Dozens of wastewater discharge permits have expired, but permittees have been allowed to continue operating under administrative holds placed on them by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.
At least 40 utility and industrial facilities continue to operate while their permit renewal applications idle indefinitely. Some of those permits expired as long ago as 2008.
The renewal applications generally hit the same stumbling block: Because of environmental officials' findings of impairment in waters downstream of permittees, they must set new mineral limits for their permits in an effort to make those waters healthy again.
Companies and utilities say they can't afford to do that, while others argue the standards were too strict to begin with.
Officials say the least expensive ways to effectively reduce mineral discharge often are estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars. Those ways include reverse osmosis, electrodialysis or capacitive deionization technology, according to an analysis of the technologies performed by GBMc and Associates, an engineering firm in Benton that frequently works with permit holders on potential solutions to their mineral discharge problems.
Many facilities continue to operate without methods in place to help remedy the waters downstream, and without new permits those facilities can't modify their operations.
"Where we go from here, I think everybody is still trying to figure out," said Charles Miller, executive director of the Arkansas Environmental Federation, a group that works with utilities and businesses subject to environmental permits and regulations.
Held permits are different from permits that have merely expired. Held permits are in a status pending major changes and can languish for years.
Often the utilities with held permits are among smaller wastewater plants and the companies are major Arkansas industries, such as Great Lakes Chemical, Lion Oil and Tyson. The bulk of the permits are in south Arkansas.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality supplied the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette with a list of 53 permits that were on hold as of March 23. In mid-April, in response to a request for an updated list, the department sent a list of 40 permits. The department said the permits that had been removed were under "active review" and that the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had just begun "discussions about working together to move these permits forward over the next year."
MINERAL STANDARDS
The department submitted a report to the EPA in February 2016 outlining different ways it could calculate new mineral standards for waters, which included basing them on background measurements in an ecoregion, toxicity to aquatic life, and a field-based approach to measuring limits for total dissolved solids.
The department's goal is to reduce the number of wastewater discharge permits on hold by 10 percent by the end of June 2019, the end of the 2019 fiscal year.
Arkansas' regulations on surface water quality outline conditions for three minerals criteria: total dissolved solids, chlorides and sulfates. Each has a different limit for the six ecoregions. The EPA has established a concentration limit for each mineral at which the agency says the water is no longer appropriate for drinking, but it doesn't set anything for other uses, such as aquatic life or fishable/swimmable use. So states must set their own limits.
Industries and utilities have fought the limits for decades, arguing the limits are not tailored enough to the natural conditions of certain streams and often impose difficult-to-meet permit limits for dischargers.
Some have hired attorneys and environmental firms -- at an expense of tens of thousands of dollars -- to petition the state to change the standards for segments of a stream. Those petitions often languish at the state or federal level.
Utilities and industries argue that reverse osmosis is the only other way to meet some of the standards.
In 1973, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality adopted mineral standards for just 51 streams or segments of streams, according to the department's latest report to the EPA on minerals. All other bodies of water were subject to the EPA's secondary drinking-water standards.
The state expanded the list by 15 two years later, when it added that tributaries not on the list could not experience an increase in mineral concentrations more than one-third of naturally occurring levels.
The most contentious action occurred in 1991, when the department adopted mineral limits more broadly based on the findings of a study done in 1987 on "reference streams" in a given "ecoregion."
Essentially, department officials decided what six geographic areas, characterized by their ecology, should have for mineral limits based on analyses of the conditions of several streams in each area. They were the "least-disturbed" streams in an ecoregion, meaning they were least affected by activities that would directly or indirectly discharge into them, according to the study. They were nearly all located in areas described as "most typical" for each ecoregion. Those values set would apply to every surface water in the ecoregion except for the more than 60 that already had site-specific criteria set for them.
Those values are too low, according to Shon Simpson, co-owner of GBMc and Associates.
"That's because the streams where the data was collected were really the best of the best," Simpson said.
The last time the state submitted its methodology for evaluating water quality to the EPA, it added a sentence in the surface water quality regulation stating that mineral numbers listed in the regulation were "guidelines" and not standards. The EPA rejected that change in 2014 but took no action on it in its final review of the state's water quality standards in late 2016. At the time, the EPA asked the department to come up with an approach to adopt new standards within the next year.
The department also changed the maximum percentage of the time a body of water could exceed limits before being considered impaired for minerals from 10 percent to 25 percent. It would not have applied to the ecoregion values and instead only to the water bodies that had been studied and received "site-specific" mineral limits.
In its latest mineral strategy report to the EPA, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality said it would revise its limits for aquatic life-sustaining water bodies using a new Ambient Biological Network, starting in the Ouachita Mountains.
GROUPS WEIGH IN
Environmental groups contacted by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said they don't focus much of their resources on mineral limits. Many focus mostly on specific water bodies and nutrients that cause algal blooms.
Ozarks Water Watch Executive Director David Casaletto said he doesn't direct his organization to spend much time on the issue of minerals in Arkansas. Three permits are on hold because of mineral issues in the region of Arkansas monitored by Casaletto's conservation group.
The group, based in Springfield, Mo., concentrates more on nutrient issues in the Beaver Lake watershed, where Casaletto believes it can have more of an impact.
Mineral limits create issues for permits, he said, adding that from what he can tell, some of the issues are out of the hands of companies or utilities. When permit holders don't know what to do to comply with mineral standards, "it's difficult for a water quality group to have an answer," he said.
Others disagree.
Jessie Green, executive director of the White River Waterkeeper, said the ecoregion limits for minerals accurately reflect the conditions of waters in Arkansas but acknowledged the limits can be hard for some industries to meet. Green questioned whether the needs of industry should outweigh those of water bodies.
"Is it fair to degrade shared resources for the benefit of industry?" she said, adding that the cost of increased treatment of drinking water or the declines in aquatic life should be considered.
"A solution would require rewarding industries that sacrifice capital gain to provide better treatment infrastructure," Green said.
Some progress has been made in removing permits from hold status, largely ones that needed to comply with new mercury limitations.
The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality said permits held for mercury issues were the focus of the department's current efforts to remove permits from their holds. Those permits can get removed by developing Mercury Minimization Plans, setting mercury limits, including mercury monitoring and reporting or requiring mercury certification. Certification would indicate that no operations at the facility are expected to result in mercury discharges.
UTILITIES, COMPANIES
One company, El Dorado Chemical, got off the list and received a new permit after nearly 10 years of being held because of minerals requirements. The department declined to explain how the company got off the list, citing the company's appeal of its permit renewal.
The department's 2016 Integrated Water Quality Assessment stated that an unnamed tributary of the Ouachita River had "some of the most severe water quality problems" caused by the company's discharge, including toxic levels of ammonia and elevated nitrates, sulfates, total dissolved solids and copper. The company has appealed its new minerals limits.
Some utility managers said they did not know their permits were expired and on hold.
Tyson, Lion Oil and the city of Huntsville all have active rule-making petitions on minerals before the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission. All were filed in 2013.
A reporter left a message with a Lion Oil corporate official but did not hear back from the official.
Great Lakes Chemical's parent company, Lanxess, sent a statement that said it was complying with its existing permit and that the permit is on hold while "dissolved minerals requirements are worked on" by the department.
Great Lakes Chemical's Central Plant has received "temporary variances" to discharge its wastewater from two different locations, including one only in emergencies. The variances each last 90 days and have been approved since July 2017.
Temporary variances are allowed for only 90 days unless "a longer period is justified by circumstances beyond the control of the applicant," according to letters sent to the company from Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh granting the latest variances.
A Section on 05/29/2018