A federal appeals court ordered the US Environmental Protection agency to file a status report by Jan. 12 on when it expects to establish air quality designations under the 2015 National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for US areas not yet designated.
The Dec. 19 US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia order responded to a statement in EPA’s Nov. 16 Federal Register notice concerning the 2015 ground-level ozone limits that remaining designations would be issued in a “separate future action.”
The agency is reviewing the order, a spokeswoman told OGJ. “EPA has already taken action to designate 85% of the country as meeting the standards and is in the process of working with states to designate the remaining areas,” she said.
EPA proposed rules for state, local, and Indian tribal agencies to implement the 2015 NAAQS, which reduce allowable ozone levels from 75 to 70 ppb, in early November 2016 (OGJ Online, Nov. 4, 2016). But it quickly became apparent that many states were still implementing 2008 requirements from EPA.
Oil and gas and other business associations, along with several state and local governments, expressed concerns that the lower limit could push national parks and other nonindustrial parts of the country into nonattainment penalties because it failed to account for naturally occurring background ozone.
EPA Administrator E. Scott Pruitt notified state governors in early June that he extended by 1 year the deadline for states to promulgate initial area designations under the 2015 NAAQS.
The US House of Representatives passed a resolution in July giving state and local governments more time to implement federal ground-level ozone limits and avoid nonattainment penalties (OGJ Online, July 19, 2017).
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