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Groups question Shell permit legality Environmentalists say Kulluk air permit unenforceable, has an unjustified exclusion zone and falls short of other legal requirements Alan Bailey Petroleum News
On Nov. 28 Earthjustice on behalf of nine environmental groups appealed Shell’s air quality permit for the use of the company’s Kulluk drilling vessel in the Alaska Beaufort Sea. Shell wants to start drilling the Beaufort in the summer open water season of 2012. The appeal has gone to the Environmental Appeals Board, the panel of judges with final authority over decisions made by the Environmental Protection Agency, the agency that issued Shell’s permit.
In a filing that has now been published on the Environmental Appeals Board website, Earthjustice has set out its objections to the Shell permit. The environmental law firm has raised four issues, each of which the firm says calls into question the permit’s validity.
The first objection relates to the fact that the Kulluk is a minor air permit, rather than a major permit — EPA has said that no regulated emission from the drilling vessel would exceed volumes of 250 tons per year, the emission level that triggers the need for a major permit. For example, the maximum nitrogen oxides emissions from the Kulluk would be 240 tons per year, while the maximum carbon monoxide emission would be 200 tons.
Unenforceable But there is no way of monitoring such general emissions levels, and hence no way of ensuring that the emissions remain within the limits for a minor permit, Earthjustice said. EPA either needs to spell out specific, enforceable ways of monitoring the emissions, or to require a major permit rather than a minor permit, the law firm said. Among other things, the use of a major permit would require the Kulluk to install what is referred to as the “best available control technology” for emissions control.
The environmental groups’ second objection is the use of a 500-meter zone around the vessel, within which ambient air quality standards will not apply. The EPA rationale behind this zone is that it is equivalent to the fence that would normally exist around a land based industrial facility — the zone corresponds to a 500-meter public safety zone that the U.S. Coast Guard would place around the vessel during a drilling operation. But that is an arbitrary specification of the facility “fence,” with Shell having no ownership or control over the zone, Earthjustice said. And the larger the zone of air quality standard exclusion, the more emissions the Kulluk will be allowed to generate, the law firm said.
The environmental groups’ third claim is that the permit will allow air quality degradation beyond legally allowed increments. And the fourth claim is that the emission modeling that the permit relies on underestimates the likely hourly emissions of nitrogen dioxide.
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