NOX Standards for Boilers Upheld

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on December21, 1999 upheld Pennsylvania's new source performance standards for nitrogen oxide (NOx) emission from the utility and industrial boilers. In the case of Lignite Energy Council v. EPA, 1999 W.L. 1215307 (December21, 1999) the Circuit Court denied petitions filed by industry attacking the new source performance standards of .15 pounds per million BTU for the utility boilers and .20 pounds per million BTU for industrial boilers. EPA based these standards on what it considered to be "the best demonstrated system of emissions reduction" i.e., selective catalytic reduction (SCR) in combination with combustion control technologies. Petitioners claimed that SCR was not the best demonstrated system for utility boilers because combustion controls could obtain similar reductions at less cost. But the court stated that "in light of EPA's unchallenged findings showing that the new standards would only modestly increase the cost of reducing electricity in newly constructed boilers ... we do not think that EPA exceeded its considerable discretion under §111." Petitioners also attacked the regulations on the basis that SCR had not been adequately demonstrated for use in industrial boilers. The court found that EPA was justified in extrapolating the performance of the technology in utility boilers to use in industrial boilers. The court found that "EPA has shown that SCR can be successfully applied to coal - fired utility boilers under a 'wide range of operating conditions' including those analogous to the load cycles of industrial boilers."