The Environmental Protection Agency should reconsider its plan for implementing the 1999 Regional Haze Rule in Arkansas that affects electrical utilities, the state argued in a petition filed Tuesday before the EPA.
The 14-page petition filed by Assistant Attorney General Jamie Ewing on behalf of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality asks the EPA to review and stay its final plan published as a rule in the Federal Register in September. A two-page petition for review filed Tuesday in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge requests a court review of the plan.
As written, the plan does not consider developments within the past two years, including Entergy Arkansas' proposal to close a coal plant and data that show Arkansas is already meeting standards for the initial planning period, the state argued. Because of the state's progress on haze, granting a stay would pose no harm and would prevent utilities from having to raise rates to comply with the rule, the state argued.
The rule's proponents, which include the Sierra Club, argue that implementing the plan would benefit parks, air quality and public health.
The Regional Haze Rule sets requirements for visibility at 64 national wildlife areas across the country and allows the EPA to require emissions reductions at industrial facilities -- often, coal-fired power plants -- that emit chemicals that contribute to haze, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. The rule is to be implemented in 10-year planning periods. The first planning period runs from 2008-18.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality is in charge of improving and monitoring visibility in Caney Creek and Upper Buffalo wilderness areas in Arkansas, and the Hercules-Glades Wilderness area and the Mingo National Wildlife Refuge in Missouri.
In Arkansas, when Caney Creek and the Upper Buffalo River last were measured for haze, they came in at 20.41 deciviews and 19.96 deciviews, respectively, according to the state's petition filed Tuesday. A deciview is a measure of visibility meant to represent the minimal perceptible change visible to the human eye.
The EPA goal is to reduce haze to 11.58 deciviews for Caney Creek and 11.57 deciviews for the Upper Buffalo River by 2064, but the goal of the implementation plan calls for 22.47 deciviews for Caney Creek and 22.51 deciviews for the Upper Buffalo River by 2018.
Under the plan, utilities estimated the cost of compliance to be at least $2 billion -- mainly for the cost to update two Entergy Arkansas coal-fired plants -- but the EPA put the costs of compliance at nearly $500 million. Entergy Arkansas has proposed mitigating some of the costs by closing its 1,700-megawatt White Bluff coal-fired plant near Redfield and eventually replacing it with natural gas or renewable energy sources.
The Department of Environmental Quality is working on its own implementation plan. Director Becky Keogh told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in September that the department would have to seek a stay to keep the federal plan from going into effect before the state plan is released.
Keogh noted that federal plans have been stayed in court in Texas and Oklahoma, and she said Arkansas is in a good position to challenge the EPA's plan in court, particularly because of the inclusion of the coal plant near Redfield.
EPA officials said they did not account for Entergy Arkansas' proposal to close the plant because they did not believe they could call for a plant's closure. They also said they included the 1,700-megawatt Independence plant near Newark against Entergy Arkansas' and the state's wishes because of the Regional Haze Rule's requirement that they consider the "reasonable progress" in air quality that could be achieved.
Entergy Arkansas and the state argued that the Independence plant should not be included because its date of construction excluded it from the first planning period.
"Imposing a federal directive that goes far beyond what is required and ignores the interest of the State has become the norm, not the exception for the EPA," Rutledge said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon.
Rutledge also noted that the EPA rejected Arkansas' plan before implementing its own. The EPA partially rejected Arkansas' plan in 2012, and the state did not resubmit one.
After two years, the Sierra Club sued the EPA, arguing that the agency was legally required to issue its own plan if the state had not resubmitted its own within two years of rejection. The EPA then issued a federal plan in 2015 that Rutledge challenged, but a judge ordered the EPA in November 2015 to issue a final plan by Aug. 31, 2016, which the EPA did.
"The State of Arkansas had every opportunity to write and submit its own Regional Haze plan, but failed to do so," Sierra Club of Arkansas President Glen Hooks said in a statement.
Rutledge and others have argued that the plan's costs of compliance are not worth the projected benefit in visibility, which is already improving.
"This plan will lead to unreasonable and unnecessary utility rate increases, something no Arkansan can afford, and I will not stand for it," Rutledge said in her statement.
Hooks and others have argued that the improved visibility would be noticeable at parks and that ancillary health effects of reduced emissions would be beneficial.
"It is important to emphasize that the same pollutants that impair visibility also harm public health," Hooks said in his statement. "So this EPA plan is a big win for Arkansas parks and Arkansas people."
While proponents of the rule and the subsequent emissions restrictions on coal plants have argued that the rule will have an effect on air quality and respiratory health among nearby residents, the rule concerns only visibility, and the EPA can consider only improvements to visibility in its implementation of the rule.
The EPA notes that sulfur dioxide and the fine particles that can form in sulfur dioxide's interaction with surrounding air have been linked to "increased respiratory illness, decreased lung function, and even premature death." Nitrogen oxide contributes to ground-level ozone, which can be hazardous to health at certain levels.
Metro on 11/23/2016