EPA, Environmental NGOs Appeal Alt Agricultural Storm Water Decision

 I don't usually blog about about the cases I'm involved in, so here is a link to  a Bloomberg article that reports on the appeal of Judge Bailey's decision by EPA and others to  the Fourth Circuit. It is largely correct, although  the first  appeals came in to me on December 20, 2013, not the 23rd, and while the case number for theEPA appeal is correct, the cases have all been consolidated under Case No. 13-2527.

West Virginia DEP Recycling Electronics in Charleston November 23

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is conducting a free electronics recycling event for the public from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., on Saturday, Nov. 23, at the DEP headquarters building in Charleston. The building is located at 601 57th St., S.E., Charleston, WV, 25304.

The DEP’s Rehabilitation Environmental Action Plan (REAP) and MRM Recycling are sponsoring the e-cycling event to make it easy for the public to responsibly dispose of electronic devices.

Devices that will be accepted on Nov. 23 include:

televisions, computers, printers, copiers, zip drives, video game devices, electronic cables, laser and multifunction scanners, fax machines, laptops, mice, keyboards, speakers, Web cams, monitors, cables, hard drives, circuit boards, cell phones, CD players and tape players.

Devices that will not be accepted include: kitchen appliances, refrigerators, washers, dryers, freezers, microwaves, air conditioners, lamps, CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, magnetic tapes, household batteries, fluorescent bulbs and home thermostats.

All materials will be recycled through 2TRG, which provides secure data destruction.

For more information call 1-800-322-5530.

Climate Equity Proposal Would Disproportionately Reduce US Emissions

Less developed nations have come up with a new proposal for reducing greenhouse gas  emissions.  They are suggesting that wealthier nations, who are more responsible for existing  levels of GHGs because of their historic emissions, make disproportionate reductions in GHGs in order to meet future targets.  Since that couldn't be done without greatly interfering with wealthy nations' economies, it appears to be a nonstarter. See the article from Alex Morales of Bloomberg here.

WV Attorney General Leads Troops in Attack on EPA

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey took the lead in drafting  an amicus brief that was signed off on by eight other state attorneys general.  The brief supported  a circuit court's rejection of EPA's interstate air pollution rule. A press release from his office describes it this way: 

West Virginia’s amicus, or friend of the court, brief argues that EPA exceeded its authority under the federal Clean Air Act when the agency promulgated a rule in 2011 announcing new air pollution cuts and imposing federal implementation plans on states. The brief argues the CAA requires the EPA to give states an opportunity to decide how to meet new air pollution standards. 

West Virginia is joined on the brief by a bipartisan group of attorneys general representing the states of Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. The brief supports fifteen other states, as well as industry groups and labor organizations, who sued EPA on this issue in 2011. In August 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the regulation, saying that it “exceeds the agency’s statutory authority.” The Supreme Court agreed to review the rule earlier this year. 

An article  from Jessica Karmasek is here.  The brief that was filed (and it is well-written) is here.

Marcellus Ethane Headed Out of the Area

We had big hopes for a cracker  that would use Marcellus  ethane and  other natural gas liquids to make plastic, and help restart our chemical industry.  That was especially true after Shell announced its plans to build a cracker in Pennsylvania.  Now Shell appears to have shelved its plans, and MarkWest is making plans to send up to 400,000 bbl per day  down to the Gulf Coast, where there's lots of existing petrochemical capacity, or northwest to Canaday.   I have heard  the ethane is used in Canada to mix with viscous tar sand oil to make it thin enough to flow through pipelines.

Climate Change and the Food Supply

This from economist Don Boudreaux, responding to an article in the New York Times that climate change is going to pose a danger to the world's food supply:

You report that "Climate change will pose sharp risks to the world’s food supply in coming decades" ("Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies," Nov. 2) - with the premise that this impending calamity requires aggressive government curtailment or modification of industrial capitalist activities. 

Color me skeptical. Wherever industrial capitalism has flourished over the past three centuries it has eliminated for the first time in human history the millennia-long curse of recurrent famines. Today, food is in short supply only in societies without market institutions and cut off from global trade. (The people suffering the greatest risk now of fatal shortages of food are true locavores, such as the North Koreans and the Somalis.) Relatedly, some of the worst famines in modern times - most notably, in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China - have been caused by the hubris of government officials curtailing market forces with command-and-control regulations.

The greatest risk to the world's food supply is not the industrial capitalist activities that environmentalists are keen to curtail. Rather, the greatest risk is the trust that many currently well-fed westerners blithely put in government to rein in the only force in human history that has proven successful at eliminating starvation: market-driven capitalism.

thanks to Bishop Hill 

No Bids on Solar Auction

You'd hate to throw a party, and no one comes.   That appears to be the situation with the first auction of rights to develop a solar energy facility on federal land. No bidders showed up for the solar auction at San Luis Valley, CO.  Some cited the uncertainty of the cost of  mitigation that might be required for development at the site, or a lack of a market for the power at the cost of generation.   It's further proof that solar power is still not competitive with fossil fuels, unless subsidies are available.

Marcellus Natural Gas Production Continues to Exceed Expectations

Marcellus natural gas production continues to surprise even the experts, reaching 12 billion cubic feet per day according to this report in the Daily Mail.  Oil  and gas industry employment is up, as Phil Kabler reports here. Not all the news is good, though.  Jared Hunt, Daily Mail business writer, reports on the diminished  likelihood of getting an ethane cracker in the region.

US Supreme Court to Hear Greenhouse Gas Rule Challenge

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of Texas v. EPA, in which the D.C. Circuit Court approved EPA’s greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations.  Numerous industrial organizations and states had challenged the D.C. Court’s upholding of the Endangerment Finding, in which EPA concluded that GHGs from mobile sources represent a danger to U.S. health and welfare, and the Timing and Tailoring Rules, in which EPA described how it would regulate GHGs for stationary sources under the Clean Air Act.  The two primary objections raised by industry were that EPA’s conclusion that GHGs are a danger (and therefore a pollutant to be regulated) is  unsupported scientifically, and that EPA’s conclusion that GHGs are a pollutant under the mobile source program should not  automatically result in GHG regulations for  stationary sources under the New Source Review program.

The Supreme  Court has decided to  consider only the very narrow, but very important, question of “whether EPA permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouse gases.” EPA has taken the position that once a pollutant is regulated under the Clean Air Act’s mobile source rule, it is regulated under other portions of the  Act as well, including New Source Review.  The Supreme Court will now tell us whether that is correct, or whether EPA’s GHG regulations are limited to mobile sources, at least until EPA would initiate rulemaking to impose GHG limits on stationary sources.

EPA recently set GHG New Source Performance Standards for electric generators that would essentially prevent construction of new coal-fired generating plants, and is presently preparing to set GHG standards for existing sources as well.   The Supreme Court decision will determine whether EPA has authority to adopt those rules.

The Supreme Court’sorder is at http://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/101513zor_4g25.pdf

ORSANCO Delays Mixing Zone Prohibition

ORSANCO (the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission)  has elected to delay its prohibition on mixing zones for bioaccumulative substances until October 16, 2015.  The prohibition had been scheduled to go into effect on October 16, 2013 for the following substances:

Bioaccumulative Chemicals of Concern

Lindane	Mirex
Hexachlorocyclohexane	Hexachlorobenzene
alpha-Hexachlorocyclohexane	Chlordane
beta-Hexachlorocyclohexane	DDD
delta-Hexachlorocyclohexane	DDT
Hexachlorobutadiene	DDE
Photomirex	Octachlorostyrene
1,2,4,5-Tetrachlorobenzene	PCBs
Toxaphene	2,3,7,8-TCDD
Pentachlorobenzene	Mercury
1,2,3,4-Tetrachlorobenzene	Dieldrin

During the extension of the mixing zone prohibition, dischargers will be expected to be working on reductions in bioaccumulative substances.

Ken Ward's article on the Commission's action is here. 

The High Cost Of Renewable Credits

Command and control economies just don't work.  Congress requires refiners to blend gasoline with ethanol, but right now  gasoline consumption is dropping  and  there are relatively few cars that can use more than a 10% ethanol blend,so  refiners can't use all the ethanol they are supposed to.  To compensate, they  have to buy credits - i.e., pay a penalty for failure to use enough ethanol.  That gets tacked onto the price of a gallon of gas.

Jeff Macke of Breakout summarizes it this way.

 The vast majority — around 90% — of American cars don't work with an ethanol blend over 10%. When the ethanol requirements continued to rise while demand for end product fell, the refiners were reduced to buying and selling RINs or Renewable Identification Numbers, which are, in effect, credits that allow refiners to meet the terms of the 2005 Clean Air Act without producing fuel that is unsuitable for most cars.

So as demand for gas falls, refiners need to buy more RINs. From just pennies-per-gallon in January, RINs had soared over $1.40 by last summer. Lutz says as much as 75% of the additional cost was passed along to the consumer.

 Therefore, in an attempt to force cleaner burning fuels into the marketplace, the EPA created a policy that ended up artificially inflating the cost of refining gas when demand fell. So the refiners and consumers got gouged for not burning enough fossil fuels. Only the government could make refinery companies look sympathetic.

See the story here.  The good news is that Macke believes EPA will provide some relief on  renewable fuel credits, dropping the price of gasoline to perhaps less than $3 a gallon.

West Virginia DEP Schedules Training For Electronic DMR Submissions

The state Division of Water and Waste Management has free training scheduled for the following dates for the regulated community and consultants who are required to submit certain water resources permit applications and discharge monitoring reporting (DMR) electronically to the DWWM. The training will be conducted at the state Department of Environmental Protection headquarters, located at 601 57th St, SE, Charleston, WV   25304.

The dates are:

September 26, 2013 Thursday

ePermitting  10:00 am to 12:00 pm

September 26, 2013 Thursday

eReporting 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

October 7, 2013 Monday

ePermitting  10:00 am to 12:00 pm

October 7, 2013

Monday                                                               

eReporting 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

October 31, 2013 Thursday

ePermitting 10:00 am to 12:00 pm

October 31, 2013 Thursday

eReporting 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

To reserve a spot for the above training, contact either Mavis Layton at Mavis.L.Layton@wv.gov, (304) 926-0499, ext. 1025; or Megan Smith at Megan.D.Smith@wv.gov, (304) 926-0499, ext. 1281. E-mail is preferable.

                                                          

The WV Environmental Training Center is hosting DEP Training in the Bridgeport area around the end of November/early December 2013 instead of Morgantown as previously mentioned.  Check the wvetc.org website calendar in a month or so for actual date and sign up with them.  

  

District Court Interprets NPDES Permit Shield

Judge Chambers of the USDC for the Southern Dist of WV recently ruled, in a case pertaining to discharges from a surface coal mine, that the mine (owned by Marfork Coal Co.) was in violation of its NPDES permit if it discharged selenium in excess of the state water quality criteria, even though it had no permit limit for selenium.  As part of the permit application process, the mine had tested for selenium and found it at a level too low to qualify for an effluent limit, based on a reasonable potential analysis.  Sampling done by environmental groups at a later time allegedly revealed selenium discharges in excess of state criteria, and the environmentalists brought a citizen suit under the Clean Water Act, claiming that Marfork had violated its permit.

Marfork relied upon the permit shield that is found in the federal (CWA Section 402(k)) and state (W. Va. Code 22-11-6(2)) acts. The Court ruled that the permit shield provided no protection against a citizen suit alleging a violation of water quality standards, even where the agency had been provided selenium data at the time of the permit application, and had rejected effluent limits for selenium.  The Court decided that the permit required compliance with water quality standards, and the presence of any pollutant in excess of water quality criteria  (numeric or narrative, presumably) was a violation of the permit, even if no numeric permit limit had been placed in the permit. 

One  crucial difference between coal permits and other NPDES permits is that the  coal NPDES regulations have a provision that requires dischargers to comply with water quality standards, and the industrial NPDES regulations do not.  That may provide industrial facilities with a more expansive permit shield. 

The case is Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition v. Marfork Coal Company, Case 5:12-CV-01464 (Aug 23, 2103).  Thanks to Bob McLusky for bringing this to my attention.

Great Kanawha River Cleanup September 14, 2013

The 24th annual Great Kanawha River Cleanup, sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, is scheduled from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, Sept. 14.

Cleanup sites include Kanawha Falls at Glen Ferris; Magic Island in Charleston; Winfield Beach/Locks; Daniel Boone Park in Charleston; and Roadside Park in St. Albans.

Those wishing to volunteer are urged to register with the DEP so enough supplies can be obtained for each cleanup location. The DEP’s REAP program (Rehabilitation Environmental Action Plan) will supply bags and gloves for volunteers and will arrange for trash to be hauled away.

All volunteers also will receive a T-shirt.

Last year, local citizens collected two tons of debris and trash from the Kanawha River’s banks. Over the last five years, volunteers have removed more than 30 tons of trash from the river and around 400 discarded tires.

For more information or to register to volunteer, contact Travis Cooper at 304-926-0499 ext. 1117 or email:

Travis.L.Cooper@wv.gov

Today's Number - 60 GWs

Sixty gigawatts (GW) is the total amount of installed wind power capacity in America as of the end of 2012.  It is also the amount of coal-fired generating capacity that will be retired over the next five years in the eastern US.  The Department of Energy reports that 

Last year, over 13 gigawatts (GW) of new wind power capacity were added to the U.S. grid – nearly double the wind capacity deployed in 2011. This tremendous growth helped America’s total wind power capacity surpass 60 GW at the end of 2012 – representing enough capacity to power more than 15 million homes each year, or as many homes as in California and Washington state combined. The country’s cumulative installed wind energy capacity has increased more than 22-fold since 2000.

E & E Publishing, in an article  passed along by  Midwest Energy News,  reports that 60 GW of coal-powered electricity generating capacity will be retired over the next 5 years.  This will present issues for the regional power transmission organizations to deal with.

The reliability of the U.S. electric grid has been a key concern among regulators and utilities in response to impending emissions control regulations by U.S. EPA, including greenhouse gas regulations and tighter control on so-called conventional pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxides. 

Nearly 85 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power plants are in the Eastern Interconnection, a part of the grid comprising 39 states along the East Coast and across to the Midwest. By 2015, about half of those coal plants will be 50 years old or older, but they represent about 25 percent of the region’s total capacity, the report says. 

The report says that the region contains 269 gigawatts of coal capacity, with one-third of that in five states: Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The news about increased power generation from wind is a good thing - it's helpful to have a mix of power generation sources, and the technology behind wind turbines will likely continue to improve.  But one can't compare 60 GW of  base load, reliable generation from coal plants with 60 GW of intermittent generation from wind turbines.  And the unsubsidized cost of wind generation will have to come down significantly to be comparable to fossil fuel or nuclear.   In some ways, wind may be a victim of its own success - having spent the last few years proclaiming that its costs are on a par with fossil fuels, there may be less support among politicians for continuing subsidies.

Office of Oil and Gas Says No Further Air Pollution Regulation Needed

A provision in the Natural Gas Horizontal Well Control Act directed the  DEP Office of Oil and Gas to study the need for further regulation of  air  pollutants from oil and gas drilling sites.  The OOG finished its report in late June and presented it to an interim committee of the West Virginia Legislature yesterday.  

The important conclusion from the report was that 

Based on a review of several completed air studies to date, including the results from the well pad development monitoring conducted in West Virginia's Brooke, Marion and Wetzel Counties, no additional legislative rules establishing special requirements need to be promulgated at this time.  The existing regulatory framework provides a basis for implementation of requirements to minimize and mitigate human health and environmental impacts. 

The report can be found here, and the cover letter summarizing the conclusions can be found here. 

The report contains three appendices, listing location restrictions, existing air pollution control requirements, and a list of state and federal investigations, completed and ongoing, investigating the effects of  oil and gas drilling.  They could be a useful resource.  

A story about the legislative meeting from Fuel FIx  is found here. 

The Energy Cost of Raising the World's Standard of Living

Poverty means  energy poverty for most of the world. Lights, heating and cooling, refrigeration, transportation, pumps, and  labor-saving devices of all kinds require power.  So how much additional energy would be needed to elevate the poor to  the energy usage required to maintain the standard of living of a developed country like Spain? Considering the huge improvement in health and quality of life that would result, the amount of additional energy required is surprisingly little. Willis Eschenbach  explains it here.

Of equal interest is the extended comment on Eschenbach's essay from rgb@duke, a professor of physics at Duke University.  He makes the intriguing case that future sources  of energy are essentially unlimited. Since you  may not scroll down through the comments, I've  reprinted it below.

A few small notes. Looking at the table, there is a difference between “reserves” and “recoverable resources”. We have 81 years of the former, but well over ten times that in recoverable resources. The former has proven to be a rather flexible and hence perhaps pointless number as it keeps changing as new resources are discovered and proven, which is why we haven’t reached “the end of oil” quite yet. In particular, there is a LOT of coal that is recoverable, and nothing prevents us from using a venerable process for converting coal into gasoline but price — the general availability of cheaper gasoline produced directly by refining crude oil.

Second, you deliberately (I imagine) did not address nuclear energy and its reserves. Uranium is problematic — perhaps — because high pressure light water cooled reactors have technical risks of meltdown and associated risks of nuclear proliferation, but nevertheless there are at least hundreds, possibly tens of thousands thousands of years worth of Uranium reserves (the latter if we use breeder reactors and actually burn all of the Uranium instead of a pitifully small fraction of lightly enriched U-235). Of course breeder reactors that are efficient in this regard burn plutonium for most of the energy they produce, and plutonium is bomb material at this point for pretty much any country that gets it as the concept of implosion lenses and critical density is hardly either secret or technically inaccessible any more even to a very poor and backwards country. Still, we have 30,000 years of Uranium WITHOUT using Uranium from seawater from proven reserves if we use breeder reactors. If anyone works out how to economically extract Uranium from seawater we have an effectively infinite supply — humanity would evolve before we ran out, as the 60,000 years in seawater would be amplified by 100 to 6 million years. Admittedly, this is “at current consumption rates” so it would be less if we converted over to using fission reactors on a broad basis, but I think that it makes the 81 years entirely moot.

Third, that doesn’t include Thorium, either. Thorium has a number of advantages over Uranium as a reactor fuel, the principle ones being that it is somewhat (but not decisively) more difficult to use as the basis for a clandestine bomb building program, it produces anywhere from 10 to 10,000 times less nuclear waste depending on the fuel cycle selected, and it is MUCH more difficult to make a thorium reactor “melt down” the way existing solid-fuel LWR Uranium designs can. The most advantage fuel cycle appears to be liquid salt reactor designs, which literally cannot melt down, have reduced (but nonzero) proliferation concerns, and which could literally be used to burn EXISTING nuclear waste and in the process would release a lot of the unburned energy in existing spent nuclear solid fuel (currently only around 1% of the available energy is being recovered in LWR Uranium non-breeder designs). Estimates of thorium reserves and available energy necessarily vary because only prototype reactors have been built of the various kinds and because little effort has been put into developing Thorium reserves (Thorium is currently a radioactive waste byproduct of mining rare earth metals and has only a handful of industrial/commercial applications as things now stand) but it is at LEAST tens of thousands of years. As a side effect of adopting Thorium as an energy fuel, we would completely solve the problems with global shortages of rare earths and hence e.g. rare earth magnets and exotic semiconductors, both essential components in other aspects of efficient energy production and transmission and utilization.

I know that we don’t necessarily agree on the eventual utility of solar power, but IMO there is also no question at all that over the next decade or two solar cell technology and engineering will progress to where the cost per watt at over the counter retail rates drops below fifty US cents (to as low, eventually, as ten cents or even less). This will correspond to wholesale prices that are roughly half of these retail prices. This will push the amortized cost recovery for large and small scale solar energy projects to well under a decade, with an expected plant lifetime of at least twice that, and IMO will make solar a no-brainer energy resource for the entire tropical and subtropical band. Although without efficient energy transportation and storage (which are both more speculative and less predictable) solar alone is not a viable single energy resource for a steady state global civilization such as the one you propose, they can easily eke out both nuclear and carbon-based resources and double or triple any of the numbers above for years of available energy.

If (say) high temperature superconducting transmission lines are discovered/invented that facilitate the transport of electrical energy distances on the order of 10,000 miles with minimal loss, and/or high capacity high efficiency multicycle energy storage is ever worked out (say zinc oxide batteries are eventually developed that have charged energy densities that are roughly comparable to gasoline) it would both permit the eking out of “fossile” resources (carbon, Uranium and Thorium) to “indefinitely long” and could even serve as the basis for a truly steady state civilization, which I believe should be our long term goal regardless of greenhouse issues.

Finally, on the speculative front, is low temperature fusion. Fusion in some sense is the holy grail of energy production mechanisms. If economically feasible deuterium-based fusion is ever worked out, we will literally never run out of energy. It would take us tens of millions of years of utilization to BEGIN to deplete deuterium even if you provided energy to every person on Earth at levels equal to or in excess of US consumption per capita, and with that much energy we could cost-effectively mine e.g. Europa, Titan and the gas giants if we should ever actually significantly deplete the Earth’s oceans. A mix of solar and fusion energy production would make the human species secure well past the point where it is no longer recognizably human, time frames longer than the interval from the end of the Cretaceous to the present, geological time scales. The human species might well die off over that sort of time frame, but probably not because we ran out of energy. To ensure survival of the species even beyond that would likely require at least interplanetary if not interstellar colonization, and still more speculative advances in physics and technology for the latter to become even imaginatively possible.

Otherwise, yes, I agree, we have little excuse for not ending energy poverty worldwide. Nor do I think Spain/Italy should be the standard — our goal should be lifting people up to e.g. the rate of energy utilization in the US. Eliminating poverty might actually facilitate a reduction in the rate of population growth or even initiate a period of population decrease, and that too is a way of extending and improving per capita consumption. Finally, there is a world of undeveloped technology that might reduce per capita consumption without impacting quality of life. The past conversion from incandescent to CF light bulbs, the future conversion from CF to LED bulbs (that use still less energy and have far longer lifetimes) are a prime example. Houses that use integrated local solar for local daytime AC are another. Smart houses that deliver e.g. light or AC only when and where it is needed (without loss of comfort or utility) yet another. A lot of this is technically feasible right now; it simply isn’t implemented because the cost-benefit is marginal with energy being as CHEAP as it is, but as energy prices increase over time, the marginal return from these technologies and their broader implementation and economy of scale will greatly reduce the real dollar cost and eke out our energy resources further still.

It would be a whole lot easier to establish a stable and sustainable global civilization with a billion humans than it is or will be with 7+ billion humans. OTOH, I’m not quite ready to go out there and pick 6+ billion humans to be “culled”. Nature — via pandemics, asteroid collisions, ice ages — might do it anyway. Or, we might get there by simply improving the standard of living worldwide to the point where humans (apparently) stop reproducing at rates that lead to population growth, and then gradually ramp it down by having fewer babies than people who die of natural causes for a century or two.

Either way, I won’t be around to watch most of this, probably. Interesting to think about, though.

rgb

EPA Updates Oil and Gas Standards for Storage Tnaks

EPA has announced revisions to the 40 CFR Part 60 Subpart OOOO (sometimes referred to as "Quad O") New Source Performance Standards  that apply to oil and gas production storage tanks.  In West Virginia, these changes will presumably be made part of the G-70 general air permit for oil and gas production facilities that we hope will be issued by the Division of Air Quality  fairly soon.

It is worth noting that Chesapeake Operating  appealed a permit condition in a minor source Reg 13 permit  that specified how it was to confirm flashing emission potential, and a resolution of that appeal may affect how companies calculate whether they are going to exceed the 6 ton threshold.

Below is EPA's press release, with  a hyperlink that can eventually get  you to the rule.,

WASHINGTON – Today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued updates to its April 2012 oil and natural gas standards for storage tanks, which allow responsible oil and natural gas production while ensuring air emissions are reduced as quickly as possible. The updates will phase in emission control deadlines, starting with higher-emitting tanks first, and will provide the time needed to ramp up the production and installation of controls. EPA is making the changes based on information received after the 2012 standards were issued that shows more storage tanks will come online than the agency originally estimated.

Storage tanks that emit 6 or more tons of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) a year must reduce emissions by 95 percent. Today’s rule establishes two emission control deadlines:

• tanks that come online after April 12, 2013 are likely to have higher emissions and must control VOC emissions within 60 days or by April 15, 2014, whichever is later; and 
• tanks that came online before April 12, 2013 are likely to have lower emissions and must control VOC emissions by April 15, 2015.

The updated standards also establish an alternative emissions limit that would allow owners/operators to remove controls from tanks if they can demonstrate that the tanks emit less than 4 tons per year of VOC emissions without controls. In addition, the rule streamlines compliance and monitoring requirements for tanks that have already installed controls.

The oil and natural gas industry uses tanks for temporary storage of crude oil, condensate and other liquids, before those liquids are moved to a pipeline, sold or moved for disposal. These storage tanks can be sources of emissions of ozone-forming VOCs, along with several toxic air pollutants, including benzene. Today’s final action does not affect the April 2012 standards for capturing natural gas from hydraulically fractured wells.
Today’s updates respond to petitions for reconsideration of the 2012 New Source Performance Standards for Oil and Natural Gas Production. Those cost-effective standards rely on proven technologies and best practices to reduce emissions of ozone-forming VOCs and air toxics, including benzene and hexane.

Exposure to ozone is linked a variety of health effects, including aggravated asthma, reduced lung function and increased susceptibility to respiratory infections, in addition to increased risk of premature death from heart or lung disease. Benzene and hexane are air toxics, which can cause cancer and other serious health effects.


More information: http://www.epa.gov/airquality/oilandgas/actions.html

EPA Proposing Changes to CLean Water Act Reporting

EPA is proposing a modernization of Clean Water Act reporting. (See press release below.) The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Water and Waste Management already requires electronic filing of  NPDES discharge monitoring reports, so it's not clear what would change. Yogesh Patel, who heads up the DWWM's NPDES Permitting Section, is not sure how EPA's new proposal will affect West Virginia's eDMR system, but he will be attending an EPA webinar and  advising NPDES permittees thereafter.  

EPA Proposes Rule to Modernize Clean Water Act Reporting

E-reporting initiative will increase efficiency, ease burden for states and improve public access to data

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed a rule that would modernize Clean Water Act (CWA) reporting processes for hundreds of thousands of municipalities, industries, and other facilities by converting to an electronic data reporting system. The proposed e-reporting rule would make facility-specific information, such as inspection and enforcement history, pollutant monitoring results, and other data required by permits accessible to the public through EPA’s website.

EPA estimates that, once the rule is fully implemented, the 46 states and the Virgin Island Territory that are authorized to administer the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program will collectively save approximately $29 million each year as a result of switching from paper to electronic reporting.

“In addition to dramatically cutting costs for states and other regulatory authorities, the e-reporting rule will substantially expand transparency by making it easier for everyone to quickly access critical data on pollution that may be affecting communities,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “The e-reporting rule will also allow states and other regulatory authorities to focus limited resources on the most serious water quality problems, which will lead to increased compliance, improved water quality, and a level playing field for the regulated community.”
Currently, facilities subject to reporting requirements submit data in paper form to states and other regulatory authorities, where the information must be manually entered into data systems. Through the e-reporting rule, these facilities will electronically report their data directly to the appropriate regulatory authority. EPA expects that the e-reporting rule will lead to more comprehensive and complete data on pollution sources, quicker availability of the data for use, and increased accessibility and transparency of the data to the public.

The CWA requires that municipal, industrial or commercial facilities that discharge wastewater directly into waters of the United States obtain a permit. The NPDES program requires that permitted facilities monitor and report data on pollutant discharges and take other actions to ensure discharges do not affect human health or the environment.

Most facilities subject to reporting requirements will be required to start submitting data electronically one year following the effective date of the final rule. Facilities with limited access to the Internet will have the option of one additional year to come into compliance with the new rule. EPA will work closely with states to provide support to develop or enhance state electronic reporting capabilities.

EPA has already scheduled several webinars in an effort to help states, trade organizations, and other interested parties better understand the details and requirements of the proposed rule. Over the next few months, EPA expects to schedule additional webinar sessions.

The proposed rule will be available for review and public comment for 90 days following the publication date in the Federal Register.

View the proposed rule in the Federal Register: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/07/30/2013-17551/npdes-electronic-reporting-rule

More information on webinars: http://www2.epa.gov/compliance/proposed-npdes-electronic-reporting-rule

Fish & Wildlife List Diamond Darter As Endangered Species

The US Fish & Wildlife Service has decided to list the Diamond Darter, a fish that is only found in the Elk River, as endangered.  A news release from FWS is found here.  The following is an excellent summary of the facts surrounding the listing, from Jason Bostic of the WV Coal Assn.  

In the July 26, 2012 the F&WS proposed listing the diamond darter under the ESA.  Concurrent with its proposed classification as an endangered species, the F&WS proposed to designate 28 miles of the lower Elk River in West Virginia (from the Confluence of King Shoals Run near the Wallback Wildlife Management Area to near Knollwood Drive in Charleston) as “critical habitat” for the species.  This section of the Elk River contains the only known remaining populations of diamond darters in the country.  F&WS also proposed to classify 95 miles of the Green River in Kentucky as critical habitat since diamond darters historically inhabited the area, although none exist there today.  

F&WS has NOT made a decision regarding critical habitat designation in the notice that will be published tomorrow.  The decision regarding critical habitat will come later, as will any proposed protection measures.

In the July 2012 Federal Register notice announcing the proposed listing and critical habitat designation, F&WS identified several factors that may jeopardize the continued existence of the diamond darter, including water quality impacts associated with coal mining activities undertaken on tributaries to the Elk River.  F&WS claims that sedimentation, metals and increases in downstream conductivity threaten the existence of other sensitive fish species and therefore pose a threat to the diamond darter.  The agency’s conclusions regarding conductance and fish impacts is largely based on studies undertaken by the agency on the Kentucky Arrow Darter in the Cumberland River Basin.

Although mining activities generally do not directly exist within the 28-mile range of proposed critical habitat designation area, concerns related to the alternation of that critical habitat area could be applied to any proposed / current mining activity on any of the Elk River’s tributaries.  The terms of the ESA that require federal agencies to ensure that permitted activities will not jeopardize the continued existence of an endangered species and/or its habitat would apply directly to Clean Water Act (CWA) Section 404 permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and indirectly to the issuance of permits by the state under the Surface Mining Control & Reclamation Act, and potentially to state issued Clean Water Act Section 402 NPDES permits.  

King Coal Highway Renamed For Mike Whitt

In a nice tribute to a man who exemplified unselfish public service, the King Coal Highway in Mingo County was named after Mike Whitt, who died a year or so ago.  The Williamson Daily News has the story here.   If only every county had someone working for it as hard as Mike did for Mingo County.

Dam Owner Education Program August 8 in Eastern Panhandle

      The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Dam Safety Program is sponsoring a one-day workshop for dam owners and monitors on Thursday, Aug.

8, at the Mountain Lake Club near Charles Town. 

The workshop, which will run from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., is designed to provide practical information on topics of importance to anyone who owns or monitors a dam. Topics to be covered include: Dam Safety Act and rule; owner responsibilities and liabilities; basic terminology; causes of dam failures; emergency action plan guidance for dam monitors; maintenance problems and solutions; and remediation projects, hiring an engineer, costs.

The early registration fee is $25. It will cost $35 at the door. As part of the registration fee, workshop participants will receive a CD-ROM with the presentations and other valuable resources. To register, or for more information, contact the WVDEP’s Anita Chapman at 866-568-6649, ext. 1006 or email Anita.R.Chapman@wv.gov.

Australia Moving From Carbon Tax To CarbonTrading

Last year Australia adopted a carbon tax, one that hasn't been too well received. It was a pretty hefty tax of about $24 Aus, much higher than about any other country.  Green feeling evidently overcame rational thought, as Australia was hamstringing itself in the world markets. It was supposed to be spread out broadly among all the big companies, but as Phillip Hutchings learned, that wasn't the case.   Mr. Hutchings provides an excellent analysis of the carbon tax here.

The Australian government has retreated, and will be moving to a carbon trading system, in line with those in Europe and elsewhere. Australian politicians are now saying that the country  should be contributing to GHG reduction in a manner (and to a degree) consistent with other nations, which seems about right.  Platts has the story here The primary effect will be to drop the price for a ton of CO2 equivalent down to the European price of about $6 US, and it will probably drop further.  (I seem to recall that the US carbon trading market collapsed and trading was suspended a few years ago.)   .

Willis Eschenbach has calculated on Watts Up With That how much the province of British Columbia could reduce global warming by its efforts to be carbon free, and came up with a figure of .005 of a degree.  Are all these carbon schemes worth anything?

Coal - It's Not Just For Burning Anymore

Forbes magazine reminds us that coal isn't useful just for burning; it can also be the building block of structural and electrical components with interesting characteristics.   The West Virginia Coal Association reminds us that  coal can be foamed into insulation and other useful products.  Perhaps one day coal will be in greater demand as a source of  graphene and carbon fiber than for power generation.

Consol Shows Off State-Of-The-Art Water Treatment Plant

Consolidation Coal Company has recently unveiled a $200 million treatment  plant and pipeline system to handle acid water from numerous underground mines in the Morgantown area. Joselyn King of the Wheeling Intelligencer/Wheeling News Register reports on it here.  The treatment plant was a necessity if Consol was going to continue operatingits mines,  its willingness to construct the plant speaks volumes for its commitment to the area.

Of particular interest is the possible use of the treated water as frack water by the oil and gas industry. Given the plant's location in the heart of the liquids-rich portion of the Marcellus, that would seem like a great opportunity for Consol to recoup a small part of the cost of running the plant.

West Virginia Supreme Court Defines "Surface Only"

Years ago, in a poorly-written decision, the WV Supreme Court decided that a conveyance of "surface only" was inherently  ambiguous in the case of  Ramage v. South Penn Oil Co., 94 W.Va. 81, 118 S.E. 162 (1923).  In a recent well-written opinion by Justice Ketchum,  the Supreme Court reversed Syllabus Point 1 of Ramage and gave those words a reasonable, set definition.

The word “surface,” when used in an instrument of conveyance, generally means the exposed area of land, improvements on the land, and any part of the underground actually used by a surface owner as an adjunct to surface use (for example, medium for the roots of growing plants, groundwater, water wells, roads, basements, or construction footings).

You wouldn't think that "surface only", in a property conveyance, would be unclear, but you would be wrong. I have exactly this issue in a pending case, and I look forward to citing the court's decision.

The decision is Faith United Methodist v. Morgan, Case No. 12-0080 (June 13, 2013). Thanks to Tom Hurney for writing about this in one of  his excellent emails on behalf of the Defense Trial Counsel.

We Can't Predict the Climate

This is part of a comment from rgb at Duke, a commenter on Watts Up With That 

We cannot predict the climate. We cannot even predict the damn weather, not more than a week or so out. There are really good reasons we cannot predict the weather, and equally good reasons we cannot predict the climate. It is true that they aren’t quite the same problem, and sometimes one can predict the average behavior of a system in the long run (whatever that means) when one cannot predict its short time behavior at all reliably, but when I say we cannot predict the climate I mean that wecannot even understand the past behavior of the climate! We have no friggin’ idea why the MWP was warm, the LIA was cold, and why the world warmed (without CO_2 increase to drive it) since the Dalton minimum. We cannot predict the future state of one of the only important contributor of heat to the system, an enormously important cause whose effects on the Earth are complex and only beginning to be understood. To claim otherwise is an enormous act of intellectual hubris and scientific fraud — unless and until you can back up the claim with actual predictions, consistently validated. Or hey, I’d settle for a halfway decent hindcast or two, back to (say) 0 BCE or 16,000 BCE or 120,000 BCE or 50,000,000 BCE. The only thing we learn looking at the real climate record of the Earth is that it is always changing, that the changes are sometimes sudden and profound, and that we have no idea why they occurred or why they WERE either sudden, or gradual as the case may be, or gentle and moderate, or profound and catastrophic as the case may be.

Some of these things we are likely to never be able to properly prove or understandas the evidence is simply gone into the past. The Ordovician-Silurian transition — an ice age that began with 7000 ppm CO_2, and that peaked in glaciation a few million years later with CO_2 still at 4000 ppm. What’s up with that? Space aliens came and directed a freezing ray at the Earth, straight out of Buck Rogers? The Sun decided to turn off (partly) for a million years or so? A civilization consisting of highly evolved giant spiders had a nuclear war and triggered a nuclear winter a few million years long? Sure, we can propose more sensible alternatives, but honestly they will all still feel like science fiction, and in all probability none of them can either be verified/supported or falsified, at best they can be shown to be a consistent possibility.

Why is it so very difficult to say “we don’t know”?

rgb

There's more at his comment, found here, and go to June 5 at 5:12 pm

Morrisey and Huffman Respond To EPA SIP Call for Changes to Startup and Shutdown Events

            EPA has proposed significant  changes to the manner in which states manage their air pollution control programs.  Many states allow air emission sources to exceed air pollution permit limits during brief periods of equipment startup, shutdown and malfunction when there may be, for example, incomplete fuel combustion. As a result of a lawsuit by the Sierra Club, EPA now wants to require states to amend their State Implementation Plans (SIPs) to treat emissions exceedances during startups and shutdowns as violations.  (Exceedances may be allowed because of malfunctions, but only as a matter of enforcement discretion.)  EPA's fact sheet can be found here.

            The SIP Call identifies eight West Virginia regulations that would have to be revised to eliminate exemptions for startup and shutdown events.  On May 13, 2013 Randy Huffman, Director of the Department of Environmental Protection and Patrick Morrisey, Attorney General responded to EPA, objecting to EPA’s proposed rejection of the state regulations.  One of the principal contentions of EPA is that §302(k) of the Clean Air Act defines emission limitation as “a requirement established by the State with the Administrator which limits the quantity, rate, or concentration of air pollutants on a continuous basis. . .”   However, as Huffman and Morrisey pointed out, in the past EPA has not interpreted the word “continuous” to preclude higher emissions during SSM events.  They also noted: that EPA lacks the authority to issue a SIP Call because it had not made the necessary findings that changes in state regulations are needed; that the rule fails to comply with the federal Administrative Procedure Act; and that EPA had misconstrued West Virginia’s SSM emissions and greatly overstated the amount of discretion given the state to allow higher emissions during the SSM events.

            Several other states have joined West Virginia in opposing EPA’s rulemaking.  EPA will review the comments and then determine whether to proceed with the proposed rule.

            State Implementation Plans: Response toPetition for Rulemaking; Findings of Substantial Inadequacies; and SIP Calls toAmend Provisions Applying Access Emissions During Periods of Startup, Shutdown,and Malfunction.  78 Fed. Reg. 12460(Feb. 22, 2013) Air Docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2012-0322.

West Virginia Issues Oil and Gas Storm Water Permit

            On May 13, 2013 the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Water and Waste Management issued its General Water Pollution Control Permit for Stormwater Associated with Oil and Gas-related Construction Activities.  This permit will be required for storm water discharges from earth-disturbing activities of more than an acre that are associated with oil and gas production and transportation  and  that are not covered under an Office of Oil and Gas well work permit. The permit has an effective date of June 12, 2013 and an expiration date of May 13, 2018.

The new permit is very similar to the  NPDES general permit for storm water from construction activities that is already in effect.  However, a separate state-only permit had to be issued for oil and gas activities because storm water runoff from oil and gas activities is generally exempt from state/federal NPDES permitting. Section 402(l)(2) of the Clean Water Act exempts oil and gas operations from storm water permitting, and §502 of the Act broadly defines those operations:

The term “oil and gas exploration, production, processing or treatment operations or transmission facilities” means all field activities or operations associated with exploration, production, processing or treatment operations, or transmission facilities, including activities necessary to prepare a site for drilling and for the movement and placement of drilling equipment, whether or not such field activities or operations may be considered to be construction activities.

33 U.S.C. §1362(24).  More information about the scope of this exemption can be found at EPA’s website and in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 526 F.3d 593 (9th Cir. 2008).

The result of the exemption is a patchwork of regulation.  Generally speaking, the Office of Oil and Gas requires sediment and erosion control measures for roads, pads, pits and other earth disturbance that are associated with drilling.  These best management practices are placed in drilling permits, but they are state-only conditions, and are not enforceable under the state/federal NPDES program.  The new permit is intended for earth disturbance associated with gas line laying and other oil and gas activities that are not regulated in a drilling permit.  Runoff from all other earth disturbance is covered under Division of Water and Waste Management’s general NPDES permit for storm water discharged from construction operations.

The permit, fact sheet and responsiveness summary for the new oil and gas storm water permit  can be found here. 

            For more information, contact Dave Yaussy at dly@ramlaw.com   

2012 Drought Not Tied To Climate Change

It looks like the drought last year in the Midwest was the result of changes in the Jet Stream, not global warming.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reached that conclusion recently as reported on Watts Up With That.  See another report on NOAA's  report  here in the Examiner

Trout Fishing Improves in Southern West Virginia

Trout fishing in Southern West Virginia is making a comeback, according to this article by Bob Fala outdoors columnist for the Logan Banner.  He gives credit all around, to the Clean Water Act, DEP and DNR, Trout Unlimited, local citizen groups, and coal mine mitigation projects.

West Virginia DEP Junior Conservation Camp June 17-21

Applications are being accepted for the 33rd annual state Junior Conservation Camp, scheduled June 17-21 at Cedar Lakes in Ripley.

Sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Youth Environmental Program, the camp is open to youth, ages 11-14. The cost is $165 per child and the deadline for paying the application fee is May 1.

Junior Conservation Camp offers a wide variety of classes that focus on a sound environmental education and other topics, such as first aid and hunter safety. Approximately

200 campers will learn how to conserve West Virginia’s natural resources by attending classes on subjects such as wildlife, recycling, geocaching/orienteering, water study, forestry, fishing and more. Sports activities will include swimming, basketball, kickball, volleyball, Wiffle Ball and relay races.

Camp assemblies will take place Monday evening and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Campfire programs are scheduled Monday through Wednesday nights with a dance set for Thursday night. 

Each year, the assemblies feature presenters from organizations around the state who provide demonstrations for the campers. Past presenters have included the Oglebay Good Zoo; the state Division of Natural Resources’ (snake presentation and mechanical deer and turkey demonstrations); DEP Division of Air Quality (energy efficiency demonstration); DEP Dive Team; and the state Division of Forestry (fire dog demonstration).

Camp counselors and leaders will include dedicated and knowledgeable employees from the DEP, DNR, Division of Forestry and the West Virginia University Extension Service. For more information and application forms, please contact Diana Haid at 304-926-0499, Ext. 1114 or email diana.k.haid@wv.gov .

For youth ages 14-18, the state Conservation Camp at Camp Caesar in Webster County is scheduled for June 10-15. The camp is sponsored by the West Virginia Conservation Agency.

For more information, go to www.wvconservationcamp.com.

U. S. Supreme Court Rules Logging Road Runoff Not Subject To NPDES Permitting

    EPA properly interpreted its regulations when it concluded that NPDES permits are not required for runoff from logging roads, even if the storm water runs through a man-made ditch, the U.S. Supreme Court decided. But some justices questioned whether courts should be deferring to administrative agencies’ interpretations of their own rules, dicta that will doubtless encourage many attorneys to make exactly that argument. 

The Northwestern Environmental Defense Center had challenged the state of Oregon’s decision to allow logging companies to rely on best management practices, rather than permits, to control storm water runoff. Oregon’s position was based on its, and EPA’s, interpretation of the “Silvicultural Rule.”  At the time the lawsuit was filed, the Silvicultural Rule listed certain types of forest industry activities that require NPDES permits, but allowed an exemption for “road construction and maintenance from which there is natural runoff.”  40 C.F.R. §122.27(b)(1).  The NEDC challenged EPA’s interpretation of the Rule, arguing (among other things) that runoff in manmade channels was not natural runoff.

The Court initially addressed, and resolved in the NEDC’s favor, questions relating to the whether the NEDC properly brought its lawsuit under 33 U.S. §1365 (citizen suits) rather than §1369(b) (appeals of agency rules), and whether EPA’s revisions to the Silvicultural Rule in November 2012, a few days before oral argument, had mooted the NEDC’s suit. After giving the NEDC these two preliminary procedural wins, the Court agreed with EPA that it was reasonable to exempt logging road runoff from NPDES permitting. The Court noted that logging is the harvesting of raw material rather than manufacturing, and that EPA’s interpretation had not changed from prior practice and was a post hoc justification in response to litigation.

            The decision by the Supreme Court was not unexpected.  What is intriguing are statements by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Scalia that it is time to reconsider judicial deference to agencies’ interpretations of their own rules.  Justice Scalia noted that under Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resource Defense Counsel, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984) the courts defer to the agency interpretations of legislation, which gives Congress an incentive to clearly explain what it intends in its enactments. In contrast, giving deference to agencies to interpret their own regulations under Auer v. Robbins, 519 U.S. 452 (1997) encourages vague regulations that leave the promulgating agency with the greatest latitude to interpret the rule as it sees fit.  Given Justice Thomas’ similar opinion expressed in another case, it appears that at least four justices are willing to reconsider Auer.  We’re certain to see petitions soon asking the Court to do just that.

Decker v. Northwestern Environmental Defense Center, No. 11-338

Georgia-Pacific West, Inc. v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, No. 11-347

The West Virginia Land Stewardship Corporation Act

  

The West Virginia Legislature is considering adoption of the Land Stewardship Corporation Act,  SB 342 and HB 2590, in order to promote  the productive reuse of idle and underutilized commercial, industrial, and mining properties. Many sites in West Virginia are subject to long-term remediation obligations that make them unattractive to buyers.  The LSCA is intended to make them more palatable to developers  in the following fashion:

The Voluntary Land Stewardship Program would allow remediation parties and owners of sites which have been remediated or closed under a state or federal environmental program (including brownfields, underground storage tanks, closed landfills, open dumps, hazardous waste sites, and former mining sites), upon payment of an appropriate fee, to transfer to the Land Stewardship Corporation the responsibility for certain site maintenance and remediation obligations.  Site owners could retain ownership while contracting with the Corporation to assume long-term duties, such as groundwater monitoring or landfill cap maintenance, that are required under an environmental remediation program. 

      The State Certified Sites Program would establish an inventory of sites that are ready for redevelopment and/or construction within twelve months and certify them as “project-ready” for a specific industry profile in order to enhance economic development efforts within West Virginia.  The Board (see below) can issue a site certification if it determines that the decision ready document has been prepared and completed in accordance with the requirements that are otherwise to be established by the Land Stewardship Corporation.  Proposed W.Va. Code §31-21-9. 

            A Land Bank Program would assist State and/or local government efforts in economic development efforts by accepting formerly used or developable properties into the bank and preparing the properties so they can be conveyed to other parties to locate or expand businesses and create or retain jobs in the State. 

A Non-Profit Corporation would be established provide for the long-term operation and maintenance of certain sites.  Oversight would be provided by a Board of Directors appointed by the Governor.  Liabilities, including any environmental liabilities, would not pass to the Corporation by its acquisition of title.  WV DEP would retain all of its rights with regard to access to contaminated property held by the Corporation, and the Corporation may not transfer contaminated property until DEP determines that any immediate threats are remediated and/or eliminated

Where sorts of sites might benefit?  Here's one that the DEP  has just  given notice of::

Pennzoil Quaker State Co., (dba Shell Oil Products) is working with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection to remediate property along State Route 36, near Wallback in Clay County.

 Pennzoil has entered the Stockley (Valley Fork) Station into the DEP’s Voluntary Remediation Program (VRP). The 0.75-acre facility is believed to have been constructed by Eureka Pipeline Co. and contains three buildings (a pump building, a driver building, and an office building) and two above-ground storage tanks (ASTs). The site is an active oil gathering facility, where crude oil from nearby production wells is transferred to the ASTs, with the stored oil periodically transferred to a pipeline which runs through the area.
 Pennzoil is working with the DEP’s Office of Environmental Remediation (OER) to address environmental conditions at the site which may have resulted from historic operations at the facility.
 The OER’s voluntary remediation agreement with Pennzoil includes provisions for identifying human health and ecological risks associated with potential future uses of the site in order to establish appropriate cleanup standards.
 A final report will be submitted to the OER for review to confirm that work meets all applicable remediation standards.
 The OER encourages voluntary clean-ups of contaminated sites, as well as redevelopment of abandoned and under- utilized properties, in the hope of counteracting the lack of growth on sites with contamination or perceived contamination. The OER sets applicable remediation standards and confirms that the site maintains these standards.
 Typical DEP enforcement actions, as well as liability under environmental laws, are limited while sites are being remediated. The Voluntary Remediation Program gives developers the ability to redevelop sites with existing industrial infrastructure at a lower price, and provides financial incentives to invest in Brownfields.
 Questions should be directed to either Pasupathy Ramanan, WV DEP-OER, 2031 Pleasant Valley Road, Fairmont, WV 26554
(304) 368-2000 ext. 3730 or to Steven Stinger, Project Manager, URS Corporation, 12420 Milestone Drive, Suite 150, Germantown, MD 20876 (301) 820-3149.

West Virginia Works to Rehabilitate the Little Coal River

The DEP reports, in a recent press release:

Work has begun on another major restoration project on the Little Coal River. The river continues to benefit from the strong commitment of state agencies, environmental groups, businesses and concerned citizens to improve its water quality, fish habitat and recreational opportunities.

The latest restoration effort, sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, will enhance water quality on a 15-mile stretch of the river from Danville downstream to McCorkle. Work recently began on a section of the river at Julian in Boone County.

The entire project involves placing 198 restoration structures (boulders and logs) in the river to increase its flow velocity. Rapidly moving water better carries sediment through the river, flushes out sand and silt from the bottom and improves habitat for fish and insects. The project also will help reduce stream bank erosion on the Little Coal. The placement of the restoration structures allows fish passage at all flows and will not hinder current recreational boating opportunities.

R.E.I. Consulting designed the work and Stantec Inc. is engineering the $3 million project, which is targeted for completion in December 2014. Partial funding was provided by American Electric Power, whose utility subsidiary, Appalachian Power, serves a portion of West Virginia. AEP’s

$1.45 million contribution was provided through a consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act. DEP Stream Restoration Fund money is covering the remainder of the project’s costs.

Efforts to improve water quality on the Little Coal have been ongoing for close to 30 years. The state Division of Highways first began placing restoration structures in the river during construction of Corridor G. Since then, state agencies and others have continued the work to reduce sediment in the river, a problem brought on by pre-law mining, timbering and road construction. The latest project is being supported by the West Virginia Conservation Agency.

Local schools have joined the effort, as well. Madison Middle School science students in Boone County wrote about how they hoped to assist agencies in the Little Coal restoration and entered those plans in a national science contest, “Solve for Tomorrow,” sponsored by Samsung.

Madison Middle is now among 15 finalists nationwide to win up to $110,000 in technology and software for the school. A Samsung judging panel will select four grand prize winners.

A fifth winner -- called the Community Choice winner -- will be selected based on on-line voting by the public. To vote for Madison Middle School and to view a video about their efforts, go to www.samsung.com/solvefortomorrow.

Licensed Remediation Specialist Exam Scheduled for March 27

            The Department of Environmental Protection is announcing that the next examination for licensed remediation specialist certification will be held from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on March 27, 2013 at Marshall University Graduate College – South Charleston Campus, Room 205 of the Robert C. Byrd Academic Center Building, 100 Angus E. Peyton Drive, South Charleston, West Virginia.

      Certification is required for anyone submitting voluntary remediation and brownfields cleanup designs to the agency’s Office of Environmental Remediation (OER) for review.

      To qualify for the exam, you must have a bachelor’s degree in an approved scientific field and at least six years of relevant professional experience. You can also qualify with a high school diploma and 10 years of relevant professional experience. In either case, you must have at least one year of supervisory or project management experience.

      To take the exam, register online at www.dep.wv.gov. Under the Office of Environmental Remediation, go to the licensed remediation specialist online application and follow the instructions. Fees of $300 for the application and

$250 for the examination are required.  Online applications must be received by March 13, 2013.

      Only approved candidates with picture identification cards will be admitted to the testing site. Photo identification and the $250 testing fee must be presented before the exam starts.

      For more information about the exam, call Jamie Wolfe, CEGAS Manager, at (304) 696-6042, or by email at jawolfe@marshall.edu. Marshall University

(CEGAS) administers the licensing exam for OER.

      The legislature enacted the voluntary remediation and brownfields law during the 1996 legislative session. Voluntary remediation involves a responsible party cleaning up a site for future development, and brownfields involves clean up by a third party.