Practice Areas: Environmental Solutions

Clean Air Practice

Our Air Team brings to bear a sophisticated, complementary expertise in a wide range of Clean Air issues to help our clients in this exploding practice area. Careful compliance assessment—driven by experienced practitioners with demonstrated ability to counsel clients on current requirements, plus anticipate the next phase of regulatory programs—is the hallmark of our problem-solving approach. We are proud of our ability to think like businesspeople, develop the full range of options for our clients, and manage against budgets to help clients pursue the routes they choose.

The Team’s experienced regulatory and litigation members have long worked with career staff at EPA headquarters, EPA regions, state agencies or legislatures, and on Capitol Hill. We move easily between national issues to site or company-specific applications in ways that strengthen both.

Nationally, our efforts on behalf of companies and trade associations helped shape provisions of the 1990 Amendments as well as most key development since. We've served on several national industry steering committees, including those dealing with EPA’s Open Market Trading Rule, Compliance Assurance Monitoring and Any Credible Evidence rules. We have commented for clients on EPA’s rules or guidance from the first SIPs and NSPS through post-1990 Amendment transition and program proposals. These include comments on EPA’s recent New Source Review Reform proposal, several industry air toxic MACT rules, EPA’s core Acid Rain rules, and enhanced monitoring and credible evidence proposals. We have long shaped parallel state programs including those for Title V permits, SIPs and state emission trading rules.

At the plant level, we have permitted numerous projects, facilities or facility expansions, earning recognition for our ability to identify critical paths and unravel major source PSD/NSR, SIP and operating permit tangles. We have helped clients develop Title V permit applications, operating scheme flexibility provisions and compliance certification support for thorny past possible transgressions. We have successfully defended both state and federal air enforcement actions, often by persuading the agency to withdraw the action.

Representative Work

• Represented generating company in development of state rules regarding control of mercury emissions from coal fired power plants.
• Represented several generating companies and manufacturers in defending New Source Review enforcement actions.
• Represented large generating companies in drafting comprehensive NSR settlement agreements.
• Developed an innovative permitting strategy which allowed a large cogeneration project to avoid potentially fatal Class I visibility concerns;
• Defeated an EPA Region enforcement action seeking retroactive installation of LAER controls, retroactive offsets, and millions of dollars in potential penalties;
• Filed a unique Title III petition with EPA to delist allegedly hazardous air emissions, on behalf of a major manufacturing trade association;
• Persuaded EPA to reverse national guidance which would have required use of cumbersome and expensive coating total enclosures to certify compliance;
• Secured withdrawal of state RACT requirements that would have severely disadvantaged a major industrial client, based on arguments that the state had no authority to implement its proposal;
  Developed a "user friendly" handbook on Title IV emission credit programs for an electrical generating association;
• Documented to a state agency that New Source Review does not apply to replacement of unit-specific permit limits with plantwide limits;
• Lifted a Clean Air Act government contracting "debarment" that would have put a client out of business; briefed EPA’s lack of authority to reopen PSD permits based on revised emission factors;
• Developed air permitting strategies related to acquisition of a large electrical generating station.