Rockwool EPA Air Letter

The Foundation Asks the EPA to Postpone Rockwool’s Operation in Light of Clean Air Act Violations

In a letter dated May 17, 2021, Jefferson County Foundation asks the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use its authority provided under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to immediately stop the construction and postpone the operation of Rockwool until the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) has issued a prevention of significant deterioration (PSD) permit that accurately reflects Rockwool’s CAA requirements.

Rockwool’s Change in Operation

In 2020 during its ongoing construction Rockwool made a major change in the operation of its facility by changing the primary fuel source of its largest emission unit the melting furnace. From the publicly available documents and the communications between the WVDEP and the Foundation, it seems that the WVDEP neither required nor performed any analysis of the continued validity of the PSD permit terms in light of this change, and the current permit terms thus do not accurately reflect the planned operation of the facility.

The Clean Air Act Must Be Enforced

The Foundation is asking the EPA to engage with WVDEP to re-open the existing permit or to start a new permitting process to analyze and incorporate the melting furnace fuel change in an enforceable PSD permit with appropriate controls and emission limits and to include public participation in that process. The Foundation further asked the EPA that if this effort is unsuccessful that the EPA take action under all applicable CAA enforcement provisions (such as sections 167 and 113) to address the situation in which the state permitting authority refuses to act to correct an improperly permitted facility.

Background

Burning coal and burning natural gas result in fundamentally different pollutant emission profiles, and there is nothing in Rockwool’s current PSD permit or the record created by WVDEP demonstrating that the control technologies being installed at the facility, and the resulting emission limits in the current permit, meet CAA requirements for an operation primarily fueled by natural gas. Now the Foundation is concerned that the control technologies being installed at the facility, and the associated emission limits in the current permit, do not meet the CAA’s requirements that such a facility must implement the best available control technologies for each regulated pollutant it emits.

Additionally, the CAA requires as part of the best available control technology analysis that cleaner fuels such as natural gas be used rather than fuels such as coal unless they are technologically infeasible. It is now clear that the use of primarily natural gas for the operation of the melting furnace is technologically feasible. Rockwool should therefore be required to use natural gas as the primary fuel source for the melting furnace. Rockwool should not be allowed to simply switch back and forth between fuels based on operational and economic convenience.

The Act’s PSD permitting program was enacted, in part, to ensure that economic growth – such as building a new production facility like Rockwool – “will occur in a manner consistent with the  preservation of existing clean air resources” and that any permit for construction of a new source of emissions in an area “is made only after careful evaluation of all the consequences of such a decision and after adequate procedural opportunities for informed public participation in the decision making process.” (42 U.S.C. §§ 7470(3) and (5)) To do so, Congress required such a source to have a permit before the source was constructed that required installation of the best controls for the emissions that would ultimately result from it (42 U.S.C § 7475(4)). The objectives of the CAA are completely thwarted if an applicant can apply for a permit based on a specific operating scenario and then change it completely before operation without any evaluation of the permit or public participation regarding those changes.