Comments split on haze rule
Utilities back state plan opposed by environmental groups
Utilities and a consumer group largely favor the state’s proposed changes in the way it will implement a federal rule to reduce haze, but environmental groups oppose it, according to comments submitted to the state.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality received 499 comments — mostly from individuals — on the more contested portion of the Regional Haze Rule that utilities anticipate would cost them collectively more than $2 billion and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated would cost less than $500 million.
The state’s plan would require lower-cost controls for reducing sulfur dioxide that reduce emissions less. The state argues that the EPA’s plan is not cost-effective, although it did not define “cost-effective.”
Utilities would have three years to comply.
The positions are a reversal of how the same groups felt about the EPA’s proposal to implement the Regional Haze Rule in Arkansas. Utilities and consumer groups largely opposed that plan because of the cost to utilities and the expected trickle down to customer bills. Environmental groups supported the EPA’s proposal because of the expected decrease in haze-causing compounds that they said were also detrimental to public health.
Comments from environmental organizations on the state’s proposed plan largely concerned whether the department did what commenters believed it was legally required to do under state and federal air laws.
Many individual comments were identical messages sent through an automated system that supported more stringent emissions controls on Entergy Arkansas’ two largest coal plants, White Bluff near Redfield and Independence near Newark. The comments expressed concern for visibility, ozone pollution and public health.
The Regional Haze Rule, approved by Congress in 1999, requires states to take measures to improve visibility in national wilderness areas. The wilderness areas targeted by the Arkansas plan are Caney Creek and the Upper Buffalo River in Arkansas and the Hercules-Glades and Mingo areas in Missouri.
Instead of emissions-reducing scrubbers, the state’s plan would ask utilities to begin using lower-sulfur coal to fire the White Bluff plant for a cost of $1,150 per ton of sulfur dioxide reduced. A question to Entergy officials about how much that would cost overall went unanswered Friday.
The state plan also re-
moves the Independence plant from having to comply with the plan because it is not technically required to comply under Best Available Retrofit Technology analysis because of the later installation date of its boiler.
The White Bluff and Independence plants, each 1,700 megawatts, are by far the state’s largest coal-fired plants and were the largest targets of the haze plans.
The state’s plan did not change the federal plan’s requirements for natural-gas plants.
In their comments, the National Parks Conservation Association, Earthjustice and the Sierra Club argued that the cost for Entergy to comply with the EPA’s plan was comparable to other costs approved in other state and federal implementation plans. In contrast, Entergy argued in its comments against requiring scrubbers because other state and federal implementation plans had determined those costs to be excessive.
A chart made by the environmental groups showed that some plans required higher costs and others required lower costs.
The environmental groups also noted that the department did not define “cost-effective.”
Entergy and other utility groups contended that the state did not need to conduct any further reasonable progress analysis for meeting progress goals outlined in the Regional Haze Rule at the Independence plant because Arkansas was already meeting its visibility goals for the first planning period.
The environmental groups posited that the plan did not adequately consider Missouri’s visibility improvements and did not supply information on how visibility at Missouri’s wilderness areas would be affected.
They also argued that the state, per the Arkansas Air Pollution Control Act, was required to consider the public health effects of sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide can contribute to ground-level ozone, which can cause respiratory problems at high enough levels.
Last month, the EPA approved the state’s proposed changes to nitrogen oxide emissions reductions, but utilities said they had already installed the low-nitrogen oxide burners the EPA had required at a cost of several million dollars per burner.
The state’s proposal concerns the first Regional Haze planning period, which ends this year. It started in 2008.
The state submitted a plan to comply in 2012, but it was partially rejected by the EPA, and the state never replaced it. The Sierra Club and the National Parks Conservation Association sued in 2014 to force the creation of a plan, which a federal judge ultimately ordered the EPA to issue.
The EPA finalized the plan in the fall of 2016, which was challenged in court, and the EPA has allowed the state to redraft its own plan for the 2008-18 period while the bulk of its plan remains under a stay in federal court.