Date: July 6, 2023
To:
Michael S. Regan, Administrator
Mail code 1101A
United States Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Ave.
NW Washington, DC 20460
Re: EPA Proposal to Strengthen Standards for Synthetic Organic Chemical Plants and Groups I & II Polymers and Resins Plants
Submitted via regulations.gov
Attention: Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2022-0730
Dear Administrator Regan,
Thank you for this opportunity to submit comments on your proposed New Source Performance Standards for the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturing Industry and National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturing Industry and Group I & II Polymers and Resins Industry. These regulations cover more than 200 of the heaviest polluting, most dangerous petrochemical facilities in the nation. Some of these facilities are as large as hundreds of football fields. They produce hazardous chemicals used to make plastics, paints, synthetic fabrics, pesticides, vinyl flooring, and other petrochemical products.
We are pleased that EPA has issued the proposed rules, and we urge the agency to strengthen the safeguards, close the loopholes, and tie the rules more tightly to the risk assessment. As written, the rules include many missed opportunities to make conditions safer for chemical manufacturing workers and for people living amidst the hazardous air pollutants emitted from these facilities.
Communities surrounding these facilities and the people who work within them are forced to breathe high concentrations of carcinogens, mutagens, teratogens, and reproductive toxicants 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. Ethylene oxide, 1,3-butadiene and the dozens of other toxic chemicals emitted by these facilities have serious health impacts. People who live in the vicinity – largely low-income people and communities of color – face dramatically elevated risk of cancer and other illnesses.
More than 80 percent of these facilities have violated pollution laws during the last three years (some, for every single quarter) including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act. Roughly one-third of the facilities currently have what are classified as the most significant and highest priority types of violations. States with multiple heavy-emitters covered by these rules include Texas (74), Louisiana (44), Ohio (13), Kentucky (9), New York (4), Virginia (4), West Virginia (4), Mississippi (3), North Carolina (3), Pennsylvania (3), South Carolina (3), and Tennessee (3).
We are counting on EPA to step up to protect people, including our many Moms Clean Air Force members who reside in the neighborhoods surrounding these facilities. Those who live in harm’s way are disproportionately lower income and people of color. The standards to protect them are meant to be updated every eight years but were last reviewed by EPA in 2008.
Moms Clean Air Force is a community of over 1.5 million moms and dads united against air pollution—including the urgent crisis of our changing climate—to protect our children’s health. We support robust protections for workers, frontline communities, and the climate. We fight for Justice in Every Breath, recognizing the importance of equitable solutions in addressing air pollution and climate change. A large part of our work addresses plastics and chemical manufacturing, which are among the heaviest polluting and most toxic industrial sectors in the country.
We are grateful that the EPA is taking steps to reduce emissions and thus to lower the risks from these dangerous facilities. In particular, the new rules will reduce the emissions of certain hazardous air pollutants and volatile organic compounds by requiring increases in the efficiency of flares; setting fenceline monitoring requirements for roughly half of the facilities; setting stronger leak detection and repair requirements for new facilities and for existing facilities emitting ethylene oxide or chloroprene; and removing the unlawful startup, shutdown, and malfunction exemptions.
These are all positive steps, but EPA can and must do more. The companies covered by these newly proposed rules release extraordinary amounts of carcinogens and other hazardous chemicals into the air. They have done so for generations, with cruel disregard for the devastating impacts on communities around their facilities. And people have paid with their health. The risk to communities surrounding synthetic organic chemical plants and groups I and II polymers and resins plants will remain unacceptably high without further steps to strengthen the rules.
We are asking EPA to quickly finalize the strongest possible standards to protect people from petrochemical pollution. In particular, our Moms Clean Air Force recommendations include:
- Strengthen the fenceline monitoring provisions.
We are pleased that EPA includes precedent-setting fenceline monitoring (pollution monitoring along the perimeter of a facility’s property line) for six toxic air pollutants:
- ethylene oxide (damages the DNA of children and increases the risk of non[1]Hodgkin’s lymphoma, myeloma, and lymphocytic leukemia)
- benzene (causes leukemia and other blood-cancers and harms the reproductive system)
- chloroprene (causes cancer and damages the liver, cardiovascular system, and immune system; extremely harmful to the children and adults who live near the Denka-DuPont facility in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana)
- ethylene dichloride (impairs the nervous system, liver, kidneys, cardiovascular system, reproductive system)
- 1,3-butadiene (linked to leukemia and other cancers, and to heart, lung, reproductive and neurological problems), and
- vinyl chloride (causes liver injury and liver cancer as well as neurologic and behavioral symptoms).
This fenceline monitoring will be connected to root-cause analysis and mandatory corrective actions. This is a positive step. EPA writes, “The proposed fenceline monitoring provisions would require the initiation of root cause analysis upon exceeding the annual average concentration as determined on a rolling average every sampling period.” As the proposed rule explains in its “Standards for Fenceline Monitoring” section, such monitoring has been successfully applied to the petroleum refineries source category to reduce benzene emissions from fugitive emissions sources such as storage vessels, wastewater treatment systems, and leaking equipment. In 2015, the EPA required that petroleum refineries install and operate fenceline monitors following EPA Reference Method 325 A/B to monitor benzene emissions. The 2015 rule required that refineries install and begin operating passive diffusive tube monitors by 2018. Additionally, the rule required that refineries conduct a root cause analysis to identify sources of high fenceline monitoring readings (above an annual action level) and then develop a corrective action plan to address the sources and reduce emissions to a level that will bring fenceline monitoring concentrations below the action level.
EPA reports that, “To date, the EPA has received fenceline monitoring data for more than four years. These data show that petroleum refinery fenceline concentrations have dropped by an average of 30 percent since the inception of the monitoring program requirements. These results illustrate that fenceline monitoring is an effective tool in reducing emissions and preserving emission reductions on an ongoing basis for these sources.”
It is clear that fenceline monitoring connected to root-cause analysis and mandatory corrective actions does far more than notify communities of the risks they are facing. Fenceline monitoring is a critically important tool in identifying the hazards, mitigating the risks, and preventing future chemical leaks and disasters.
EPA acknowledges that the majority of emissions from sources covered by the HON and P&R I are fugitive in nature, which the agency defines as those emissions which could not reasonably pass through a stack, chimney, vent, or other functionally-equivalent opening. This makes fenceline monitoring all the more important in the current context. We urge EPA to build upon its positive experience in the refinery monitoring program and to consider the following points:
- Require fenceline monitoring at all facilities, not just half.
EPA must ensure that every facility covered by these chemical manufacturing rules is required to perform proper fenceline or community monitoring. Even though parts of the rule leave readers under the impression that all facilities will be covered by the fenceline monitoring, Tables 26 and 27 and the attached supplemental documents tell a different story.
For example, the very first bullet on EPA’s List of Facilities Subject to the HON and Group I and Group II Polymers and Resins NESHAP states, “Not all of the facilities in this list are required to conduct fenceline monitoring.” https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023- 04/List%20of%20Facilities%20Subject%20to%20the%20HON%20and%20Group%20I%20 and%20Group%20II%20Polymers%20and%20Resins%20NESHAP.pdf
And EPA’s Supporting Statement: Risk and Technology Review of the Hazardous Organic National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (HON) (40 CFR Part 63, Subparts F, G, H, and I), in table “(iii) Capital/Startup and Operation and Maintenance (O&M) Costs,” indicates that 126 facilities will be required to conduct fenceline monitoring (footnote d). https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OAR-2022- 0730-0055
This number is repeated elsewhere in the document including in 6(c) on Estimating Agency Burden and Cost. It is also repeated in Table 1 - Annual Respondent Burden and Cost of Recordkeeping and Reporting Requirements for the HON RTR - Year 1. https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OAR-2022-0730-0055
It appears that only 126 facilities would be covered by the fenceline monitoring requirements, leaving roughly 90 facilities without any requirements for fenceline monitoring. We hope this is a misunderstanding. The fenceline monitoring requirements must cover all facilities. If EPA needs to identify additional sentinel chemicals, then now is the time. We do not understand the justification for leaving almost half the facilities without fenceline monitoring. This seemingly arbitrary decision would leave people in grave danger around these 90 or so facilities not covered by the fenceline monitoring requirement.
➢ Add additional sentinel chemicals
The fenceline monitoring includes six chemicals – benzene, 1,3-butadiene, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, ethylene oxide, and chloroprene. This is precedent setting but still not enough.
Since there are many other extremely toxic chemicals released from these facilities, we urge EPA to consider adding other sentinel pollutants to this initial list of six. This will help ensure that each facility has at least one or more sentinel chemicals that can be monitored.
We hope that EPA will replicate this multi-pollutant monitoring in other rules, including as a supplement to the ethylene production rules issued with far lesser requirements at virtually the same time as the HON rule was released.
➢ Don’t reward the largest facilities with lesser monitoring requirements
The sizes and shapes of HON and Group 1 and 2 P&R facilities vary considerably, and yet EPA seems to follow a “one-size-fits-all” approach in setting some of the requirements. For example, the rulemaking states that “For canister monitoring of EtO and vinyl chloride, the EPA is proposing that each facility would place 8 canisters evenly spaced on the monitoring perimeter.”
This would seem to put a proportionately higher responsibility on more compact facilities and reward the more sprawling behemoths. We recognize that the current proposal avoids some of the complexities found in the refinery rule’s multi-page instructions for measuring the distances and angles of variously-shaped perimeters and their proximity to VOC sources. Despite the appeal of streamlined provisions, however, we believe that EPA should consider other ways to designate the number and location of fenceline monitors to ensure that nearby populations are fully protected.
➢ Mandate more sensitive detection technologies
The pollution thresholds at the fenceline that would trigger corrective measures – known as the “action levels” -- are set too high to protect fenceline communities. In 6 particular, the action levels for ethylene oxide and chloroprene are based on old detection limits. For example, ethylene oxide is toxic at 11 ppt but the EPA is using a 300 ppt detection limit for ethylene oxide and then tripling it to set a fenceline action limit of 900 ppt.
Current, more advanced monitoring technologies can measure much lower, more health-protective concentrations. In addition, the rule includes other action levels that are based on the worst-performing, highest emitting facilities. Tying the rules to these highest-emitting facilities leads to elevated pollution levels at the fenceline.
We urge EPA to strengthen its proposed fenceline monitoring requirements by considering advanced technologies with far lower detection limits and by setting more protective “action levels” at the fenceline.
- End the practice of open flaring for routine waste gases.
While we support improvements in flare efficiency, it can be extremely difficult to monitor, verify, and enforce the emissions from most open stack flares, ground flares, and other types of flares. The partial and highly variable levels of combustion in the open flames lead to the unavoidable release of toxic chemicals into neighboring communities.
Although the proposed flare monitoring requirements are an improvement over current standards, the amount of pollution permitted is still hugely polluting and puts surrounding communities in significant danger. For example, the proposal would let each facility send 20 tons of ethylene oxide to their flares in any consecutive 12-month period.
Far better is to limit the amount of flaring taking place. Flares should not be used for routine management of waste gases. Their use should be limited to emergency situations as a last resort. Facilities should be using more efficient and more effective controls such as thermal oxidizers (already in use at many facilities), vapor recovery systems, and waste gas storage systems.
- Revise the leak detection and repair standards.
EPA’s failure to revise the leak detection and repair standards for most of the facilities covered is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in this rule. EPA only proposes to update the leak standards for sources that use ethylene oxide or chloroprene and for new or modified facilities under the New Source Performance Standards.
As EPA acknowledges, the majority of emissions from HON and polymers and resins sources are “fugitive.” As noted by EPA in its Leak Detection and Repair Best Practices Guide (2007), the average oil refinery or chemical plant has 12,000 connectors; 7,400 valves; 560 open-ended lines, 100 pumps, 90 pressure relief valves, and 80 sampling connections. Each of these routinely leaks, and collectively these sources make up the fugitive emissions. They are a major source of toxic air pollution.
Despite the significance of these fugitive sources, the agency leaves in place standards that it last revised in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and fails to require available technologies that prevent equipment leaks. By not adopting advanced monitoring systems and leak detection, the EPA is allowing unnecessary toxic emissions and exposures while giving a regulatory subsidy to companies that make billions of dollars from polluting fenceline communities.
EPA needs to apply the strict provisions on leak detection and repair it created for ethylene oxide to all hazardous air pollutants across the entire facility. While ethylene oxide is highly toxic, many of the other chemicals produced and emitted by these facilities are contributing to excess emissions and resulting risk.
EPA should require facilities to use newer technologies including leakless or low-leak pumps and valves, as well as leak prevention verification systems using optical gas imaging and leak detection sensor networks. These pollution detection and prevention technologies would enable facilities to identify leaks quickly and to promptly repair such leaks.
In addition, EPA uses a flawed cost-effectiveness analysis that includes current cost figures for new requirements but 2007 cost figures for the savings in preventing loss of valuable chemicals.
- Remove the exemptions for start-up, shutdown, and malfunction (SSM).
Allowing companies to release unlimited amounts of toxic air pollution whenever a system breaks down or a storm is coming harms workers and communities and disincentivizes proper maintenance and the use of safer operating systems. EPA has been granting facilities a free pass to pollute, and thus exposing communities to high levels of benzene, formaldehyde, and other toxic air pollutants. This is contrary to the plain language of the Clean Air Act which calls for continuous application of emissions standards.
The SSM loopholes enable facilities to release massive amounts of pollution before, during, and after maintenance operations, storms, and other events. These pollution releases are predictable and preventable.
Often the SSM emissions far exceed the toxic pollution levels during normal operations, endangering the health of people working at or living in the vicinity of such facilities. In Texas, for example, over 2,980 malfunction air pollution events released over 46 million pounds of air pollution in 2020 alone. The SSM events last from a few hours to several days or even weeks. The effects on workers, children and all people living in the vicinity can be devastating, from asthma attacks to cancers.
While we are pleased that EPA has removed the prior SSM loopholes from its proposed rules, we are discouraged to see that EPA has also added new SSM exemptions as part of the work practices standards in the rule.
“Work practice standards” are used in lieu of numerical emissions standards under section 112(h) of the Clean Air Act when EPA determines that it is not feasible to use an emission standard to control a hazardous air pollutant, particularly in situations where the Administrator determines that the pollutant “cannot be emitted through a conveyance designed and constructed to emit or capture such pollutant.”
EPA’s new SSM exemptions are embedded in the proposed work practice standards for releases from pressure relief devices and smoking flares during malfunctions. We ask EPA to remove these unlawful new SSM exemptions.
- Protect community health.
We are pleased to see EPA’s first-ever attempt to create a community-focused risk analysis, which considers the effects that communities face from air toxics emitted by nearby industrial facilities.
We appreciate the efforts of agency scientists in conducting the analysis and looking further into the cumulative risks. Petrochemical facilities are commonly situated in communities of color and in low-income neighborhoods that are impacted by multiple pollution sources. It is critical to reduce the pollution burden on these most overburdened communities.
We ask EPA to add non-cancer endpoints such as miscarriages, birth defects, and neuro-developmental impacts; to include other sources of toxic air pollution risk in these communities (for example pollution from roadways and heavy equipment); and to explicitly link the risk assessment to the regulatory requirements in the rule.
EPA states that it did not use this community-based risk assessment in making its regulatory decisions. We urge EPA to explicitly link the new flaring efficiency requirements, leak detection and repair requirements, fenceline monitoring, and other safeguards to the need to protect heavily-exposed people living at the fenceline.
It is time for the agency to do something truly groundbreaking by using this information to set risk-based standards that protect communities from the multiple toxic pollution sources they face simultaneously.
- Set limits for 1-Bromopropane (1-BP).
EPA has estimated that there are 26 million pounds of 1-BP manufactured in the U.S. annually. It is a common organic solvent used for the cleaning of metal surfaces, removal of soldering residues from electronic circuit boards, and many other applications. It is a replacement for perchloroethylene as a dry-cleaning solvent, and it is a solvent in aerosol glues for foam cushions. It is commonly found in everything from degreasers and cleaners to automotive refrigerant flushes to lubricants. 1-BP is also used in the production of pesticides, plastics, flavors and fragrances, and pharmaceuticals.
Given all these uses, 1-BP is understood to be present in at least a subset of the 200-plus facilities covered in this source category. Indeed, EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory includes significant 1-BP emissions from HON facilities such as the Albemarle Corp South Plant in Magnolia, Arkansas, which from 2016 to 2021 reported annual 1-BP air emissions between 9,677 and 33,614 pounds, and the Flint Hills Resources Corpus Christi West Plant in Texas, which has reported tons of 1-BP emissions every year.
Yet EPA writes, “…we have no information showing that 1-BP is used, produced, or emitted to make any SOCMI chemicals regulated by the HON, and we are unaware of any information showing that it is used, produced, or emitted in the production of any of the polymers and resins processes covered by the P&R I or P&R II. Accordingly, we believe there is no further action required by the EPA needed to address emissions of 1-BP from these source categories.”
1-BP is a solvent, a neurotoxin, and a carcinogen. Exposure can damage the liver and kidneys, decrease resistance to infections, cause lung cancer, and impair reproduction. EPA published a final rule in January 2022 adding 1-BP to its list of 188 Hazardous Air Pollutants.
Since 1-BP was only listed 18 months ago, however, it was not considered a Hazardous Air Pollutant when EPA previously promulgated standards for HON and P&R source categories. Now that 1-BP is officially included on the Hazardous Air Pollutant list, EPA needs to determine which facilities are using it – and start protecting the workers and the communities.
We urge the agency to develop a plan and to figure out the scope of 1-BP emissions from covered sources. EPA needs to establish emission limits for the release of 1-BP 10 from these source categories and to work with impacted communities to develop safeguards.
So as not to delay or jeopardize the desperately needed HON and Polymers & Resins rules, however, we are recommending that EPA proceed to finalize the proposed rules right away, and meanwhile start collecting data on 1-BP. EPA can then do a supplemental rule for 1-BP source categories.
Production of plastics and other petrochemicals is on course to increase exponentially in the coming years. In fact, 2022 was the biggest year in U.S. history for the opening of new ethylene cracker facilities. The HON and polymers & resins rules do not take into account the projected increase in production of fossil-fuel plastics and other petrochemicals, which will lead to a dramatic rise in toxic air emissions and accompanying cancer risks from these facilities. It is critical that the agency tighten the requirements.
The proposed rules are a huge opportunity to improve people’s lives. Please do not let these rules become a missed opportunity. We urge you to strengthen and finalize the requirements as quickly as possible.
Thank you for considering our comments.
Respectfully submitted,
Cynthia Palmer
Senior Analyst, Petrochemicals
Moms Clean Air Force
Dominique Browning
Director and Co-Founder
Moms Clean Air Force
Learn more about Moms' work on petrochemical pollution and vinyl chloride.