EPA likes second part of haze plan

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed approval of the second part of Arkansas’ plan to comply with haze regulations.

The agency published a Federal Register notice Friday, and people have through Dec. 31 to comment on the proposal.

The plan concerns sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and nitrogen oxide emissions.

The EPA approved Arkansas’ nitrogen oxide proposal in February.

Last fall, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality submitted a 1,809-page package for implementing the second portion of the federal Regional Haze Rule. The plan suggested eliminating the heftiest requirements of the EPA’s 2015-issued federal plan that could have cost utilities as much as $2 billion to install emissions-reducing scrubbers on two coal-fired power plants and other equipment on natural-gas plants.

The EPA issued the federal plan in 2015 because the state had not submitted one at that point.

The state plan orders coalfired plants and natural-gas facilities to use lower-sulfur coal and fuels.

Entergy Arkansas, which is the principal owner and operator of the state’s two largest coal-fired plants and the ones implicated in the federal plan, has already announced its plans via a proposed court settlement to stop using the coal-fired plants by the end of the next decade.

The Regional Haze Rule implements part of the Clean Air Act that stipulates 2064 visibility goals for national wilderness and wildlife areas.

Arkansas has two of those areas — the Upper Buffalo and Caney Creek.