ILTA Meets with EPA on Gasoline Distribution Rule Ahead of July 8 Petition Deadline
On June 26, ILTA again met with EPA alongside API and AFPM at EPA’s Research Park, NC headquarters. The purpose was to discuss several issues the trade associations plan to address in their respective Petitions for Reconsideration for the final Air Permitting Rules.
On ILTA’s part, ILTA communicated its message that the terminal membership needs relief on LDAR (‘leak detection and repair’ program) for subpart XXa as soon as possible. EPA appears to understand the issues though (as usual) they did not commit to specific action. ILTA briefly explained why a regulatory interpretation letter is not enough to resolve the applicability issues, and why EPA must take action to make the rule text provide clear relief.
From ILTA’s view, LDAR will eventually apply by 2027, on a lower-frequency basis, under the other two subparts, R and BBBBBB, but this relief will prevent small “process improvement” projects from immediately triggering high-frequency (quarterly) LDAR inspections across all gasoline equipment at a terminal. Currently, more than one key industry member is holding up a project due to the possibility of stepping into LDAR under subpart XXa. Getting the relief would allow those projects to go forward. Subsequent to the meeting, ILTA formally petitioned EPA on this matter separately from the rest of its formal petition, which you can find here on ILTA’s website.
Separately, on subpart Kc, the meeting provided ILTA an opportunity to endorse verbally some supportive survey results from API and AFPM regarding tank applicability. Recall that the “modification” definition of subpart Kc was ILTA’s top-line comment on the rule proposal. The proposed rule would establish a new precedent that a tank liquid service change can cause parts of the rule to apply to the tank (via ‘modification’) if stored liquid vapor pressure increases. ILTA strenuously oppose this change, on clear grounds of both law and fact, and ILTA commented that EPA should codify existing ‘modification’ guidance instead. AFPM undertook to survey member companies to identify the number of tanks that would be subject to Kc via modification. By contrast with EPA’s rule proposal suggesting 30 tanks in 5 years, AFPM survey suggested approximately 750 tanks could have already been ‘modified’ under adverse interpretation of the proposed rule, based on service changes in the period from Oct 2023 to now. ILTA has not conducted a similar study, but our rule comments suggested that this would be the reality.
ILTA plans to submit a full Petition for Reconsideration on the remainder of the Air Permitting Rules by the July 8, 2024 deadline. More information will be shared in due course.