EPA says regional haze rules for Arkansas complete, governor calls plan ‘irrational’

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday (Sept. 1) announced it had completed the process to implement a Regional Haze plan to improve visibility in wilderness areas across Arkansas and Missouri, prompting criticism from Gov. Asa Hutchinson and the state’s top environment official even before federal regulators released a final draft of its proposal.

According to a news release from the EPA’s Region 6 South Central office in Dallas, the plan will help Arkansas and Missouri meet federal Clean Air Act requirements following over a year of “meaningful negotiations” between the Obama administration’s environmental regulators and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ). By Thursday afternoon, several hours after its announcement, the EPA had not released a copy of its final proposal.

The EPA said the plan would cut about 68,500 tons of SO2 emissions per year and 15,100 ton of NOx per year, which will better protect the parks and refuge areas from hazy conditions, while also providing health and environmental benefits. In addition to forming haze and impairing visibility, SO2 can harm people’s health and the environment. SO2 reacts with other compounds in the air to form fine particles. Exposure to the small particles in the air has been linked to increased respiratory illness, decreased lung function, and even premature death, the EPA said.

In response, Governor Asa Hutchinson said Arkansas – not the federal government – better understands the measures we needed for the state to comply with the regional haze rule.

“I believe this action represents unsupported federal overreach and goes beyond the authority provided by law. EPA’s mandate to impose billions of dollars in economic costs without clear health or environmental benefits is questionable at best and irrational at worst. It is arbitrary for EPA to force Arkansas ratepayers to pay millions, much less billions, of dollars for new technology that, by EPA’s own admission, will have no appreciable effect on regional haze and improved visibility,” Hutchinson said in a statement.

The governor said he was mindful of litigation in surrounding states regarding their haze plans and has directed ADEQ to work with the Arkansas Attorney General to pursue all available legal remedies. ADEQ Director Becky Keogh called the EPA’s plan “unnecessary and costly,” saying it did not take into account the real progress Arkansas has made in visibility improvements.

“While we appreciate EPA’s willingness to consider certain comments, we feel EPA’s final federal plan does not adequately address many substantive issues that were raised during the comment period and closely resembles the proposed (plan),” Keogh said.

By Thursday afternoon, officials with Entergy Arkansas, the Arkansas Attorney General’s Office and the Arkansas chapter of the Sierra Club were scrambling to get a copy of the EPA plan before making comments to the media. Talk Business & Politics could not immediately reach EPA officials to answer questions concerning the regional haze plan.

When the Obama administration put out its final guidelines on the more controversial “Clean Power Plan in August 2015 to cut carbon pollution from the power sector 32% below 2005 levels by 2030, those final rules were included nearly 1,600 pages of regulations and state-specific toolboxes and fact sheets. According to the EPA, the Clean Air Act’s rules on regional haze requires states to make progress toward achieving natural visibility conditions in some of the nation’s most treasured wilderness areas. States must submit plans for achieving these progress goals by reducing harmful emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter.

However, when state implementation plans do not meet federal requirements, EPA said it works with states to address deficiencies so that a new state plan can replace the federal plan.

All wilderness areas now in Arkansas included in the plan have already shown some improvement in visibility, EPA officials said. However, the new plan of action will provide for better visibility for the Caney Creek Wilderness Area, Upper Buffalo Wilderness Area, Hercules-Glades Wilderness Area and Mingo National Wildlife Refuge, EPA officials said.

The new proposal, which has been nearly two years in the making, does not come without some controversy. In April 2015, EPA officials from Dallas spent an entire day at ADEQ’s headquarter in North Little Rock listening to comments from Arkansans on the pros and cons of the federal agency’s proposed rules to clean up haze in the state’s national parks and wilderness areas.

The EPA proposed guidelines published in the Federal Register in April 2015 rejected a portion of ADEQ’s haze plan, called Best Available Retrofit Technology, or BART. The EPA said the state plan should have made “reasonable progress” toward protecting the Arkansas Buffalo National River, Ouachita National Forest and Caney Creek wilderness area from haze and the harmful effects of pollution. The proposed guidelines also address “downwind” haze problems from Arkansas power plants and factories that cross state lines.

Under the BART plan, ADEQ proposed retrofitting nine units and six mills and power plants across the state to meet the EPA requirements to reduce 71,500 tons a year of sulfur dioxide emissions and up to 15,000 tons of nitrogen oxide annually. The EPA’s 360-page proposal, called the Federal Implementation Plan (FIP), relied heavily on the state’s BART evaluations, but goes several steps further by establishing goals, deadlines and long-term strategies that meet the EPA’s “reasonable progress” mandate.

That proposal also included limited emissions and five-year compliance schedules for stationary pollution sources across the state, including putting scrubbers, or pollution control devices, on nine smokestacks at six of the state’s largest power plants and factories in control to limit ozone and carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA haze rule would affect two of the state’s oldest coal-fired facilities, White Bluff Electric in Jefferson County and Independence Steam Electric Station in Independence. Those aging facilities are also on the EPA’s list for possible shutdown under the president’s Clean Power Plan that would cut carbon emissions at existing power plants by 2030.

In July 2015, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge filed comments with the EPA, saying federal regulators acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner in its decision to require billions of dollars in compliance costs for very limited improvement in visibility. A month later, Entergy Arkansas Inc. proposed what it called “a more reasonable, long-term, multi-unit approach to address Arkansas’ regional haze” in response to the federal EPA’s rejection of the state’s earlier plan to improve visibility in wilderness areas. Entergy officials have not responded to a request for comment on this story.

Entergy’s proposal to the EPA calls for the eventual shutdown of its coal-fired operations at the White Bluff Electric Station in Jefferson County, instead of a costlier plan to install scrubbers atop the smokestacks of the sprawling power plant near Redfield by 2021.

According to former Entergy Arkansas CEO Hugh McDonald, the proposed haze controls for the White Bluff power plant do not warrant an investment of more than $2 billion in scrubber technology at the plants. Under the Entergy Plan, he said the utility would cease all coal-fired operations at the two coal-fired units in 2027 and 2028.

Entergy also makes the case that scrubbers are not necessary for the utility’s Independence Steam Electric Station in Independence County because the state had already made “reasonable progress” toward better visibility conditions that the EPA had previously approved.

“Based on the negligible visibility benefit from installing scrubbers at Independence, the cost of the controls is an astounding $1.33 billion to $1.53 billion per … improvement,” Entergy said in its 57-page filing. “Scrubbers at Independence are simply not necessary to ensure that visibility in Arkansas’ Class I areas remains below the (glide path), nor are they justifiable based on EPA’s own analysis of the visibility benefits resulting from such a huge investment.”

A month after the Entergy Arkansas filings, the Sierra Club filed a motion for summary judgment in U.S. District Court alleging the EPA neglected its duties to create and finalize a plan to reduce regional haze in the state’s wilderness areas. In the court filing, Sierra Club officials argue that the EPA was obligated to issue a federal plan within two years of disapproving the ADEQ’s plan.