.

North Carolina Demands MACT for Cliffside
The Division of Air Quality in N.C. has reconsidered the permit they approved for Duke Energy and asked Duke to resubmit with maximum achievable control technologies for hazardous air pollutants including mercury. An excerpt from Asheville, NC's Citizen Times follows;

The division granted Duke an air quality permit in January for a new 800-megawatt boiler at its Cliffside Steam Station near Forest City.

After the division issued the permit, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned the federal Clean Air Mercury Rule, concluding that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acted inappropriately in exempting coal-fired power plants from portions of the Clean Air Act that deal with the control of hazardous air pollutants.

The court's decision means that all new coal-fired plants must demonstrate that they use the most stringent controls for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants.

EPA Moves to Increase Allowed Fugitive Mercury Emissions from Chlor-Alkali Plants
I am not an expert on fugitive emissions and I don't know that increasing them from the few chlor-alkali plants still in existence is a big deal or not. It is my underastanding that the real issue with the outdated chlor-alkali process, that uses lots of mercury unnecessarily, is the effluent streams that immediately pollute the waters in the rivers nearby. Yes, the fugitive emissions are airborne and will add to the problem but they appear to be less significant, I could be wrong. But what I am not wrong about is that all chlor-alkali plants using the old mercury cell technology should be converted to be mercury free. Then there are no mercury laden effluents and no fugitive emissions to worry about.

More than a hundred of these plants have already converted or are in the process of doing so. Why do these four or five remaining plants hold on to the old technology so tightly. Yes, it is an expense to convert, and there may be a lengthy return on investment for the conversion, but undoubtedly ownership and management should be concerned with their neighbors and employees enough to go forward and change. Not doing so is a slap in the face of their surrounding communities and an admission that dollars are more important than lives.

An excerpt from a post on the Georgia Public Broadcasting blog, Georgia News GPB, follows;

A federal agency is proposing a new emissions standard for companies that make chlorine using mercury.

The new standard would release more mercury into the air.

Olin Corporation in Augusta uses mercury in its chlorine production. It's one of five in the nation that still do.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to raise the percentage of mercury, called fugitive emissions, it allows companies to release into the air from the cell room where the chlorine is produced.
[...]
"It's another demonstration of the EPA allowing Olin to continue to pollute the Augusta area," says Tonya Bonitatibus, a field representative for the environmental watchdog group Oceana. She says the group is still studying the proposed rule but opposes the higher emissions.

David Blair, the plant manager at Olin in Augusta, declined to comment on the proposed rule, but did respond to the emissions issue in a written statement. "We've invested millions of dollars in technology and workplace practices during recent years," he said. "We already have in place a system that continuously monitors emissions at the cell room."

Blair said the company had reduced its emissions by more than 85 percent by 2007.

A link to the Proposed Rule is here.