Basics of the Proposed Rule
Q: What is the portland cement NESHAP rule?
On May 6, the EPA published a new proposed rule that would significantly change the air pollution standards applicable to cement kilns. The proposed rule establishes new national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants for cement kilns under the Clean Air Act.
Q: When will plants need to follow the proposed regulations?
There is no fixed date for finalization of the rule, but all comments on the proposed rule are required to be submitted by September 4, 2009. After receiving comments, the EPA has many options, including revising the proposed rule, delaying implementation, or publishing a final rule for adoption.
Q: What plants must follow the proposed rule?
The proposed rule covers 93 portland cement manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Puerto Rico that are operated by private industry, or by state, local, and tribal governments.
Q: Why are the emissions standards in the proposed rule significant?
The proposed rule does more than change the degree of emissions regulations applicable to cement kilns—it utilizes an unduly burdensome and unrealistic "pollutant-by pollutant" approach to develop maximum achievable control technology ("MACT") requirements that fail to reflect adequate real world data about demonstrated emissions control strategies. MACT requirements are designed to direct industries towards the pollution control technology used by the "best performers" in a certain industry sector. The proposed rule, however, cobbles together a range of different performance characteristics applicable to different pollutants without determining if it is feasible or possible for any one kiln to comply with all of the standards simultaneously. Additionally, the rule does not account for the fact that the chemical composition of key cement inputs, such as limestone, varies from region to region. As a result, the proposed rule will have disproportionate impacts on different manufacturing locations.
Q: Is the approach in the proposed rule legal?
No. The Clean Air Act requires EPA to base MACT floor standards on emissions control that has been achieved in practice. It also requires EPA to set achievable standards. The proposed standards do not meet either requirement. The rule requires every U.S. facility to implement very costly control strategies to achieve compliance simultaneously with four excessively stringent standards that have not been demonstrated to be simultaneously achievable in practice and that do not take into account important factors impacting achievable emissions control by facilities, such as the composition of their nontechnological raw material inputs.
Impacts on the Cement Industry
Q: What is the portland cement industry?
The cement industry is, quite literally, the key building block of the nation's construction industry. Virtually no new construction activity can be undertaken without the use of concrete, and p ortland cement is in the key ingredient in concrete. Portland cement is calcium silicate cement made with a combination of calcium, silicon, aluminum, and iron. Lime and silica make up about 85% of its mass , and large cement kilns, operating at temperatures of approximately 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, covert the raw materials into portland cement that is then mixed with sand, gravel, and water to create concrete.
Q: How will the proposed rule affect the U.S. portland cement industry?
As written, the proposed rule would be devastating to the U.S. cement industry. The U.S. cement industry already faces extreme pressure from foreign competitors that do not have to comply with rigorous environmental or labor standards. Requiring U.S. cement manufacturers to comply with the MACT approach will result in much higher manufacturing costs and undermine the ability for U.S. cement to compete with foreign products. Further, because adopting all of the emissions control technologies in the rule is neither practical nor economically feasible, it is likely that many U.S. cement jobs will have to move to foreign locations.
Q: Isn't the cement industry exaggerating the costs?
This is not your typical regulation—it is a whole new approach to regulating air toxics from industry, being applied to one of our nation's most essential industries. Adoption of this rule will make it difficult to raise the capital or the business confidence to modernize existing cement kilns, will reduce the capacity of kilns, and will make new plant construction almost impossible. Even the EPA, in their proposed rule, estimates that adoption of the proposed rule will result in $340 million in new costs to cement industry, and an almost 10% drop in U.S. cement production. And, these predictions are unreasonably conservative because they do not take into account that the costs of adopting all of the differing MACT technologies simultaneously are inherently unpredictable because there is no cement manufacturing plant that has attempted to use all of these control technologies at once.
Q: Why is the U.S. portland cement industry important to infrastructure and economic recovery?
The U.S. cement industry employs tens of thousands of Americans and produces a product that is absolutely essential to the U.S. economic recovery and security. Without affordable cement it will be impossible to pursue many of the construction projects that have been identified as important to an economic recovery, such as infrastructure projects. Adoption of this rule will, by the EPA's own admission, reduce the number of U.S. jobs in the industry, increase our reliance on foreign producers of cement, and increase costs for all consumers of cement. This means that the rule will apply pressure on the U.S. economy both directly, by driving U.S. cement producers out of business, and indirectly, by increasing the costs of cement for all of the industries that depend upon cement.
The Obama Administration and the Congress have recently enacted a stimulus program in part designed to make infrastructure investments an engine for economic recovery. If this rule is adopted, and domestic cement supply is constrained and investments in cement capacity expansion are avoided, the stimulus package simply will advance fewer projects with less jobs created. A reasonable rule – based soundly on Clean Air Act requirements and building on the demonstrated record of current regulatory programs – would not act at cross-purposes to economic recovery.
Q: Why is it bad to rely on foreign cement?
From an economic perspective, relying on foreign cement production will place the U.S. construction industry at the mercy of potentially uncertain sources of supply. From an environmental perspective, reliance on foreign sources of supply actually will increase global greenhouse emissions because transporting cement to the United States from international markets will require tremendous additional use of fossil fuels, thus substantially increasing the amount of carbon emissions per unit of cement used in this country. Finally, many foreign sources of cement are manufactured under conditions that are simply not as environmentally protective as we find in the United States. For example, one of the purposes of the NESHAP is to reduce mercury emissions. However, increased releases of mercury from less-controlled facilities overseas will simply add to the global pool of mercury in the Earth's biosphere. Such mercury can travel, increasing soil and water deposits throughout the world, including in the U.S. So, increasing mercury emissions overseas under less controlled conditions defeats an important environmental purpose of the proposal. Similarly, while the congress is actively debating regulation of greenhouse gas emission, it recognizes that emissions leakage (i.e. the movement of U.S. industry to foreign production) could have a net increase in the global emissions of CO2. To the extent the NESHAP rule pushes production of cement out of the U.S. to countries with higher carbon footprints will directly increase CO2 emissions as both a result of the increased levels of “dirtier” production globally, and high levels of CO2 emitted to move huge quantities of cement to the U.S. marketplace.
Alternatives
Q: What changes can be made to the proposed rule to reduce its negative impacts on the U.S. cement industry?
This rule should be re-worked to take into account more real world data and more realistic assumptions about the cement industry and about what controls can be placed on cement kilns and the emissions reductions such controls can achieve in practice. The EPA should reject the pollutant-by-pollutant approach and set MACT floors based upon requirements that are demonstrably achievable and that take regional and other kinds of relevant variability into account. And, as suggested in the recent Brick MACT decision, EPA should establish appropriate subcategories of the regulated community in order to ensure that standards are both achievable and reasonable.
Existing Track Record of Environmental Performance
Q: If the proposed rule is altered, will the industry go unregulated?
No. Cement manufacturing in the United States today is regulated by a complex system of federal, state, and local regulations. Cement plants utilize sophisticated air pollution control devices and monitoring systems. Further, cement companies have worked hand in hand with EPA to enhance the energy efficiency of their facilities, meaning less fuel is consumed per unit of production. Cement plants also have extensive recycling programs that include recovery of cement kiln dust, and use of fly ash and wastes to supplement both raw feed and energy needs. Such programs have important positive impacts on the environment. In short, sustainability is not just a slogan to the modern cement industry; it is a core operating principle.
Q: How can neighbors learn more about cement kilns and their environmental performance?
Cement companies actively engage the communities in which they operate to address conservation and ecological issues in the region and provide direct employment and skill acquisition training for community members. Examples of these activities can be found at www.cement.org in the 2008 Sustainability Manufacturing Report.
For more information, please contact Patti Flesher at the Portland Cement Association or visit our Website, www.cement.org
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