Comment being accepted on emissions-reduction plan for Olympic National Park, wilderness areas
Published 12:01 am Wednesday, October 19, 2011
OLYMPIA — Public comment is being accepted on a plan to cut emissions from a coal-fired plant near Centralia to reduce haze in Olympic National Park and other wilderness areas.
The comment period, which opened Monday and closes Nov. 21, is only for proposed changes to the state’s plan for reducing emissions from TransAlta’s coal-fired power plant in Lewis County.
The proposed revisions do not affect other portions of the state implementation plan or the Best Available Retrofit Technology — or BART — orders for six other facilities in Washington, which include the Port Townsend Paper Corp. mill.
Olympic National Park is one of eight Washington parks and wilderness areas that are targeted for reductions in haze-making air pollution.
The state Department of Ecology said haze has reduced the views in national parks and wilderness areas from an average of 140 miles to 35 to 90 miles in the western United States.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — or EPA — has directed states to reduce regional haze in 156 national parks and wilderness areas in coming decades.
BART technology
The EPA requires certain industrial plants to install BART if they emit air pollutants that are believed to cause or contribute to regional haze.
Visibility-limiting pollutants include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particles.
The TransAlta plant is the state’s largest stationary source of nitrogen oxide emissions.
Ecology submitted the state’s implementation plan for regional haze in January.
The agency now proposes to revise TransAlta’s BART order and the part of the plan that addresses it.
The law requires TransAlta to:
■ Install controls to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions.
The revised BART order calls for a 12 percent reduction and an optimization study to determine the actual reduction that the controls can achieve.
This reduction would be in addition to a 20 percent reduction that the company achieved by switching to use of a different type of coal as a fuel source.
■ Meet the state’s greenhouse gas emission performance standard on a schedule.
Ecology will conduct a public hearing at 6 p.m. Nov. 16 at Ecology headquarters at 300 Desmond Drive S.E. in Lacey.
The draft documents can be found on Ecology’s Air Quality Program website at http://tinyurl.com/hcq2c.
To submit comments, mail them to Al Newman, Washington Department of Ecology, Air Quality Program, P.O. Box 47600, Olympia, WA 98504-7600; or send an email to AQcomments@ecy.wa.gov.
Haze in ‘Class 1’ areas
States must develop Regional Haze State Implementation Plans for specific periods between now and 2064 in a national effort to restore 140-mile visibility in “Class 1” areas.
Washington state has eight Class 1 areas. In addition to Olympic National Park, they are Mount Rainier National Park, North Cascades National Park, Glacier Peak Wilderness, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Goat Rocks Wilderness, Mount Adams Wilderness and Pasayten Wilderness.
The EPA adopted a regional haze rule in 1999. The initial planning period runs through 2018.
In addition to TransAlta’s coal-fired power plant and the Port Townsend Paper Corp. mill, BART plans are under scrutiny for the BP Cherry Point Refinery and the Alcoa Intalco Works aluminum smelter, both in Whatcom County; the Tesoro refinery in Skagit County; the Lafarge cement plant in Seattle; and the Weyerhaeuser Corp. paper mill in Longview.
For more information on regional haze, visit http://tinyurl.com/23juqd9.
