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When two become one Environmental Appeals Board questions the rule for deciding whether two offshore drillships form a single air pollution source Alan Bailey Petroleum News
When might two drillships operating as part of the same offshore drilling program be considered as a single industrial facility? When they’re touching each other while drilling? If they’re just 500 meters apart? Or what if they’re a mile apart?
These apparently esoteric questions have caused the Environmental Appeals Board to bounce the air quality permits for Shell’s Beaufort Sea drilling back to EPA’s Pacific Northwest Region for reconsideration. The Pacific Northwest Region, as part of its permit approval, had allowed Shell to consider its drillship Frontier Discoverer and floating drilling platform Kulluk as separate facilities, provided that they operate at least 500 meters apart.
Not good enough, said the Appeals Board in a Sept. 14 ruling on an appeal against the EPA air quality permits. The district needs to present evidence “on the record” for the 500-meter rule. Alternatively the district will need to proceed through the public review process for some alternative ruling.
Trigger major permit And that’s not just a matter of academic interest. If EPA views the drillship and floating drilling platform as a single “stationary source” of air pollution, the total emissions from two drilling operations would likely trigger the need for a major air quality permit. Individually, each of the drilling units can operate within the limits of a minor permit, thus simplifying Shell’s permitting requirements.
The appeal against approval of Shell’s air quality permits had come from a coalition of organizations, including the North Slope Borough, Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands or REDOIL and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center.
The petitioners actually went beyond the 500-yard rule, saying that the drilling units should be considered as a single pollution source any time that the units are operating concurrently anywhere within Shell’s Beaufort Sea leases. That view stemmed from the definition in the federal regulations of a stationary source of emissions as “all of the pollutant-emitting activities which belong to the same industrial grouping, are located on one or more contiguous or adjacent properties, and are under the control of the same person.”
But the Appeals Board rejected the petitioners’ interpretation of the regulations, saying that oil and gas leases were too broad a view of what constituted “property” and that EPA has previously stated that activities should not be aggregated as a stationary source if “they would not fit within the ordinary meaning of ‘building,’ ‘structure,’ ‘facility,’ or ‘installation.’”
Attached to seabed The Appeals Board also said that under federal regulations a marine vessel only qualifies as an outer continental shelf emission source when it is attached to the seabed. Thus, each Shell drilling unit would be viewed as a separate “OCS source” during each period that the unit is attached to the seabed for a drilling operation.
In addition, the Appeals Board rejected the petitioners’ claims of errors in the emissions data that Shell had submitted to EPA and of Shell’s air quality modeling being invalid.
And the Appeals Board rejected a North Slope Borough complaint that EPA had scheduled public hearings on the permits during the subsistence hunting season, when many people were unable to attend. EPA’s Pacific Northwest Region has “complied with all regulatory requirements regarding public notice and public comment,” the Appeals Board said. The board also cited a statement by the Pacific Northwest Region that the region had sought out and encouraged community input, including the issuing of an invitation to “Presidents, Chairman, Village Coordinator, and First Chiefs of 30 federally recognized tribes” to government-to-government consultations.
The Appeals Board ruling also rejected a North Slope Borough assertion that the Pacific Northwest Region had failed to perform an adequate analysis of potential adverse health and environmental impacts on minority and low-income populations.
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