EPA: House offshore oil permitting plan threatens public health

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) top air-quality official is criticizing a GOP-backed plan to speed up pollution permits for oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, that hope to drill off Alaska’s coast.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is weighing legislation that scales back air pollution control requirements for offshore projects and thwarts citizen challenges of permits to EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board.

Gina McCarthy, who heads EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, warns in testimony for a Friday hearing that that plan could risk public health even though it seeks to ease standards for offshore drilling.

“I understand why you would question the value of requiring compliance with health-based standards in locations where there is no obvious human exposure to the emissions,” she said in testimony submitted to the committee.

“However, not requiring compliance with health-based air quality standards at any point off the shoreline, as the draft bill does, could result in significant human exposure to air pollution from [Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)] sources, including nitrogen dioxide, particles, sulfur dioxide and pollution that causes ozone,” McCarthy said.

She also criticizes the bill’s limits on permit challenges.

McCarthy states: “The bill is designed to preclude citizens from appealing permit decisions to the Environmental Appeals Board, and thus would force them into a more expensive, lengthier process in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In some respects, the change is one-sided, for the bill seems to preserve some ability for the permit applicant, but not other interested parties, to seek reconsideration by EPA of an adverse permit decision.”

Shell has faced years-long delays obtaining EPA and Interior Department approval for planned exploratory drilling in Arctic waters.

That has led critics — including Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Alaska’s bipartisan Senate delegation — to allege that red tape is stymieing development of promising domestic energy sources.

McCarthy, in her statement, says the EPA is committed to working with other federal agencies to improve the permitting process.

“As part of the administration’s interagency task force on Arctic energy permitting, we are committed to finding ways to improve our processes and better integrate our work with that of other federal agencies involved in permitting Arctic OCS energy activities,” she said.

Her testimony and a GOP memo on the bill are available here.