Plants Get Reprieve: EPA Adds 2 Years to Reduce Toxic Metals in Wastewater

The EPA has finalized a rule postponing the dates for certain rules that would limit runoff from two waste streams at power plants: bottom ash transport water and flue gas desulfurization. Compliance dates for the rules, which were issued in Nov. 2015, have been pushed back by two years, the EPA says.

The final rule essentially resets the clock for certain portions of the agency’s effluent guidelines for power plants. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt says the postponement provides relief from the “existing regulatory deadlines while the agency revisits some of the rule’s requirements.”

Power plants now have until Nov. 1, 2020, to comply with the rules, rather than by Nov. of 2018.

Power plant owners and other energy companies had said that purchasing the required “best available technology economically achievable” (BAT) would have a negative effect on jobs, and that the costs had been “grossly underestimated” by the EPA; the agency had pegged annual compliance costs at $480 million. In fact, the groups argued, such a regulatory burden could force plant closures, writes ThinkProgress.

The article says that the clean water protections implemented in 2015 “would have kept heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury, and boron from being dumped into local waterways…”

The Obama-era rule set “the first federal limits on the levels of toxic metals in wastewater that can be discharged from power plants, based on technology improvements in the steam electric power industry over the last three decades,” the EPA said at the time. “On an annual basis, the rule is projected to reduce the amount of toxic metals, nutrients, and other pollutants that steam electric power plants are allowed to discharge by 1.4 billion pounds and reduce water withdrawal by 57 billion gallons.” The agency estimated benefits associated with the rule at $451 to $566 million.