A RECURRENT THEME of pollution control policy is the enormous difficulty of translating "technology-forcing" legislation into practical regulations. Such legislation typically instructs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promulgate regulations requiring the use of the best technology available for reduction of pollution, within some constraint on economic feasibility.
What makes technical rule making so difficult is the ambiguity inherent in the words best and feasible. There are great differences of opinion regarding whether a new technology has been demonstrated to be commercially feasible. Also, pollution control technology, which works well under some conditions (having to do with climate, product mix, or raw materials input, for example), may not work at all under others. Moreover, equipment suitable for large modern plants may be technologically and economically inappropriate for older or smaller facilities. In addition, what role should environmental quality considerations play in the rulemaking process? While the objective of the process is to identify the frontier of technology, one cannot lose sight of the overall goal of the legislation—improvement of the quality of the environment. In short, what might appear to be only a technological decision is a political decision as well.
The proposed standards. The problems of technical rule making are well illustrated by the revision, now in progress, of the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for coal-fired utility boilers. (The emissions standards for all fossil fuels are being revised, but the coal standard is by far the most controversial and important.) At present, coal-fired utility and industrial boilers are subject to the same regulations limiting the discharge of sulfur dioxides, particulates, and nitrogen oxides. The old standard was essentially a limit on mass emissions rates, expressed in pounds of sulfur dioxide discharged per million Btu input. Almost all the alternative regulations proposed so far have not one, but three, essential components. The first is a "percentage removal requirement," now an essential part of the definition of performance standard. The second is a "floor," an emissions rate below which no plant would be required to achieve; and the third is the "ceiling," an emissions rate which no plant would be allowed to exceed. The EPA's proposed standard, for example, calls for a percentage reduction of 85 percent, with a floor of 0.2 pounds per million Btu and a ceiling of 1.2 pounds per million Btu. This regulation has been called a "uniform full-scrubbing" alternative, because the floor is so low that practically all coal would require 85 percent control.
The principal rulemaking issue has been whether a source should get any credit for using low-sulfur coal. That is, if less sulfur dioxide is produced in the burning process, should the requirement for reduction of sulfur emissions be reduced? The new regulations will probably be considerably more stringent and will apply to any utility boiler for which construction begins after the regulations are issued. Industrial boilers will not be affected.
The EPA first considered revising the standards in August 1976, in response to a petition from the Sierra Club and part of the Navajo Tribe. One year later the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977 directed the EPA to promulgate new regulations specifically for the utility sector within one year (before August 7, 1978). Owing to the complexity of the problem, however, the agency was unable to meet the one-year deadline, and final regulations will probably not be promulgated until spring 1979 or later—a half-year beyond the date originally envisioned by the Congress and two and a half years after the EPA first began to study revisions.
The 1977 Amendments require a percentage reduction in emissions compared with the emissions resulting from uncontrolled burning. Thus, all coal used in new utility boilers will have to be subjected to some degree of sulfur removal.
In its proposed regulation the EPA chose a uniform full-scrubbing option, including removal of 85 percent of sulfur dioxide, and other alternatives involving special treatment for low-sulfur coal were also presented for comment. These alternatives were suggested by the Department of Energy and the Utility Air Regulatory Group, an ad hoc industry group established to "advise" the EPA. For an agency to propose a regulation plus a number of alternatives is rather unusual, and may be indicative of the divisions within the EPA over this issue.
The full-scrubbing issue has two aspects. First, is full scrubbing legally required by the act, even for low-sulfur coal? The interest groups with the most at stake—the environmental movement and the utilities—differ in their interpretation of the act's requirements. No matter what the result, it is sure to be challenged in the courts.
Second, assuming that full scrubbing is not legally required, is it nonetheless a wise policy? Answering this question requires us to consider the purposes of the act and whether these objectives could be met by a simple emissions standard or by other forms of regulation.
Implications. Among those purposes are two which have little to do with air quality: One is to promote the burning of local coal to protect the jobs of miners in eastern and midwestern states producing high-sulfur coal, and the other is to avoid causing increased oil imports. However, analyses of the impacts of alternative regulations suggest that all will have about the same effect on oil consumption by utilities. On the other hand, the EPA analysis finds that alternative regulations will have substantially different effects on the regional distribution of coal production and thus on jobs as well.
As for air quality, the EPA has a clear mandate to force the introduction of improved control technology. The principal air quality-related purpose is the prevention of significant deterioration, especially in the West. As pointed out by Allen Kneese elsewhere in this issue, visibility is one of the most important attributes of air quality in the West, and it is strongly affected by very low concentrations of pollutants in the atmosphere, especially sulfur dioxide. The present regulation would permit a substantial increase in emissions from western power plants, as electrical output grows, causing a further decline in visibility. But since western coal is generally low in sulfur, the proposed regulation requiring 85 percent removal on new plants would reduce total annual emissions from western power plants in 1995, for example, by more than 50 percent below what they would be under present regulations.
Unfortunately, the proposed standards appear to achieve this cutback in an inefficient way. A utility's incentive to use low-sulfur coal in a new plant would be eliminated if all coal has to be fully scrubbed anyway. (This point does not come up in the West, because nearly all western coal has a low-sulfur content.) A comparison of the proposed regulation with some of the twenty-odd alternatives that EPA consultants have examined shows that the EPA proposal is considerably more costly than the alternatives and would achieve only about the same level of reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions by 1995, both in the western states and in the United States as a whole. Considerations of cost effectiveness, in other words, suggest that the proposed regulation be dropped in favor of one of the alternatives.
But ultimately, cost-effectiveness considerations play only a limited role in agency rulemaking. The outcome will turn on other issues, many of which have little to do with air quality or the price of electricity. For it happens that some prominent and well-organized groups are net gainers from the proposed policy, costly though it may be to society as a whole. The environmentalists, for example, would welcome any further obstacle to the additional development of western coal. Eastern coal producers also may have an interest in the proposed regulation, to the extent that it promotes eastern production. There is also a labor issue, because eastern coal production is largely a union activity, and western coal production is not. In any of its forms the new regulation will be a great boon to the environmental equipment industry, but the growth of the market will vary enormously depending on the regulation. Some time in the next few months the EPA will have to reconcile the tugging and pulling of these and other interests.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1979 issue of Resources magazine.
