CLEAN AIR FOR HOUSTON COULD BE TEN YEARS AWAY

By Ella Tyler

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality filed proposed amendments to the State Implementation Plan for the Dallas/ Fort Worth and the Houston/Galveston/Brazoria ozone non-attainment areas yesterday. The SIP projects that the Dallas/Fort Worth area will meet the eight-hour federal ozone standard by the deadline in 2010, but the Houston/Galveston/Brazoria area will not come into compliance with the eight-hour standard until sometime between 2009 and 2018, according to the TCEQ press release.

The press release says the SIP will report that “tremendous progress has taken place in emissions reductions to date as a result of NOx and volatile organic compound (VOC) controls put into place for the one-hour standard. From 1990 to 2003, total reported emissions of VOCs and NOx dropped 48 percent and 43 percent respectively. In 2000, the population exposed to what would have been eight-hour ozone exceedances was estimated at 4.5 million, and in 2009 that number is predicted to be 824,000, a reduction of 82 percent.”

The TCEQ is proposing three new rules for our area:

1. Monitoring and stopping the escape of pollutants from storage tanks and when fuels and other materials are transferred between vessels;
2. Requiring near-shore marine vessels to use the same clean-burning diesel fuel that trucks and other land-based engines use; and
3. Approving the Houston-Galveston Area Council to seek local reductions through programs of its own.

The TCEQ commissioners will consider the SIP rules for publishing on Dec 13. The proposed rule changes are at TCEQ’s website. The SIP, the first one since the eight-hour ozone standard was adopted, must go to the EPA by June 15, 2007.

Critics had lined up even before the plan was formally released. Last week, Ramon Alvarez, PhD, senior scientist for Environmental Defense, told the Galveston County Daily News that the plan won’t bring the Houston-Galveston region anywhere near the health standard for air. The federal eight-hour ozone standard to be reached by 2010 is 84 parts per billion. Alvarez said that, according to its own projections, the new measures the state will propose this month will only bring the region down to 95 parts per billion by the end of the decade.

Earlier this month, the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention filed suit, asking the EPA to force the state to come up with a plan that will do more to clean up the region’s air. Yesterday, GHASP’s executive director Sabrina Strawn said, “This forecasted failure is a result of an unwillingness, not an inability, to meet the standard. For years, GHASP has insisted that there are many additional measures that the state could take to decrease ozone levels in Houston. In fact, TCEQ staff members have proposed many such measures previously, but the agency’s leadership chose not to accept them.”

Alvarez suggested that if electric hookups were required in truck- parking spots, truck drivers would not have to idle their engines in order to run air conditioners and TVs when the truck is stopped. “This is one simple way to reduce emissions,” he said.

One casualty of the area’s air quality problems may be that the TCEQ may effectively ban biodiesel in the state’s largest markets by the end of the year. According to the TCEQ, biodiesel does not meet the stricter NOx standards recently imposed on diesel and alternative diesel fuels under new regulations. For more on this issue, see the CLEAN website.