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Friday, July 20, 2007

Environment - More on: Protests grow over BP permit to increase dumping in Lake Michigan

Much more today on this. Gitte Laasby of the Gary Post-Tribune reports:

"Clearly something went wrong with the implementation of the Clean Water Act," said Ann Alexander, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council based in Chicago. "Anti-degradation regulations are supposed to make sure things like this don't happen. Yes, some minimal discharge can occur when it's genuinely necessary for social and economic development. But that should be the exception, not a gaping loophole in the Clean Water Act."

Indiana's anti-degradation law is turning into a large loophole in the absence of a better definition, Alexander said.

State officials, environmentalists and industry representatives worked between 2003 and 2005 to fill in that gap and define how the federal anti-degradation policy should be implemented.

A draft was issued in early 2005, but after Gov. Mitch Daniels was elected, industry representatives decided they weren't happy with the outcome and demanded an overhaul. Then the project was shelved, said Albert Ettinger, who represented the Sierra Club in the rulemaking process. * * *

Ettinger said another big problem with BP's permit is that it allows the company to dilute pollution through a diffuser at the bottom of the lake rather than removing it before discharge.

"By and large, under the Clean Water Act, we do not believe the solution to pollution is dilution," Ettinger said. "The problem is, BP was never required to prove this pollution was necessary."

IDEM said the additional pollution was justified.

"The increased number of jobs, the long-term viability of the existing job/business and the value of a new source of petroleum from a neighboring friendly country are additional positive social and economic results of the BP refinery reconfiguration," IDEM stated in its response to public comments.

In Illinois, the anti-degradation policy has already been fleshed out. That means a polluter in a similar situation to BP would have been required to examine alternatives and their cost, Ettinger said.

Ettinger said as a result, the permit for a wastewater treatment plant in the village of New Lenox granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was appealed and revised.

Save the Dunes has expressed concern about the precedence BP's permit may be setting.

"We are concerned that this opens the door for other industries to claim that their operations, or expansion of operations, deserve the same sort of permitting review as afforded BP," said Susan MiHalo, President of Save the Dunes Council, in a press release.

She said IDEM should be more transparent about the factors it uses to determine compliance with Indiana's water rules.

"This experience points out the need to review the administrative process used to create permits and bring them to the attention to the public that will be impacted by them," MiHalo said.

As for why much of the interested public was not notified of when the final permit had been issued (for background, see particularly the end of this ILB entry from Sat., July 14th, starting with "Want to know more"), a date which starts the 18-day clock for appeals, Gitte Laasby reports today in the Post-Tribune:
Citizens who voiced their protests about BP Whiting's wastewater permit by e-mail should have included their address or sent their comments by regular mail.

Otherwise they're not guaranteed a response from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Commissioner Thomas Easterly said at a news conference Thursday.

He said IDEM had sent out 52 hard copies of the final permit to "interested parties," but acknowledged that IDEM may not have responded to all e-mails.

"No, e-mails are, in the state of Indiana, not a legal way to send in a comment," Easterly said. "While we would like to be able to say we've always responded to e-mails, that's not our official comment way and we don't have the right name and address and that may not get a response."

State law doesn't require the agency to respond to comments by e-mail, he said.

IDEM listed e-mail as a way to comment on BP's permit, but didn't mention that a mailing address was required for a response.

And, as the ILB noted on July 14th, no Notice of Decision has ever been posted on the site IDEM designated as the source for information about the BP permit.

Patrick Guinane reports today in the NWI Times:


INDIANAPOLIS | Facing mounting criticism from Illinois leaders, Indiana's top environmental regulator on Thursday defended the decision to allow the BP oil refinery in Whiting to dramatically increase Lake Michigan water pollution as it moves ahead with a $3.8 billion plant expansion.

Meanwhile, he said a separate air pollution variance he approved for BP two weeks ago will not increase the amount of particulate matter released by the Whiting refinery.

In an afternoon conference call with reporters, Commissioner Thomas Easterly of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management complained he has "seen many (news) stories about the BP permit that don't seem right" and wanted to "set the record straight."

"We haven't made any exceptions to state or federal water quality regulations in order to issue the waste water treatment permit to BP," Easterly continued. "Anybody else that came in with the same set of facts would get the same permit (as) us. ...The plant's discharge will not affect drinking water, recreation or aquatic life in Lake Michigan."

There are several editorials today. The Post-Trbune writes:
When it comes to swaying public opinion over BP's plan to dump more pollution into Lake Michigan, a few numbers pose major stumbling blocks for the oil giant.

They start with the 1,584 additional pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of other waste the company wants to add to its discharge every day.

Following closely is the company's $22.3 billion it made in profit last year alone.

Not least of all is BP's claim that it can't find 12,000 square feet to build the necessary treatment plant on its sprawling 1,400-acre refinery.

There comes a time when Northwest Indiana residents must question why we should risk Lake Michigan's future to enrich the owners of a British company who do not drink our water or bathe along our shores.

And there comes a time when we expect our own elected officials to lead the way.

Watching Chicago's mayor and other Illinois officials call to halt approval of BP's pollution plan is reminiscent of the battle to save Indiana's dunes more than a half-century ago -- a fight led by Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois.

Despite U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky's commendable efforts to increase lakefront access with his Marquette Plan, it took a request from a reporter to prompt his public urging to do "everything possible" to reduce lake pollution. His office says he supports a resolution by U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., that calls on Indiana to "reconsider" BP's permit. Such efforts are important, but aren't enough.

It's incumbent upon Visclosky -- as well as Gov. Mitch Daniels, local mayors, legislators and other leaders -- to step up and fight publicly, visibly and without prompting for the Hoosiers who live along these shores.

Yes, BP is bringing welcome economic growth here. But other issues are at stake as well.

Too many people have fought too long and too hard on behalf of our Great Lakes to move backward now.

The LaPorte Argus-Herald writes:
It’s hard to believe that dumping nearly 2,000 additional pounds of industrial waste into Lake Michigan each day won’t harm the environment.

According to a story in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, however, that’s the conclusion reached by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) recently in granting an exemption to oil producer BP to discharge significantly more industrial waste into Lake Michigan at its refinery in Whiting. * * *

Asked by The La Porte County Herald-Argus Wednesday whether he agrees with state regulators that such discharges won’t cause harm, Alliance for the Great Lakes President Cameron Davis responded with a decisive “No.”

“I think most of us are well beyond the point of believing we can pollute and there will be no impact,” he said.

We agree. And we find it disturbing that the IDEM would grant an exemption that effectively exploits a loophole in the Clean Water Act for the benefit of big business.

Specifically, BP is able to get around the Clean Water Act’s prohibition on any downgrade in water quality near a pollution source by mixing industrial discharge with clean lake water to dilute pollutants.

Perhaps more disturbing, however, than the exemption itself is IDEM’s attempt to partially justify it by noting that BP’s expansion will create 80 jobs.

While northwest Indiana is sorely in need of new jobs, the question becomes: At what cost? * * *


Fortunately, it’s not too late to reverse the state’s decision. Already, Chicago officials have requested a meeting with BP officials to discuss the exemption and its impact on the lake, which Chicago relies upon almost exclusively as its source of drinking water. The city also isn’t ruling out legal options.

We think cities and residents along the lakeshore in northwest Indiana should consider similar options, and also should pressure the state and specifically Gov. Mitch Daniels to investigate IDEM’s decision to grant BP an exemption.

Because while an expansion at BP’s Whiting refinery might be good for BP and for gas prices, it’s a raw deal for the environment, and in that sense we all lose.

From a letter to the editor in the Chesterton Tribune:
If you ask anyone who has worked at B.P., they will tell you that their waste water treatment facility is antiquated and inadequate. The smallest amount of rainfall causes major problems for them. Toxic releases into the lake are common.

The B.P. refinery in Whiting is planning a $3.6 billion expansion to process Canadian sandy crude oil. This is a lot of money. Remember though, this company has been making record profits, as high as many $ billions, each quarter for the last few years. Their $3.6 billion dollar expansion does not include improving the water treatment plant.

The expansion will mean hundreds of construction jobs, a bigger tax base and 80 permanent jobs. These are all good things, but at what cost? I believe that if they are willing to invest that kind of money in the Whiting refinery, they should be made to expand and improve their pollution controls. They need to be polluting less not more.

Unless we are willing to learn to drink gasoline and water our gardens in Canadian crude, we must demand of our representatives to pull the permit on this expansion until B.P. can control the amount of pollutants they dump into our environment.

My opinion. Indiana has only a very small section of the Lake Michigan lakefront and often appears to value the Lake less than its sister states. Where Illinois and Michigan have miles of beachfront, Indiana has steel mills and refineries. Kudos to the forward looking Hoosiers who many years ago created the Indiana Dunes State Park. But the expansion of the lakefront to the area now covered by the National Lakeshore involved a massive effort that succeeded only in spite of many from Indiana. Illinois Senator Paul Douglas was a name held in derision or worse in most homes in Chesterton when I was growing up there. The feeling was that "outsiders" were trying to tell us what we could do with our lakefront property and that they should worry about their own business. But we did go to the beach and wonder at all the foul-smelling slag from the steel mills covering the sand, and all the decaying fish and other gross gunk washed up on the shore. What some of us have learned since is that the quality of the Great Lakes is indeed everybody's business.

[More] Here is an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times headlined "Sink BP's waste plan."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 20, 2007 08:52 AM
Posted to Environment