The Natural Gas Supply Association has begun a campaign to encourage federal regulators to amend rules that discourage use of U.S. natural gas.
Nicholas Bush, NGSA president, said some fuel users have tried to reduce air emissions by switching to natural gas and found federal regulations increase the cost of the changeover.
He said, "When you reduce pollution through cleaner fuel, you expect praise. What you get instead is a penalty."
TOUGHER RULES
NGSA said the Environmental Protection Agency has regulations that force natural gas users to meet tougher air emissions standards than users of coal or fuel oil.
Other rules take the financial benefits of fuel switching away from plants that reduce emissions in advance of regulatory requirements.
NGSA said EPA also can require plants that switch fuels to meet retroactive emissions standards.
And it said EPA rules force unrealistic comparisons between emissions for example, between a plant burning coal and operating at 50 60% of capacity compared with the plant's potential emissions if it operated with natural gas at 100% of capacity.
Bush suggested EPA abandon the "command and control" approach to regulation in favor of other methods that would reduce or eliminate the penalties against fuel switching.
He said EPA could adopt a fuel neutral system, under which all fuels must meet the same level of emissions regardless of the fuel type.
It could set a "multimedia" program that would treat all types of pollution from a single source as a whole, allowing a single pollution reduction program that would be more effective than a series of individually set emissions limits.
Bush said, "One of the clear difficulties we have is that EPA enforces its regulations on each emission separately."
EPA could allow trading programs, under which plants that cut emissions beyond requirements could sell the excess credits to other pollution sources. Or the agency could allow plants to "bank" credits toward future compliance needs.
And it could allow averaging of emissions within a geographic area to achieve overall, averaged emissions limits. That accommodates pollutants such as particulates that stay close to a source.
NO REVIEW
Bush said the barriers against natural gas use have accumulated because "environmental laws and regulations have been set over 25 years and have never been subjected to a holistic viewpoint. No one has stepped back and looked at the whole quilt."
He said the natural gas industry only wants fair treatment. "We're not out to mandate natural gas use and we're not out to set a natural gas standard" for setting emission limits that all fuels would have to meet.
