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BOEM brings new air quality approach Process for industry air emission regulation changes as Interior agency takes over Arctic OCS air quality jurisdiction from EPA Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Following intense frustration for many people during the multi-year tennis match involving the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and environmental organizations over the permitting of air emissions from Shell’s planned exploration drilling in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas, at the end of 2011 the U.S. Congress passed legislation, transferring jurisdiction for Arctic outer continental shelf air quality from EPA to the Department of the Interior. Decades ago Interior had been responsible for managing air quality on the U.S. outer continental shelf, or OCS. But legislation in 1990 transferred that authority to EPA, other than in part of the Gulf of Mexico. The 2011 legislation restored Interior’s air quality jurisdiction in much of the U.S. Arctic offshore.
But what impact will this change of jurisdiction have on those seeking to drill in U.S. Arctic waters? And what significance do the changes have for North Slope communities concerned about potential air pollution from industrial activities in the region?
On Feb. 5 officials from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency within Interior responsible for OCS air quality regulation, talked at the Alaska Forum for the Environment about how BOEM proposes dealing with Arctic air quality issues, and how BOEM’s approach differs from that of EPA.
Michael Routhier, BOEM’s program analysis officer for the Alaska OCS region, said that the new BOEM air quality jurisdiction applies to those portions of the OCS that lie adjacent the North Slope Borough, essentially encompassing the federal waters of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, outside the three-mile limit of state coastal waters.
Environmental assessment Virginia Raps, BOEM staff meteorologist, pointed out that, whereas EPA requires companies to apply for air quality permits for OCS operations, BOEM has no air quality permitting requirement. Instead, BOEM evaluates potential air emissions from an OCS project when conducting an environmental assessment or an environmental impact statement for a proposed project, a company’s proposed exploration or development plan, for example.
In fact, BOEM already carries out this type of environmental evaluation, under the terms of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, for any planned project on the federal OCS, regardless of whether that project will take place in the Arctic. The agency reviews and verifies data that a company submits for air emissions from its planned activities, considering the complete inventory of emissions associated with the project, potentially including emissions from drilling units, support vessels and aircraft, and from land-based elements of the project, such as crew housing, Raps explained.
Using air quality modeling for the impacted region, the agency then assesses what changes to the overall air quality the project may cause, determining any mitigation measures that appear necessary to prevent unacceptable levels of air pollution.
Regulatory program However, with BOEM having jurisdiction over Arctic air quality, a proposed project on the Arctic OCS will now trigger an additional procedure, known as the BOEM Air Quality Regulatory Program, Raps explained. As with EPA air permitting, the BOEM program will apply to drill ships when they are anchored to the seafloor for drilling operations and are hence viewed as stationary emissions sources. However, unlike EPA which requires consideration of emissions from both the drillship and all support vessels within 25 miles of the drilling site, BOEM’s regulatory program only takes into account emissions from the drill ship itself, Raps said.
And while EPA, operating under the terms of the Clean Air Act, requires special emissions controls such as catalytic converters if the drilling fleet would otherwise emit any of a specified list of pollutants at a rate of more than 250 tons per year, the BOEM program, operating under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, determines if emissions from the drill ship may significantly impact air along the coastline.
Dispersion analysis If BOEM assesses that the drillship may have a significant air quality impact at the shoreline, the agency requires the company involved to conduct an emissions dispersion analysis to determine whether the shoreline impact would indeed be significant. And, in the event of a significant impact being found, BOEM will require best available emission controls on the drill ship’s various engines and other equipment, to reduce the emissions to acceptable levels. On the other hand, if the air quality impacts are deemed insignificant, BOEM will take no further action under its regulatory program, instead reverting to the findings and any mitigation requirements in the agency’s NEPA analysis, Raps said.
EPA, by contrast, has attempted to view an operational drill ship in the same light as an onshore industrial facility, defining a “fence” around the drillship as analogous to an onshore facility’s fence, the boundary within which the public has no access and beyond which emissions from the facility need to meet air quality standards. Initially EPA tried to use the railing of the drillship as the “fence” but, after finding this definition impractical, defined the fence as the U.S. Coast Guard’s 500-meter exclusion zone around the vessel.
GOM formula Initially in the Arctic, BOEM will employ the formula that it uses in the Gulf of Mexico to determine whether a drillship may have a significant environmental impact at the shoreline and, hence, require a dispersion analysis, Raps said. That formula involves multiplying a specific number for each pollutant by the distance in miles between the drill ship and the coast to obtain the threshold in tons per year of the pollutant, above which BOEM would consider the air pollution significant, she said. For example, if the number for nitrogen oxide was, say, 32.6 and the drilling operation was 100 miles from the coast, the drill ship would be allowed to emit up to 32,600 tons of nitrogen oxide per year without triggering a requirement for further emissions analysis.
At first blush, this suggests that BOEM’s emissions thresholds will be far above EPA’s 250-tons-per-year threshold. But, if a drill ship is working at a drill site close to the three-mile limit of the OCS, the BOEM threshold could be lower than EPA’s, Raps cautioned. And, separately from BOEM’s regulatory program for the drill ship, the agency could require the drill ship and its support operations to apply emissions mitigation as a consequence of the agency’s NEPA assessment of a company’s plans, she said.
Review process Another key difference between the BOEM and EPA approaches relates to the processes that the agencies use to handle public reviews and appeals against agency decisions, the processes for dealing with the types of dispute which significantly delayed final approval of Shell’s air permits.
Under the EPA system, a draft air permit undergoes a 30-day public review period, after which EPA modifies the permit as necessary before issuing a final permit. That issued permit can then be appealed to the Environmental Appeals Board. The company which applied for the permit cannot undertake any operation covered by the permit until the Environmental Appeals Board makes a decision upholding the permit, with no legally mandated time limit within which the board must make its decision. If the board does uphold the permit, the appeal can be elevated to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The BOEM procedure involves opportunities for public review during the NEPA process. If the outcome of the NEPA process is approval of, say, a company’s exploration plan, that plan approval can be appealed to the 9th Circuit.
Formula review Raps said that, although BOEM will initially use its Gulf of Mexico formula for assessing whether an Arctic drillship may have a significant air quality impact at the shoreline, the formula involving the distance of the drillship from the shoreline, the agency anticipates reviewing the formula to be used in the Arctic, after evaluating the differences between the Gulf of Mexico and Arctic weather systems. In particular, the prevailing wind system in the Gulf of Mexico tends to blow directly onshore, while the winds along the coasts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas tend to hit the coastline at an angle, she said.
Major new study The data required for this formula review will come from a major study into Arctic weather systems and air emissions that BOEM plans to start this year and conduct with assistance from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, Raps said. This study, called the Arctic Air Quality Impact Assessment Modeling Study, will use historic climate data to develop a meteorological dataset for both the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Arctic Alaska does not have the abundance of weather observing stations that exists around the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Raps commented.
The major component of the BOEM study, which the agency anticipates taking four to five years to complete, will consist of the development of a complete inventory of all existing North Slope and Arctic OCS air emissions, and of anticipated future offshore oil industry emissions, based on activities that are likely to result from BOEM’s OCS lease sale program, Raps said. The emissions inventory will consist of a single dataset assembled from a variety of information sources such as company exploration plans.
Improved modeling The new inventory and weather models will enable BOEM to model the movement and concentrations of industrial emissions over offshore waters and across the shoreline, allowing the agency to compare emissions levels with EPA’s air quality standards, and also allowing an evaluation of emission control strategies, Raps said. The emissions and weather models will enable the agency to better assess the potential impacts of proposed new industrial projects, such as offshore exploration or offshore oil development, when conducting NEPA analyses of proposed plans, she said. The models will also assist in the assessment of the cumulative impacts of multiple offshore projects, proposed to be carried out in parallel. And a further anticipated outcome of the models is an evaluation of the fate of air emissions allowed offshore in excess of normal onshore air quality standards, in situations where the shoreline impact of a drilling unit operating far offshore is deemed insignificant, Raps said.
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