Cleaner air or cheaper gas? Louisville and Kentucky weigh the options

James Bruggers | Courier Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Louisville before the EPA President Donald Trump only mentioned the environment in passing during his speech before Congress. He's said he wants to get rid of the EPA. Rep. Thomas Massie has co-sponsored a bill to do that, effective Dec. 31, 2018. With the EPA under such strong attack, we thought we'd see what Louisville was like before the agency was established in 1970 President Richard Nixon.

City officials this summer are looking into whether they can make a case for Louisville to get out of a federal requirement for more expensive but cleaner burning gasoline.

They say they are doing so at the request of the Bevin administration.

But it wasn't that long ago – 2008 – when the Louisville Metro Air Pollution Control District was making a full-throated defense of what's called reformulated gas as an effective way to fight decades of problems with lung-damaging ozone.

Gas prices were high at the time, over $4 a gallon, and some Metro Council members were demanding answers.

Reformulated gas works to help clean the air, Lauren Anderson, who was the district's executive director at the time, wrote in a report. And it keeps the district from having to go back to the Louisville business community and search for other pollution cuts there.

So what's changed?

For starters, gasoline, said Sean Alteri, director of the Kentucky Division for Air Quality.

He said the difference between reformulated gasoline and non-reformulated gasoline has become small thanks to EPA changes on gasoline and congressional action on reformulated gas.

"The result of all these actions is that now the requirements for federal RFG and conventional gasoline ... are essentially the same," EPA concluded.

More: Louisville looks into ditching cleaner-burning gasoline requirement

. But the summer blend of reformulated gas still has benefits for reducing volatile organic compounds, according to a 2014 email from Kurt Gustafson, an EPA scientist, to Kentucky air quality regulators.

There are winter and summer blends of the fuel, which contain ethanol and some other production tweaks.

Equity and health issues

Still, there are skeptics who say Louisville officials need to be sure about the science and think carefully before ditching something that's helped the region make major clean-air gains.

Attorney Art Williams, the retired director of the Louisville air district, said Louisville and Kentucky officials may be able to persuade the EPA to abandon reformulated gasoline requirements. But he said that given how hard it is for the community to find ways to reduce pollution, it may be a mistake to do so.

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"I thought the city had adopted a public health comes first policy," he said. This, he added, would appear to go in another direction.

"There are no therapeutic levels of exposure to ozone of which I am aware, and elimination of a proven mechanism for reducing ozone is penny-wise and pound foolish when viewed in health terms rather than regulatory terms," added attorney Tom FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council.

He also said there are "some equity issues" in pushing all the pollution reductions onto businesses and giving cars and trucks "a pass."

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For their part, district officials said they intend to look into whether enough other pollution reductions have been made in other areas, such as at power plants and industries, to justify the change, or whether the change would require additional pollution by other sources. Any proposal will go through a public comment process, said Rachael Hamilton, the district's assistant director.

Kentucky voluntarily adopted the use of reformulated gas in the Louisville and Northern Kentucky areas in the mid-1990s, when smog levels were much worse.

Key points raised by the district in 2008 for keeping RFG included:

It was saving then as much as 3.5 tons per day of volatile organic compounds, about the same as the city's two Ford Motor Co. assembly plants.

Louisville was not, at the time, meeting the 2008 ozone standard of 75 parts per million. (It has since come into compliance with that standard, but is at risk of failing a newer, tougher standard of 70 parts per million).

State and city officials estimated then that reformulated gas – with ethanol and other tweaks to reduce certain toxic chemicals – added between 4 and 12 cents per gallon while reducing fuel efficiency 1 to 3 percent.

Tom Nord, district spokesman, said the district is revisiting some of the issues raised in the earlier report to see if they are still accurate.

Monopoly lawsuit continues

An active lawsuit in U.S. District Court by the state of Kentucky against Marathon Petroleum claims a monopoly on reformulated gasoline in Kentucky contributed to higher prices paid in Louisville - as much as 25 cents per gallon more in 2014 than for a similar summer blend product sold in St. Louis.

Marathon has denied in court documents that it has engaged in any anticompetitive conduct.

Hamilton said her staff will take a new look at the RFG the issue, crunch the numbers and consult with the Kentucky Division of Air Quality. "We think it's a fairly straightforward analysis," she said.

The EPA keeps the region on an air quality maintenance plan – a pollution budget of sorts – and would have the final say, she said.

But Hamilton, an attorney, would not say whether the district or the state has the final determination on whether to propose the change to the EPA. "I hate to be put into a yes or no" situation, she said. But she said the Louisville district does have local decision-making authority, with the state having "concurrent jurisdiction."

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FitzGerald said the district would be the decider, unless the state legislature got involved.

EPA recently gave Ohio permission to sell conventional gasoline in Cincinnati; it 's gas stations had been required to use a different type of cleaner burning fuel.

Kentucky petitions EPA

In Kentucky, this new RFG effort started with Kentucky recently informing the EPA it intended to demonstrate to the EPA that reformulated gas was not needed in northern Kentucky, another part of the state that's struggled with ozone. That letter from Energy and Environment Secretary Charles Snavely said no replacement pollution controls would be needed.

Hamilton said the district will need to demonstrate to EPA that the area will continue to meet the ozone standard if the fuel mandate were removed.

But state and city officials aren't using the current, more stringent ozone rule adopted by EPA in 2015 in making their arguments for abandoning reformulated gas. They are basing their demonstration on the weaker, 2008 standard.

Alteri said Kentucky would have additional time to find ways to meet the 2015 standard.

FitzGerald questioned a "misguided assumption that barely meeting the (ozone) standard is a proper endpoint for a healthy and compassionate community."

Hamilton said the 2008 standard is applicable for the demonstration because EPA has not yet made a decision on Louisville's compliance with the 2015 standard, which is 7 percent more stringent.

EPA recently delayed that decision, likely sparing Louisville a new dirty-air designation.

Reach reporter James Bruggers at 502-582-4645 and at jbruggers@courier-journal.com.

Ozone can:

Make it more difficult to breathe deeply and vigorously.

Cause shortness of breath, and pain when taking a deep breath.

Cause coughing and sore or scratchy throat.

Inflame and damage the airways.

Aggravate lung diseases such as asthma, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.

Increase the frequency of asthma attacks.

Make the lungs more susceptible to infection.

Continue to damage the lungs even when the symptoms have disappeared.

Cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Source: U.S. EPA