THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 26, 1994 TAG: 9409240021
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
At a meeting scheduled tomorrow in Providence, R.I., Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop is likely to stand alone or very nearly so against proposed new clean-air regulations that could end up costing Virginia businesses and residents millions of dollars.
At issue is the 12-state consortium known as the Ozone Transport Commission, consisting of the governor and chief environmental officer for each of 12 Northeastern states and the District of Columbia. It was formed by the federal Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 to make the states act in concert because of the supposed problem of ``transport'' of pollutants from one state to another.
The OTC, which is meeting in Rhode Island tomorrow, is devising a plan to nominally bring the northeastern states into ``attainment'' with the air-quality standards for ground-level ozone, or smog. But the numbers show that smog is not a serious problem for most of the area, and that ``correcting'' this situation could mean huge economic dislocations.
The EPA's current smog standard is 120 parts per billion. If ozone monitors, which are strategically placed throughout the area, read more than 120 PPB for a single hour more than three times in three years, the area ``fails'' its attainment test and all kinds of dramatic steps have to be taken to reduce nitrogen oxide. The Norfolk-Virginia Beach area had only .7 ``exceedences'' between 1990 and 1992 and three for 1993. Most of the other areas in the OTC states also had little or none.
If a majority of the states in the OTC decide the area as a whole will not meet attainment goals - and thus will risk losing billions in federal funding - then it will ask EPA to propose rules to force the area into compliance.
New Jersey, for instance, is proposing that EPA require each large stationary source (power plants and coke ovens) in the OTC region to emit 75 percent less nitrogen oxide than they did in 1990. No coal-burning utility or coke oven could possibly meet this standard. Fifteen percent of Virginia's coal goes to Massachusetts and almost 10 percent goes to Pennsylvania. That business would almost certainly be lost if this standard were implemented. Virginia Power would have to drastically modify many of its power plants in order to comply with the standard, a move that could cost ratepayers millions of dollars.
On top of all this, the computer modeling, upon which the need for all these reductions is supposedly based, is not even completed. Essentially, OTC wants to make multibillion-dollar decisions without the proper information.
And if that weren't enough, if the states in the OTC have to shut down power plants for modification, they might end up having to buy power from old power plants in states such as Indiana and Illinois, which are outside of the OTC. That will ``transport'' even more pollution into the OTC zone on the prevailing winds, thus defeating the whole purpose of the exercise.
Most Virginians have not yet awakened to the potentially mind-boggling costs of efforts to make air that is already mostly clean minutely cleaner still. The Allen administration deserves credit for seeing the danger and seeking to head it off. by CNB