First, if you haven't read our updated post below, please notice the correction to Tuesday's initial story. DFW's "Moderate" classification by EPA under the new 75 ppb ozone/smog standard is actually a more serious ranking than Houston's "Marginal" ranking. In fact, areas with Marginal status are expected to be able to achieve the standard without even having to submit a clean-up plan with special pollution control measures. That's right, for the first time in forever, Houston won't even have to submit a "SIP" - State implementation Plan - while DFW will have to write yet another one, the fourth one in 15 years. According to EPA's announcement, most metropolitan areas were classified as "Marginal," identifying North Texas right off the bat as one of the more seriously smoggy places in America (but still way behind parts of California with an "Extreme" label slapped on the LA basin, and "Severe" for three more separate areas.) Most of DFW's sunbelt peers have fared better than our metormess. Atlanta started out at the same place as DFW 15-20 years ago, but has cleaned up its act enough to rate a "Marginal" in this round. Phoenix is also "Marginal." But of course neither one of those has a major natural gas play in the middle of them. Second, the timeline for the next DFW's next smog plan is known. The clock begins ticking 60 days after the new designations are published in the Federal Register - sometime between July and September of this year. From that date, DFW leaders and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have exactly three years - until the summer of 2015 - to design and build a new clean air plan for DFW that will meet the 75 ppb standard. We have a three year running average of 90.6 ppb. Not to worry however. TCEQ has already told us that ozone levels will drop to historic new lows this summer thanks to so many new cars being bought. On the outside chance that doesn't happen, the Rick Perry- driven TCEQ will have to find some other nonsensical rationalization for avoiding new controls on the Governor's industrial contributors - cement plants, the gas industry, and power plants, like they did last year with the new car strategy. But don't look for Austin to even start working on this clean air plan until 2014. There's no rush because the agency doesn't believe the 75 ppb standard is even necessary. The Commission's leadership was vocal in its opposition against it.  If local leaders were smart, they'd disconnect their own clean air efforts from the state's and begin doing their own planning immediately, but traditionally they don't move until TCEQ says "jump". Add to this the new element of regional elected officials who, like Governor Perry, not only don't want to impose any new controls on industry, but don't even concede the value of cleaner air, and you already have a formula that's in danger of repeating last year's Worst Clean Air Plan Ever. 2015 isn't that far away, but without a serious overhaul of the regional air quality planning process, hope of meeting the new smog standard seems further than ever. By the way, counting our correction of the original story we ran on Tuesday, we've now published three posts on the new smog boundaries and deadlines. That's three more than any other source that we can find this morning.   Read More

(A previous edition of this post defined Houston's EPA rank of "Marginal" has being more sever than DFW's EPA rank of "Moderate." This was a mistake. In fact, it's just the opposite. "Moderate" is more severe under EPA's ranking than "Marginal." We regret the error. Thanks to a reader for pointing it out.)..........At around closing time came news that the EPA had finalized the boundaries of the new "non-attainment area" for smog in North Texas that corresponds to enforcement of the "new" 75 ppb ozone standard approved last year. The 9 counties that were already in violation of the older standard are still there: Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Johnson, Kaufman, Parker, Rockwall, and Tarrant. The only new addition is Wise County, but it's a huge one given its prodigious amount of gas industry pollution and commuter traffic to Tarrant and Denton Counties. It also means that Wise County will be getting an ozone monitor. If it's placed correctly by TCEQ - and that's a big if - it could be giving us a much truer understanding of how high or low ozone levels are really going. Since predominant winds during "ozone season" (April -November) are from the southeast to northwest, much of DFW's dirty air gets pushed into Wise County, where it then officially falls off the map because there's no air monitors there to record it. TCEQ likes it that way because ozone readings in Wise - where DFW dirty air meets gas patch emissions - could be significantly higher than in most of the rest of DFW. And that would dampen the Austin happy talk about improving DFW air quality. Also coming to Wise are things like those Vapor Recovery units on gasoline pumps, and other stricter pollution control requirements - although the impact on the entrenched gas industry infrastructure already there is unclear. Hood County was also singled out by EPA for inclusion in the non-attainment area but is left off this final order. It also has a number of gas industry facilities, including compressor stations, although most have shown up over the last ten years as opposed to Wise, which has seen decades of oil and gas production. There was no explanation for Hood exclusion in EPA's letter. DFW will be classified as a "Moderate" non-attainment area under the new standard while Houston will get a less severe "Marginal" classification. Dallas and Houston remain Texas' only non-attainmenta areas for smog, although that could certainly change over time. Next up is EPA's determination of the compliance timeline for all non-attainment areas. The worse the air, the more time a region has to clean it up. Officials don't have to get serious about cleaner air until around 2015 for a 2017-18 deadline. That''s been the pattern up to now - keep waiting until the last minute to think about how to dig yourself out of a multi-decade deep hole. And believe us, with this process, 2 years is "the last minute." There could be all kinds of useful planning and researching going on right now but they'll be none of that.  Because insuring receipt of federal highway dollars, not protecting public health, has been the primary motivating factor behind the clean air machinery in North Texas. Until those priorities are reversed and clean air is sought for its own worth, we're likely to always be behind the curve, chasing "unattainable" smog standards.  Read More

(CORRECTION: A previous edition of this post cited Houston's "Marginal" classification for ozone pollution by EPA as more severe than DFW's "Moderate". In fact the opposite is true, "Moderate" is a more severe classification than "Marginal." We regret the error and apologize for any confusion this caused)........At around closing time came news that the EPA had finalized the boundaries of the new "non-attainment area" for smog in North Texas that corresponds to enforcement of the "new" 75 ppb ozone standard approved last year. The 9 counties that were already in violation of the older standard are still there: Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Johnson, Kaufman, Parker, Rockwall, and Tarrant. The only new addition is Wise County, but it's a huge one given its prodigious amount of gas industry pollution and commuter traffic to Tarrant and Denton Counties. It also means that Wise County will be getting an ozone monitor. If it's placed correctly by TCEQ - and that's a big if - it could be giving us a much truer understanding of how high or low ozone levels are really going. Since predominant winds during "ozone season" (April -November) are from the southeast to northwest, much of DFW's dirty air gets pushed into Wise County, where it then officially falls off the map because there's no air monitors there to record it. TCEQ likes it that way because ozone readings in Wise - where DFW dirty air meets gas patch emissions - could be significantly higher than in most of the rest of DFW. And that would dampen the Austin happy talk about improving DFW air quality. Also coming to Wise are things like those Vapor Recovery units on gasoline pumps, and other stricter pollution control requirements - although the impact on the entrenched gas industry infrastructure already there is unclear. Hood County was also singled out by EPA for inclusion in the non-attainment area but is left off this final order. It also has a number of gas industry facilities, including compressor stations, although most have shown up over the last ten years as opposed to Wise, which has seen decades of oil and gas production. There was no explanation for Hood exclusion in EPA's letter. DFW wil be classified as a "Moderate" non-attainment area under the new standard while Houston will get a less severe "Marginal" classification. Dallas and Houston remain Texas' only non-attainmenta areas for smog, although that could certainly change over time. Next up is EPA's determination of the compliance timeline for all non-attainment areas. The good news is that DFW's deadline should be sooner than Houston's because it's not as severely ranked. The worse the air, the more time a region has to clean it up. The bad news is that it could still mean officials don't have to get serious about cleaner air until around 2015 for a 2017-18 deadline. That''s been the pattern up to now - keep waiting until the last minute to think about how to dig yourself out of a multi-decade deep hole. And believe us, with this process, 2 years is "the last minute." There could be all kinds of useful planning and researching going on right now but they'll be none of that.  Because insuring receipt of federal highway dollars, not protecting public health, has been the primary motivating factor behind the clean air machinery in North Texas. Until those priorities are reversed and clean air is sought for its own worth, we're likely to always be behind the curve, chasing "unattainable" smog standards.  Read More

Reuters has the run down on the plethora of new EPA clean air rules coming down in the next year or so, including resolution of the cross-state regs, vehicle efficiency, fracking emissions, Greenhouse Gases, and Coal Ash rules. We know there's been a lot of justifiable disappointment with this Administration, but please look at this agenda and try to imagine that any part of it would be coming from an EPA run by any of the current GOP presidential candidates. It's pretty much impossible.   Read More

Many of you know the cliche of Chaos Theory made famous by  "Jurassic Park's" Jeff Goldblum, that "when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it causes a hurricane in Florida." Now science has produced the environmental equivalent of that theory by showing how massive amounts of air pollution from China is affecting weather patterns in the western U.S. CBS News interviews a scientist working on the relationship at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "The atmosphere has no walls. So pollution on this side of the world can make it the other side of the world in about five days," she says. In this case, Chinese PM/soot is carried by the jet stream across the Pacific and stops the clouds in the western U.S. from producing rain and snow.   Read More

Late Friday EPA announced that it was recommending two more North Texas counties - Wise and Hood - join the current nine-county DFW "non-attainment" area for smog, or ozone pollution for purposes of trying to reach the new 75 parts per billion federal standard. In doing so, the EPA disagreed with the latest State of Texas plan to leave the non-attainment area boundaries unchanged. But as the Star-Telegram points out today, that wasn't the original position of the state. In 2008, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality suggested both Wise and Hood be included in DFW's smog zone. According to the documents submitted to EPA by TCEQ supporting this inclusion (accessible via a link in the S-T article), "Wise County produces significant stationary source emissions, ranking 2nd in the 13-county air quality planning area for NOx emissions in 2005. Hood County, the thirteenth county in the air quality planning area, has a design value of 84 parts per billion for 2005 through 2007, and a preliminary design value for 2006 through 2008 of 77 parts per billion."  But, as the S-T story points out, TCEQ commissioners requested that Wise be removed from the recommendation to the governor’s office in December of 2008 and Hood was cut out of the recommendation less than two months ago. Supposedly, these counties were removed by the state because ozone averages up to and including 2010 were lower than the ones in previous years. But that's only one criterion and since Wise doesn't have  monitor at all - because TCEQ is afraid of what it might find - that's not a legitimate argument for its absence on the TCEQ list to EPA. But wait there's more. In the documents EPA sent the state to justify both Wise and Hood Counties being included, it cites a number of different factors, including new emissions from Barnett Shale gas production. EPA used a national 2008 comprehensive emissions inventory to account for how much smog-producing Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) were coming from each North Texas county. According to this data, Hood County had 5500 tons a year of NOx emissions, and 9500 tons a year of VOCs FROM ALL SOURCES, while Wise had 12,000 tons a year of NOx and 23,700 tons a year of VOCs. Those are big enough numbers to get noticed. And yet EPA notes that a year later, TCEQ did its own Barnett Shale emissions inventory and found even higher totals for some counties. For Hood, Shale production accounted for 7000 tons a year of NOx - or more than 1500 tons more a year than the EPA's inventory of all sources in Hood County combined. VOCs from gas pollution accounted for 2100 tons a year, or almost a quarter of the EPA inventory total. In Wise, TCEQ's shale inventory found 2500 tons of NOX, and 6000 tons of VOCs a year being emitted from gas production. In addition, EPA traced back where dirty air came from on high ozone days at selected Tarrant County and Parker County smog monitors. It concluded that these "back trajectories" for the Eagle Mountain Lake and Parker County monitors "further support that air that is transported from Hood and Wise Counties ends up in the area when ozone exceedences are observed." As we noted on Friday, this is the first time in the two decade battle over DFW air quality that gas industry air pollution has been a reason for including a county in the DFW non-attainment area. That's what makes this latest announcement such a milestone, and worthy of more discussion in places like the Dallas and Denton gas drilling task forces that are charged with re-writing those cities gas mining ordinances.   Read More

Six Republican Senators joined their Democratic colleagues to thwart an attempt to rollback EPA's recently announced Cross State Pollution Rules that requires approximately 30 states, including Texas, to curb emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which contribute to smog and haze problems in other states. President Obama had threatened to veto the legislation if it had managed to get out of the Senate, although despite two years of trying, House Republicans have yet to find a piece of EPA rollback legislation that can make it through the other chamber. But that won't keep them from trying. Expect to hear about similar results in the coming weeks for bills nullifying the 2008 cement plant emission standards, the 2010 rules for small boilers and incinerators and other clean air legislation.   Read More

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the House Republican assault on the Clean Air Act, including gutting rules that would reduce smog, mercury poisoning, and toxic air pollution of all kinds. Every week from now until Thanksgiving, Republicans will be targeting a different EPA policy for destruction, including the 15-years-in-the-making emission rules for cement plants that Downwinders was instrumental in winning in 2008.   Read More

UPDATE: 8:30 PM    Things cooled off rapidly after 5pm and so did the ozone levels, just in the nick of time too. The Keller monitor barely escapes establishing a new season "4th high" and setting off a chain reaction that would have increased the entire regional ozone average by a part per billion or so. Instead, it merely tied its 4th highest reading of 95 ppb and the region's Design Value stays at 90 ppb. Parker County did set a record today - its highest 8-hour average this summer, also at 95 ppb. Another day like today and it could be the 7th monitor out of compliance this year. Eagle Mountain Lake also saw its highest 8-hour average reading this year at 87ppb. A final middle finger salute to DFW from the Smog Monster in what's been the worst year for ozone since 2006? We still have a week and a half to go until "ozone season" ends.   Read More