Cutting mercury from power plants by nearly half within 15 years can be done almost entirely through the Bush administration's market trading plan and without direct pollution controls, congressional researchers say.
WASHINGTON — Cutting mercury from power plants by nearly half within 15 years can be done almost entirely through the Bush administration's market trading plan and without direct pollution controls, congressional researchers say.
But a 70 percent reduction isn't likely to happen until 2030, a dozen years after the administration's target date, because of an emphasis on allowing companies to swap so-called pollution rights rather than install state-of-the-art pollution technology, the Congressional Research Service said.
Its analysis said the mercury regulations issued in March by the Environmental Protection Agency minimize costs for electric utilities by achieving mercury reductions as a byproduct of regulating other pollutants, postponing until the 2020s direct regulation of mercury.
EPA initially doesn't require companies to do anything more than they must do under other rules aimed at cutting two other key pollutants from power plants, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, said the CRS, an arm of the Library of Congress.
"Our judgment was that those technologies (for cutting mercury) aren't going to be widely available to the industry until the post-2010 time period," said Bill Wehrum, counsel to EPA's top air quality official. "We also wanted to design these regulations as cost-effective as they can be."
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Wehrum said those cuts in the other two pollutants would account for a majority of the reductions for mercury. "It's a direct result of our strategy of dealing with power plants on a multi-pollution basis," he said.
Wehrum acknowledged that it would takes some years beyond 2018 to meet that target date's cap for a 70 percent reduction in mercury, but he said the market trading would protect public health by giving some companies financial incentive to make pollution cuts early on.
In 2010, power plants would have to begin using a "cap-and-trade" program in which they could either further reduce mercury or buy "credits" from other companies that have made deeper cuts than what is required.
All but about 4 percent of the plants could meet the EPA's expectation for mercury emissions to be cut by half in 2020 through the trading program and avoiding having to buy special technology that filter and discard mercury particles, according to the analysis.
"It appears that full compliance with the 70 percent reduction might be delayed until 2030," CRS said in a report requested by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
EPA has estimated that 48 tons a year of mercury pollution from the nation's 600 coal-burning power plants will decrease to 31.3 tons in 2010 and 24.3 tons in 2020.
Felice Stadler, a policy specialist with the National Wildlife Federation, said there was no good reason to delay significantly cleaning up mercury from power plants for another quarter-century.
"It's truly unbelievable that EPA has been able to tout this rule as a step forward," she said. "Every aspect of this rule is suspect, not just the process, but the legal arguments, the cost numbers, their assessment of mercury's risks."
Source: Associated Press
