ILTA, API, and AFPM Joint Comments on EPA's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking - CWA Hazardous Substances Facility Response Plan Requirements
The American Petroleum Institute (API), the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), and the International Liquid Terminals Association (ILTA) (collectively, “the Associations”) respectfully submit these comments in response to EPA’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking to reconsider key provisions of the 2024 CWA Hazardous Substances Facility Response Plan (FRP) rule (40 CFR Part 118). The Associations represent facilities across the petroleum, petrochemical, and liquid bulk terminal sectors that collectively handle the majority of CWA hazardous substances subject to the rule.
API is the only national trade association representing all facets of the oil and natural gas industry, which supports 10.3 million U.S. jobs and nearly 8 percent of the U.S. economy. API’s more than 600 members include large integrated companies, as well as exploration and production, refining, marketing, pipeline, and marine businesses, and service and supply firms.
AFPM is the national trade association representing nearly all U.S. refining and petrochemical manufacturing capacity, including the midstream transport that moves products from facilities to consumers. AFPM members support more than three million quality jobs, contribute to our nation’s economic and national security, and enable the production of thousands of vital products used by families and businesses throughout the United States.
Founded in 1974, ILTA represents over 60 companies operating liquid terminals in all 50 states and in countries around the world. Terminals provide essential logistics services, support domestic and international trade, and foster the readiness of the United States armed forces by making fuels and liquid products available throughout the world—products such as petroleum fuels, aviation fuels, petrochemical products, chemicals, asphalt, alternative fuels like ethanol, and beyond.
Our overarching position is that the 2024 final rule significantly overreached EPA’s statutory mandate by casting an unnecessarily wide regulatory net — capturing facilities with robust, pre-existing spill prevention programs and negligible actual discharge risk to navigable waters — while doing little to improve real-world emergency preparedness. These comments are organized around the ANPRM’s six topic areas: applicability thresholds, threshold quantity methodologies, substantial harm criteria, planning distance calculations, exemptions, and FRP content and simplification.
Across all areas, the Associations’ central ask is recalibration: reset the RQ multiplier from 1,000× back to the originally proposed 10,000×, establish meaningful de minimis exclusions for container sizes, concentrations, and physical states of matter, and eliminate redundant compliance burdens for facilities already operating under SPCC, Oil FRP, RMP, or NPDES permit programs. These comments are grounded in empirical data — including National Response Center incident records from 2020–2025 — demonstrating that the population of facilities posing genuine worst-case discharge risk to navigable waters is far smaller than the 1,000× RQ threshold implies.