A group of utility companies wrote on January 15th letter Lee Zeldin was later selected as President Donald Trump nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. “We provide electricity to millions of homes, businesses and institutions across the United States, creating thousands of paying jobs, promoting economic progress and America’s prosperity,” the letter states.
After a polite opening, they are perfect for the main request. “Two issues that require immediate action in particular: (1) Regulations on greenhouse gas (‘GHG’) emissions Existing coal-fired power generation and new natural GAS power plants mandate carbon capture technologies that have not been properly demonstrated.
Companies claim that the federal government has stepped over its powers in enforcing these two areas of regulation. The letter asked Zeldin to go easily by returning regulators to the state and retracting the 2024 rule that required the cleaning of coal ash at inactive power plants.
What the utilities call “coal burning residuals,” which they describe as “a natural by-product of power generation with coal… used for beneficial purposes in US construction and manufacturing,” is more colloquially known as coal ash. lastly A century and a half Of the American coal generation, utilities have dumped coal ash in hundreds of active, inert power plants Nationwide.
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Zeldin is currently the EPA manager and it appears that the utility company is getting their hopes. In a barrage of press releases that proposed 31 deregulation measures on March 12, the two were designed to significantly reduce the enforcement of coal ash regulations, an environmental lawyer told Grist.
Zeldin called it “the biggest day of deregulation seen by our country.”
First, the EPA announcement Encourage states to take over permission and enforcement of coal ash rules; When the authorities are delegated by the EPA to issue their own coal ash disposal permit, they are at least as strict as federal regulations, but in some cases, the state’s environmental agencies simply became fraudulent, fled this requirement.
The state of Georgia, which was authorized to issue its own permit for coal ash disposal in 2019, is planning to permanently store millions of tons of coal ash in landfills partially submerged in groundwater, despite being notified by the EPA. In neighboring Alabama, state regulators sought the same delegated powers that Georgia counterparts were granted, but last year the EPA I have rejected the application Because they planned to issue permits to Alabama’s authority that violated federal rules. Similarly Like Georgia.
Alabama was the first application of the national coal ash program that the EPA denied. so farGeorgia, Texas and Oklahoma are only approved. But new approvals could soon come. “The EPA will propose a decision regarding the North Dakota permitting program within the next 60 days,” the release states.
The EPA also said it would “review” the rules finalized in 2024 under President Joe Biden. This would close a long-standing loophole by expanding coal ash regulations to cover so-called “legacy” coal ash ponds at closed power plants.
The 2024 Legacy Call Ash Rules EPA review will focus on extending the deadline for compliance with the rules. Lisa Evans, senior adviser at Earthjustice, said the time frame for written rules is already more generous than necessary. “The industry has already taken great concessions from the Biden EPA and set deadlines in the future,” she said.
The peak contamination levels of coal ash have not reached about 70 years after waste is dumped, so long deadlines mean less effective cleanup. “The more you ignore these sites, the worse the pollution will be,” Evans said.
In its second announcement relating to coal ash, the EPA said it would revise the list of the largest enforcement priorities announced in 2023 and applied between 2024 and 2027. list The national enforcement and compliance initiative, or NECI, included six “priority areas” for action. One was to “protect the community from coal ash contamination.”
The EPA is currently planning to “adjust” President Trump’s executive order and agency enforcement priorities. He said this will be achieved by “quickly” revising the NECI list to ensure that enforcement is not discriminated against “as under the Environmental Justice Initiative) or shutting down energy production and focusing on the most pressing health and safety issues (as in the Environmental Justice Initiative).
No further details have been provided as to what this means for the agency’s actual enforcement action. However, the richer photos can be found in an internal agency memo sent by Jeffrey Hall, the agency’s representative of the agency’s executive and compliance department. The notes Grist saw outline how to update the NECI list.
Hall’s memo said that priorities are under review “to ensure NECIS and the administration’s direction and prioritization,” and submitted a set of instructions that will be “tentatively” applied to all EPA enforcement and compliance measures. These include blanket directives that “environmental justice considerations will no longer be notified to the work of EPA enforcement and compliance assurance” and that declare that “the stages of power generation should not be closed in the absence of an immediate threat to energy production and compliance assurance measures) or human health or express statutory or regulatory requirements.”
Regarding coal ash, the memo argues that NECI’s priorities list “focuses on unrecognized violations of current performance standards and monitoring and testing requirements, and is primarily motivated by environmental justice considerations that conflict with the President’s executive order and administrator’s initiative. Therefore, the memo states that “enforcement of coal ash and compliance assurances at active power plant facilities will focus on imminent threats to human health.”
In the wording of the memo, Evans said in an email that “it is entirely possible for the EPA to justify avoiding enforcement of the coal ash rules under the NECI.”
This would be a dramatic reversal of the increased strengthened enforcement under the Biden administration. 2024 – The first year of coal ash neci priorities – EPA implemented 107 Compliance Evaluation Sites for coal ash sites in 18 states. In that year, only five enforcement lawsuits (an order or contract requiring the EPA to take certain measures) were filed that year, but Evans said that if an investigation is permitted, the EPA is likely to find reasons for enforcement action on many other sites.
Evans said the requirement that enforcement only occurs in the case of an imminent threat to human health effectively limits the implementation of aspects of the coal ash regulations designed to prevent “immediate threats” by requiring proper management and monitoring of toxic waste sites before damage and spills occur.
For example, the directive said it would prohibit the EPA from requesting utilities to repair failed groundwater monitoring systems. “The utility filmed the system on some plants by designing a surveillance system that intentionally misses detection of leaks from coal ash dumps,” she said, citing 2022. Report By environmental integration projects that advocated widespread practices among utility companies that manipulate surveillance data to underestimate the extent of pollution.
The utility will drill wells to assess groundwater quality with coal ash dumps and to measure their contamination levels, they will compare it with nearby uncontaminated water samples. However, the 2022 report documented examples of coal plants in Texas, Indiana and Florida. The EPA found that “background” wells used to provide baseline water samples were dug in contaminated areas near coal ash dumps. The report also documented “intrawell” monitoring practices, or simply analyzing data from each well, in order to assess changes over time, rather than in contrast to unstained wells. This method will not work unless the wells have been contaminated from the beginning and are prohibited by EPA guidelines, but the report found to be used in 108 coal plants nationwide.
These practices could essentially be given free passes under new enforcement guidance. “These are very serious violations (because no contamination has been found and no cleanup has been triggered), but they may not rise to the “immediate threat,” especially if there is no data revealing toxic releases,” Evans said.
The memo section dealing with call ash states that “an order or other enforcement action that unfairly burdens or significantly disrupts power generation” requires “pre-approval” from the assistant manager of the Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Office.
The memo justifies this requirement based on the intentions stated by the Trump administration to “unleash American energy.” But for Nick Tory, a senior lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center, it has little to do with energy production and no relation to utility bottom line profits.
“There’s nothing to clean up coal ash that affects power generation. These are two separate activities,” Tory pointed out. “So they prioritize the interests of the polluters over people’s drinking water.”
