I’ve blogged before about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that comes into effect today. A recent article provides historical background to the MATS standards, which it points out have been in development for over 20 years. It also points out that 11 of the 15 largest coal utilities, half of the U.S. coal fleet, have informed their shareholders that they are well positioned to meet them.
Power plants are significant emitters of mercury and a variety of other hazardous air pollutants, such as arsenic, nickel, cadmium, chromium, lead, selenium, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride.
According to the EPA the public health benefits of reducing emissions of these substances are in the range of $53 billion to $140 billion at an estimated cost of $11 billion.
In 1990 President Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments that required the EPA to assess where mercury emissions were coming from, their impact, and the viability of reducing emissions. In 2000 after studying mercury emissions from coal-fired plants, it decided that under the CWA it needed to regulate emissions. In 2004, the EPA proposed the first national mercury emissions standards, which were contested successfully in court because they they did not treat mercury as a hazardous air pollutant. EPA is finalizing a new set of rules today consistent with the hazardous air pollutant provisions. The new rules will require reductions beginning in 2014, 24 years after EPA was first directed to investigate regulating mercury emissions from power plants.
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