That's why I was encouraged by the turnout in support of cleaner air at an event last week. The EPA held one of three national hearings in Houston on its proposed new national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone. The hearings gave the public the opportunity to comment on EPA’s proposal to tighten the ozone standard from 75 parts per billion to somewhere between 60-70 ppb.

Still, while doctors and health professionals, mothers, environmental advocates, and other interested parties all testified for the need to protect sensitive populations from ozone exposure, our own state environmental agency – the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) – questioned the science behind the proposal and made it clear the new standard would be too costly and even unobtainable.

The testimony of Mike Honeycutt, TCEQ chief toxicologist, was revealing. Here are some telling excerpts:

• “These studies are based on the supposition that the majority of people breathe outside air 8 to 24 hours each day while the scientific data clearly show this is not the case.”

Should we take this to mean that those who do spend more time outdoors – construction workers, carpenters, utility workers, lifeguards and athletes, to name a few – don’t deserve protection from the health impacts of ozone? 

• “We hear anecdotally that hospital visits for asthma rise when ozone levels rise, but hospital admissions data show this is not the case.  Texas Inpatient Hospital Discharge data on numbers of hospital visits for asthma between 1999 and 2001 actually show that fewer children in Texas visit the hospital for asthma during peak summer ozone season as compared to wintertime. Results from a 4-year (2000-2003) air quality study conducted by Texas A&M University and Driscoll Children’s Hospital indicate hospital admissions to be weakly correlated with ambient daily maximum ozone levels.  The Kaiser Permanente Report and the Gauderman study in 2004 found no increased hospital admissions in elderly patients and health effects in children due to ozone alone.”

Do bronchial problems increase in winter? Yes, because of complications due to viruses and other illnesses that peak during this time. Honeycutt hears “anecdotally” about the relationship between asthma and hospital visits but one must wonder if he's actually read the reports on this subject. Studies continue to demonstrate a causal relationship between high ozone concentrations, the latest just released by the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which reported a 19 percent increase in ICU admissions on higher ozone days.

Is it just coincidence that Honeycutt chose to single out these reports from among more than 1,700 papers on the issue? When the EPA’s independent, statutorily-established expert panel, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), convened to develop a health-based ozone standard – after examining all 1,700 papers on the issue –the verdict was explicit: a unanimous recommendation for decreasing the primary standard to within the range of 60-70 ppb. Further, it stated that any standard above this range fails to satisfy the explicit stipulations of the Clean Air Act requiring an adequate margin of safety for all individuals, including sensitive populations.

Should we listen to Honeycutt, speaking for a notoriously politicized agency, or should we rely on the nation’s top experts who have spent their professional lives studying the subject?

Honeycutt also suggested Texans simply won’t stand for the control measures necessary to meet the lower ozone standard. [My favorite: We won’t be able to idle our car engines at the drive-thru while waiting for our Big Mac and fries.] 

The truth is that TCEQ isn’t serious about making ANY real effort to reduce ozone. In the latest state implementation plan (SIP) it submitted to EPA to demonstrate attainment with the 1997 ozone standard, the only control measures that TCEQ suggested were a paper reduction in the industry trading credits for some ozone precursors, and some small adjustments in emissions from the printing industry. [According to TCEQ’s own analysis, neither of these measures will make even a dent in reducing ozone concentrations.]

If TCEQ was really serious about protecting Texans’ health, there are plenty of opportunities out there to reduce ozone concentrations. For instance:

• TCEQ could stop issuing air quality permits that fail to consider emissions of ozone precursors from newly proposed facilities. For example, a recent ruling on the White Stallion coal/pet coke permit in Matagorda county disregards ozone modeling data that demonstrates that the new facility will contribute to ozone concentrations in Houston.
• TCEQ could enforce more penalties when facilities violate their air permits. Currently, TCEQ enforces only about 50 percent of the unplanned emission events from stationary sources across the state. These emission events release pollutants that generate large plumes of high ozone in our region.
• TCEQ could operate more meaningful trading schemes for the pre-cursors that result in ozone formation. The market for nitrogen oxide credits, for instance, is so over allocated that no one is even trading credits.
• TCEQ could encourage mass transit to help get cars off the roads, or could support legislation that would increase fuel efficiency standards. 

Fortunately for Houstonians, some elected officials testified in support of following the real science used to develop the new health-protective ozone standard. Newly elected Houston Mayor Annise Parker was realistic: “There is no doubt it would be a significant challenge for Houston to meet the lower standard, so the amount of lead time and our ability to achieve regional coordination is significant to us, but we do want to be on the record in supporting a goal that is protective of our citizens and is based on real science.”

How does Texas meet ANY new ozone standard as long as we have a state environmental agency determined to stall or block the measures necessary to attain them?

Will we get cleaner air in Texas? Yes, eventually – but in spite of TCEQ’s efforts, not because of them.

*** All Texans are invited to comment on strengthening the ozone standard. Go to http://www.regulations.gov [Note: You must include the Docket ID:  No. EPA–HQ–OAR–2005–0172 ]

The city of Corpus Christi has a similar decision to make. The city council, and city leaders, must decide how to keep the city’s water supply sufficient for future users. Corpus has two choices, and they are choosing the wrong one.

A recent article reported that Corpus’ water demand is currently 65% of their supply, on an average annual basis. At current growth rates AND assuming the same or similar water usage, the city projects they will need more water by 2027. However, water projections are not cast in stone; they depend on how the water is used. Imagine you had $2000 in your bank account and your bills each month totaled $500. If you are careful with your money, it can last you up to 4 months, but if you don’t spend it wisely it will run out much sooner. Water is the same way. The more you use it, the faster it disappears.

Corpus is planning to build a $165 million pipeline to ship water 40 miles from the Lower Colorado to Lake Texana and then into the city. Seems like a reasonable plan, until you start looking at the details. First of all, Corpus is only using 65% capacity of their current water supply. The Texas Water Development Board recommends 140 Gallons per capita per day (GPCD). Corpus’s current per capita water usage is far beyond the Texas average and their self-imposed conservation goal is to be at 212 GPCD by 2018!!! If Corpus reduced its usage to the recommended amount it would save over 26,000 gallons per capita per year which would greatly extend the capacity available to accommodate growth.

Another puzzler is the city’s agreement to provide the proposed Las Brisas coal plant with billions of gallons of water. This decision would mean that the need to find new supply would come 7 years sooner. So, instead of implementing cost saving conservation measures OR asking Las Brisas to use water saving cooling technology OR telling them to look elsewhere for water, the city has decided to borrow money from the state to build a pipeline and ask their citizens to pay for it. This doesn’t even take into consideration all the power it will take to move the water 40 miles.

It sounds to me like Corpus Christi wants to borrow some water from 40 miles away to give its own water to Las Brisas, and in the process it's going to stick the city with a $165 million bill. Who are they going to borrow from to pay that bill?

Amy Hardberger, Attorney
Environmental Defense Fund

Fans of clean air gained an important ally Monday against the proposed $3 billion Las Brisas petroleum coke-fired power plant in Corpus Christi – and it came from inside the state's own Texas Commission on Environment Quality!

December 14 was the deadline for legal briefs in TCEQ's permitting process for the enormous "pet coke" plant, and EDF attorneys filed our extensive brief against the permit, as did other interested parties. But we were pleasantly surprised by another brief against the plant filed by TCEQ's own Office of Public Interest Counsel (OPIC).

The briefs represent closing arguments from November's hearing before two administrative law judges in the case. After studying the briefs, the judges will make their recommendations to the three TCEQ commissioners, and they in turn are expected to make their final ruling on the permit by summer.

EDF's attorney Tom Weber welcomed the OPIC brief against the permit, describing it as "significant – but not surprising given the obvious deficiencies in the application." Although a division of TCEQ, the Office of Public Interest Counsel is specifically charged with representing the public interest in cases before the commission, and Tom hopes that OPIC's opposition to the permit will carry special weight with the commissioners.

Petroleum coke is a solid byproduct of the petroleum refining process. Composed mainly of carbon, it typically contains significant amounts of sulfur and hazardous air pollutants that must be captured to comply with federal clean air limits. 

We're opposing the pet coke plant on Corpus Christi's Ship Channel for the obvious (and familiar) reasons: It threatens the health of people in the area and, like most carbon-fired power plants, it would add enormous quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. TCEQ refused to consider the CO2 issue, but the Las Brisas application provided plenty of omissions and outright errors that we could challenge it on.

Among the problems we cited in our brief are:

1. The application essentially ignores or underestimates the emissions of fine particulate matter (PM) from both the smokestacks and the dockside handling of the enormous amounts of bulk pet coke and limestone used in the plant.
2. The applicant's air dispersion modeling is so plagued with errors, omissions and violations of TCEQ's own guidelines that the application's environmental impact analysis is virtually meaningless.
3. The TCEQ executive director failed to properly apply the federal Best Available Control Technology (BACT) standard on this project, and as a result, many of the emissions listed in TCEQ's draft permit don't represent BACT. 
4. The exec director also failed to perform a case-by-case Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) analysis as required under the Clean Air Act even though the proposed plant will be a major source of hazardous air pollutants. This is particularly egregious given the proposed plant's proximity to schools and churches – several of which are located within one mile of the plant.

In short, the omissions and errors in the permit are outright violations of the Clean Air Act, which requires certain demonstrations in the application. Neither Las Brisas Energy nor the TCEQ executive director made all the required demonstrations. Therefore, they've failed to meet their burden of proof and the application should be denied on the merits. In fact, Tom says this permit application is the most deficient air application he's ever seen, and it's encouraging that TCEQ's own public interest counsel has also found it seriously flawed.

That individual citizens and communities have to spend thousands of their own dollars to analyze the effects of air emissions from a major industrial boom in North Texas speaks volumes about the laissez-faire mentality of TCEQ, our state environmental agency. The Barnett Shale accounted for nearly a quarter of the natural gas produced in Texas in 2008, and prior studies have shown that the associated emissions can be substantial. Yet – nearly a decade after the Barnett boom was sparked by new drilling technologies making shale gas production economical – TCEQ has never presented any analysis of the overall effect of this industry on human health or regional air quality.

Only now, in the face of mounting local public concerns, does TCEQ finally seem to be paying attention. Representatives boldly claim that “we're really going to get a handle on the air quality in that area.” In October, they sent a mobile monitoring team to sample air quality around DISH and other parts of the Barnett Shale. [We note that, ironically, TCEQ was not testing for some of the most toxic compounds detected in DISH.]

It’s a shame that in trying “to get a handle” on air quality impacts of Barnett Shale production, TCEQ hasn’t analyzed more than 10 years of its own air monitoring data collected throughout the DFW area. Since TCEQ hadn’t done so, we decided to examine the data ourselves and found strong evidence linking Barnett Shale gas and oil production with ambient levels of air pollutants in Denton County.

In brief, we analyzed TCEQ’s own air pollution monitoring data and found that the levels of key pollutants at the Denton airport correlated well with the amount of condensate produced by natural gas wells in Denton County. We also found that the monitor at the Denton airport had the highest levels of non-methane organic compounds of all the places in the DFW Metroplex where monitoring exists. Extrapolating these results to other parts of the Barnett Shale, we would expect that if monitoring were conducted in Wise, Parker and Hood counties, the observed pollutant levels should be similar to those in Denton County (due to high levels of condensate production in those counties).

We applaud TCEQ’s recent mobile monitoring campaign and its prior emissions assessment efforts. But TCEQ must quickly translate this and other data into actionable policy options, and quickly take steps to reduce emissions. In future posts, we will review what more proactive states like Colorado are doing and highlight the tremendous win-win opportunity of capturing these emissions – both to natural gas producers and Texas taxpayers.