EPA: Shell air permits have top priority

Rick Albright, director of the Office of Air, Waste and Toxics for the Environmental Protection Agency Region 10, told Petroleum News Aug. 20 that EPA Region 10 staffing levels are an issue in processing Shell’s air quality permits for the company’s planned exploration drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, but that the agency has given the Shell permits top priority, with EPA staff assigned to working the Shell permits at the expense of some other priority work. EPA has processed Shell’s Chukchi Sea permit first, because Shell had indicated that this permit had a higher priority than its Beaufort Sea permit, he said.

“We’ve had several people working full time on the Shell permits and we’ve got a number of other people in the region that are contributing in some way to those permits,” Albright said. “So we really have made a resource shift at a cost to other work that EPA has.”

The Shell permits are the first Alaska Outer Continental Shelf Prevention of Significant Deterioration permits that EPA has had to deal with in more than 20 years, and a lot has changed in environmental management during that period, Albright said.

“We’re getting up to speed on some issues, and there’s been a number of issues … that have just emerged as national issues,” he said. “It’s a challenge to deal with some of those issues.”

—Alan Bailey