House Votes to Delay Clean Air Rules for Biomass and Fossil Fuel Boilers

On October 13, the House voted to delay the EPA’s implementation of Clean Air Act rules that would set standards for hazardous air pollutant emissions from boilers fueled by coal, petroleum, biomass, and solid waste. Both EPA and industry stakeholders seemed to agree that additional time was needed to make the standards more workable and achievable and to advance clean air goals at least cost. But many clean air advocates were concerned that the rule making process has already been delayed for far too long.

On October 13, the House passed the Regulatory Relief Act (HR 2250) by a vote of 275-142 . The bill would provide the EPA with an additional 15 months to revise its recently promulgated standards for hazardous air pollutant emissions from industrial, commercial, and institutional boilers, process heaters, and incinerators. The bill would also extend the period in which regulated boilers must be brought into compliance to five years, rather than the normal three. A similar, but not identical bill has been introduced in the Senate, S. 1392 .

The treatment of biomass as a “traditional fuel” (like coal or petroleum), or as a type of “solid waste”, is of particular concern to the biopower and pulp and paper industries. They have been using renewable woody biomass residues as a traditional fuel for decades. This concern was recently brought to the EPA Administrator’s attention in a letter from a bipartisan group of eleven senators. The senators cited significant “uncertainty regarding whether the current biomass fuel inputs would be defined as non-hazardous solid waste rather than fuel, and thus cause the facility to be regulated as an incinerator and therefore subject to additional costs.”

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson responded in a letter on October 14 committing the EPA to “codifying provisions to avoid creating disincentives for burning clean materials, such as biomass, for fuel, while preserving the public-health protections required by the Clean Air Act.”