Ecology seeks comments on revised plan to reduce haze-causing pollution, improve air quality in Washington

OLYMPIA – The public is invited to comment on proposed changes to the state’s plan for reducing visibility-limiting haze in national parks and wilderness areas.

The changes focus on reducing emissions from TransAlta’s coal-fired power plant near Centralia in Lewis County.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has directed states to reduce regional haze in national parks and wilderness areas in coming decades. As part of this effort, EPA requires certain industrial plants to install Best Available Retrofit Technology (BART) if they emit air pollutants that cause or contribute to regional haze.

Visibility-limiting pollutants include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particles. The TransAlta plant is the state’s largest stationary source of nitrogen oxide emissions.

Ecology submitted Washington’s State Implementation Plan for regional haze in January 2011. The agency now proposes to revise TransAlta’s BART order and the part of the State Implementation Plan that addresses it.

The revisions comply with specific requirements in Senate Bill 5769, which Gov. Chris Gregoire signed into law in April. The law requires TransAlta to:

Install controls to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. The revised BART order calls for a 12 percent reduction and an optimization study to determine the actual reduction that the controls can achieve. This reduction would be in addition to a 20 percent reduction that the company achieved by switching to use of a different type of coal as a fuel source.
Meet Washington’s greenhouse gas emission performance standard on a schedule.

Ecology will hold a public hearing at 6 p.m. Nov. 16, 2011, at Ecology headquarters at 300 Desmond Drive SE in Lacey.

You can find the draft documents on Ecology’s Air Quality Program website.

Here’s how you can submit comments from Oct. 17 through Nov. 21, 2011:

Mail them to Al Newman, Washington Department of Ecology, Air Quality Program, P.O. Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600.
Send email to AQcomments@ecy.wa.gov .

Ecology will consider all comments and may make changes as a result. People who plan to comment are encouraged to read Ecology’s fact sheet on effective public commenting.

The proposed revisions apply only to TransAlta. They do not affect other portions of the State Implementation Plan or the BART orders for six other facilities in Washington:

The BP Cherry Point Refinery in Whatcom County.
The Alcoa Intalco Works aluminum smelter in Whatcom County.
The Tesoro refinery in Skagit County.
The Lafarge cement plant in Seattle.
The Port Townsend Paper Corp. mill.
The Weyerhaeuser Corp. paper mill in Longview.

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Media Contact: Seth Preston, Ecology communications manager, 360-407-6848; 360-584-5744 cell; seth.preston@ecy.wa.gov

For more information:

Regional haze web page (www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/air/globalwarm_RegHaze/regional_haze.html)

Ecology’s Air Quality Program website (www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/air/airhome.html)

Fact sheet on effective public commenting (www.ecy.wa.gov/pubs/0307023.pdf)

Ecology’s social media (www.ecy.wa.gov/about/newmedia.html)