Louisiana groups pressure feds over refinery-linked plants | Company

A dozen Louisiana environmental groups and national environmental organizations are urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set water pollution limits for the first time for a niche industry that processes waste from crude oil refineries, saying they contain a host of toxic elements and dumping chemicals into the waterways of Louisiana and Texas.

Two of those Louisiana groups – Healthy Gulf and Micah 6:8 Mission – have also notified three of the processing plants, located in Gramercy and Calcasieu Parish, of their intention to sue them under the U.S. Clean Water Act due to years of alleged discharges of toxic materials. in the Mississippi, Blind and Calcasieu rivers, the notices said.

In a July report, one of the groups that filed the EPA petition, the Environmental Integrity Project, alleged that outdated petroleum coke calcining plants fall into a long-standing gap in federal regulation of air and water pollution. The situation has allowed operations in Louisiana, Texas and other states to be conducted with little oversight, the Integrity Project said.

“Petcoke processing plants have essentially been given free rein to pollute our waters for the past four decades,” said Meg Parish, senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project’s Clean Water Program. “This has to end.”

Water discharges from some plants can be several pounds to less than a pound and sometimes even orders of magnitude smaller, EPA data shows. Parish and others involved in the EPA petition argue that the amounts are significant because of the high toxicity of the elements and how long they remain in the environment before breaking down.

An EPA spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the petition, which is not a lawsuit but an administrative request issued directly to the agency under the U.S. Clean Water Act and federal administrative rules. If the agency agrees to set the limits, the process could take several years and may take into account technical feasibility, costs and amounts of water discharges.

The petition was filed days before Tuesday’s presidential election, which could change the EPA’s tougher stance on industrial regulation under the Biden administration.

Other groups involved in the EPA petition include the Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Law & Policy Center, Clean Water Action, Food & Water Watch, Habitat Recovery Project, RESTORE, Three Rivers Waterkeeper, Vessel Project of Louisiana and Waterkeeper Alliance.

Petcoke plants, built between the 1930s and the early 1980s, place the remains of crude oil refining in high-temperature furnaces and turn them into electrically conductive rocks crucial for smelting aluminum, steel and iron and glass production.

The process is known as “calcination” and emits significant amounts of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and other air pollutants, the groups say. It also leads to the discharge of process and rainwater loaded with a variety of heavy metals and a class of carcinogens the groups call polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.

Seven of the nation’s 13 petcoke burning facilities are in Louisiana, the groups say. They are often located near poor and minority communities in highly industrialized areas.

Among them are the Rain CII facilities in Gramercy, Chalmette, Norco and Sulfur; the Oxbow Calcining Facility in Baton Rouge; and Alcoa’s Reynolds plant in Lake Charles.

In the petition to the EPA, the groups want the agency to establish new national sector-specific water discharge limits for the variety of heavy metals and other chemicals they say can be discharged, including lead, mercury, nickel, benzo(ghi)perylene, PAHs and vanadium.

The groups say these releases have been reported to the EPA. Also, their own review of air and water discharge permits has tracked the flow of stormwater and process water into local waterways, they say.

Yet four of the seven facilities in Louisiana have no water discharge limits or monitoring requirements for toxic pollutants, the groups told the EPA. Those four are the Rain CII plants in Gramercy and Chalmette, Oxbow Calcining in Baton Rouge and Reynolds Alcoa in Lake Charles. A fifth, Rain CII’s Sulfur plant, has toxic chemical limits and monitoring requirements only for chromium and zinc.

Parish, the attorney for the integrity project, said the groups plan to sue the Rain CII plants in Gramercy and Sulfur and the Alcoa plant in Lake Charles because they each reported annual toxic water discharges to EPA, but the State Department of Environmental Quality said they were not discharging. those same pollutants when the agency was drafting the companies’ water permits.

Andrew Whitehurst, director of water programs for Healthy Gulf, said DEQ must better protect the state’s waterways “and hold these facilities accountable for the pollution they discharge.”

The Rain CII plant in Gramercy reported to the EPA water releases of lead, nickel, PAHs and benzo(ghi)perylene for much of the past five years. None were more than £13.5 per year. The company’s latest water discharge permit, approved last year, sets no limits or requires monitoring of these chemicals.

The majority of the water discharges pass through the company’s settling ponds and a few kilometers of canals before any contaminants are released into the Blind River. Some of the discharge from petcoke ships filtered outside that system ends up in the Mississippi, regulatory documents say.

Officials from DEQ, Rain CII and Oxbow Calcining did not respond to a request for comment. Alcoa said it could not comment on potential lawsuits.

“Alcoa is committed to operating in accordance with all applicable legal requirements,” the company said in a statement.