The Houston Chronicle
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Vote could change air pollution rules
Legislation would toughen limits for old, 'grandfathered' facilities

By BILL DAWSON
May 14, 2001

After much spirited debate in their 1997 and 1999 sessions, state lawmakers are heading toward a showdown on the issue of air pollution from old, grandfathered industrial facilities.

The Senate is expected to vote today or Tuesday on whether to accelerate a cleanup schedule approved by the House for these plants.

Another related question, which has largely dominated debate on the issue in recent weeks, is whether to toughen the House bill's mandate for compressors and other polluting machinery along the state's many oil and gas pipelines.

Older industrial facilities are called "grandfathered" if they still enjoy a legal exemption from having state emission permits. Permits often require stricter emission control. Legislators created the exemption in 1971.

After state officials documented that much of the state's industrial air pollution still came from grandfathered plants, the Legislature passed two bills in 1999.

One mandated specific pollution cutbacks for grandfathered power plants. The other measure, championed by then-Gov. George W. Bush, created a state program for oil, chemical and other industries, in which their grandfathered plants could volunteer for permits.

Not many did, however, which set the stage for legislative moves this year to end the permit exemption.

The debate this year has largely revolved around plants and pipeline equipment outside the Houston, Dallas and Beaumont metropolitan areas.

Within those multicounty regions, smog-reduction plans that the state's environmental commission adopted last year will order equally deep pollution cuts by all plants -- those with permits and others that are still grandfathered.

Environmentalists and their legislative allies have argued that cleaning up grandfathered plants outside these metropolitan areas is necessary to help these areas comply with the national smog standard by 2007, as federal law mandates.

The reason, they contend, is that drifting pollution from outside the metropolitan regions contributes to smog violations within their boundaries.

A measure that passed the House -- and altered only slightly by a Senate committee -- would order grandfathered plants outside metropolitan areas that violate the smog standard to get permits by 2007. Pollution cuts required in the permits could be made later -- after the cleanup deadline for Houston and the other smog-violation regions.

State Sen. David Bernsen, D-Beaumont, introduced an amendment, which never came to a vote in the Senate committee, to order grandfathered plants outside these violation areas to cut pollution by 2006 in the eastern half of the state and El Paso.

An aide to Bernsen said Friday that he intends to introduce a similar amendment on the Senate floor.

The House bill, authored by Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, would allow the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission to require emission cuts of up to 20 percent along pipelines. The Senate committee changed that to 30 percent.

As introduced in committee, Bernsen's measure would raise the maximum pollution cut that the TNRCC could order for pipeline machinery to 50 percent in the eastern half of the state.

A study issued earlier this month by Texas Campaign for the Environment, an Austin-based advocacy group, said state data indicate pipeline machinery accounts for nearly three-fourths of the pollution still emitted by grandfathered facilities without a permit application pending.

This pipeline equipment emits as much nitrogen oxide -- the key pollutant targeted by the state's smog plans -- as 1.3 million cars, the group said. About a fourth of this pollution is released in the eastern half of the state.

Bernsen told the Senate committee two weeks ago that cutting pipelines' emissions by more than the House bill's figure will greatly help Houston and the smog-violation cities clean up their air -- and help keep other cities in compliance.

Environmentalists argued in the same hearing that oil and gas companies now making huge profits can easily afford the Bernsen measure. They noted that a gas industry association has said an emission cut of 70 percent is reasonable for pipelines in the eastern United States.

Industry representatives said, however, that the expense of going beyond 20 percent in Texas would jeopardize the operation of some pipelines.

Cindy Morphew, a vice president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association, told the committee that the degree to which pipelines outside smog-violation regions contribute to smog levels inside those areas is "still very debatable."