Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-08-01144/USCOURTS-caDC-08-01144-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
American Petroleum Institute
Intervenor for Respondent
Environmental Protection Agency
Respondent
Gasification Technologies Council
Intervenor for Respondent
Louisiana Environmental Action Network
Petitioner
Sierra Club
Petitioner

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued May 12, 2014 Decided June 27, 2014

No. 08-1144

SIERRA CLUB AND LOUISIANA 

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION NETWORK,

PETITIONERS

v.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY,

RESPONDENT

AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE AND GASIFICATION 

TECHNOLOGIES COUNCIL,

INTERVENORS

Consolidated with Nos. 08-1145, 12-1295

On Petitions for Review of Final Actions of the 

United States Environmental Protection Agency

Khushi K. Desai argued the cause for petitioners. With 

her on the briefs were David R. Case and James S. Pew.

Norman L. Rave Jr., Attorney, U.S. Department of 

Justice, argued the cause for respondent. With him on the 

brief were Robert G. Dreher, Acting Assistant Attorney 

General, and Alan H. Carpien, Attorney, U.S. Environmental 

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Protection Agency. Cynthia J. Morris, Attorney, U.S. 

Department of Justice, entered an appearance. 

Thomas Sayre Llewellyn argued the cause for intervenors. 

With him on the brief were Harry M. Ng and Deanne M. 

Ottaviano. Michael R. See entered an appearance.

Before: HENDERSON and MILLETT, Circuit Judges, and 

SENTELLE, Senior Circuit Judge.

Opinion for the Court by Circuit Judge MILLETT.

MILLETT, Circuit Judge: In 2008, the Environmental

Protection Agency promulgated a rule that exempts from 

regulation under the Resource Conservation and Recovery 

Act (RCRA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 6901 et seq., certain hazardous 

residuals left over from the petroleum refining process. See 

73 Fed. Reg. 57 (Jan. 2, 2008). That exemption, referred to as 

the Gasification Exclusion Rule, applies when those residual 

materials are inserted into gasification units to produce

“synthesis gas,” which is a type of fuel that may be burned for 

the recovery of energy. 

Petitioners Sierra Club, Louisiana Environmental Action 

Network (Louisiana Network), and Environmental 

Technology Council petitioned this court for review of the

Gasification Exclusion Rule, arguing that it violates RCRA’s 

plain language requiring the regulation of hazardous wastes 

used as fuel, 42 U.S.C. § 6924(q), and that the Rule’s 

promulgation violated the procedural and substantive 

requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. 

§§ 551 et seq. We hold that the regulation violates the plain 

language of RCRA and, for that reason, is vacated. 

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I

Statutory Framework

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, 42 U.S.C. 

§§ 6901 et seq., is the primary federal statute addressing the 

management of solid and hazardous waste. It prescribes a 

nationwide, “cradle-to-grave” regulatory framework 

governing the “safe treatment, storage and disposal of 

hazardous waste,” United Technologies Corp. v. EPA, 821 

F.2d 714, 716 (D.C. Cir. 1987), and charges the EPA with 

promulgating regulations setting the necessary standards to 

achieve those goals, 42 U.S.C. § 6922(a). 

While the statute’s definitional provisions can be 

technical and detailed, as relevant here, RCRA defines 

“hazardous waste” as “solid waste” that poses a danger to 

human or environmental health. 42 U.S.C. § 6903(5). “Solid 

waste,” in turn, is defined as garbage, refuse, sludge, “and 

other discarded material.” Id. § 6903(27).

In Section 6921, Congress mandated that the EPA 

promulgate regulations identifying the hazardous wastes that 

are subject to RCRA regulation, “taking into account toxicity, 

persistence, and degradability in nature, potential for 

accumulation in tissue, and other related factors such as 

flammability, corrosiveness, and other hazardous 

characteristics.” 42 U.S.C. §§ 6921(a)-(b). 

Initially, the EPA declined to regulate hazardous 

materials that were burned as fuel or used to produce fuel, 

reasoning that those uses as fuel meant the materials were not 

“discarded,” and thus they were not regulable as waste. See 

40 C.F.R. § 261.2(c)(2) (1983); Horsehead Resource Dev. Co. 

v. Browner, 16 F.3d 1246, 1253 (D.C. Cir. 1994) (citing 45 

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Fed. Reg. 33,084, 33,092-33,094, 33,120 (May 19, 1980));

see also American Mining Congress v. EPA, 824 F.2d 1177, 

1189 (D.C. Cir. 1987) (AMC I).

To redress that “major deficiency” in the EPA’s 

administration of RCRA, S. Rep. No. 284, 98th Cong., 1st

Sess. 36 (1983); H.R. Rep. No. 198, 98th Cong., 1st Sess. 39 

(1983), Congress amended the statute in 1984 to add Section 

6924(q). That Section specifically addresses the regulation of 

“Hazardous waste used as fuel.” 42 U.S.C. § 6924(q). 

Specifically, Section 6924(q) directs the EPA to establish 

regulatory standards, as “necessary to protect human health 

and the environment,” to govern facilities that:

(A) “produce a fuel” from “any hazardous waste 

identified or listed under section 6921 of this title,” 

whether alone or as a component combined with other 

materials; 

(B) “burn, for purposes of energy recovery” a fuel 

produced under subsection (A) or containing any other 

hazardous waste component in fuel that is listed under 

Section 6921; or 

(C) “distribute[] or market[] any fuel” produced under 

subsection (A) or containing any other hazardous waste 

component in fuel that is listed under Section 6921. 

42 U.S.C. § 6924(q)(1). Congress added that, for purposes of 

this subsection, “the term ‘hazardous waste listed 

under section 6921’” shall “include[] any commercial 

chemical product” that “is listed under section 6921 of this 

title” and that, “in lieu of its original intended use, is (i) 

produced for use as (or as a component of) a fuel, (ii) 

distributed for use as a fuel, or (iii) burned as a fuel.” Id.

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Regulatory Background

Eleven years after Congress adopted Section 6924(q), the 

EPA proposed a rule that would exclude from RCRA 

regulation those petroleum refinery waste products that are 

reinserted into specified petroleum refining processes. See 60 

Fed. Reg. 57,747 (Nov. 20, 1995). The EPA reasoned that 

such materials do not constitute “waste” because they are

recycled as part of an ongoing petroleum production process,

and thus are never “discarded” within the meaning of 

RCRA’s definition of hazardous solid waste, 42 U.S.C. 

§ 6903(5) & (27). See 60 Fed. Reg. at 57,752-57,754.

Among the refinery processes the EPA sought to exclude

were distillation, catalytic cracking, fractionation, and thermal 

cracking (also known as coking). See id. at 57,753. 

Three weeks before the final version of that regulation 

was to be issued, the EPA published a Notice of Data 

Availability requesting comment on whether “gasification” 

should be added to the list of excluded processes. See 63 Fed. 

Reg. 38,139 (July 15, 1998). Gasification is a process that

transforms oil-bearing, residual materials separated out by the 

petroleum refining process into a distinct form of fuel known 

as synthesis gas or “syngas,” which can be used for energy 

recovery. See 63 Fed. Reg. at 38,141. Specifically, while 

syngas can be used to produce other chemicals, it can also be

burned as a fuel to produce electricity or steam. See id. 

When the EPA published the final rule three weeks later,

however, gasification was not included as one of the exempt 

processes. See 63 Fed. Reg. 42,110, 42,184 (Aug. 6, 1998).

Four years later, the EPA revisited the matter and 

proposed a rule that would exclude from RCRA regulation 

residual oil-bearing materials left over from the petroleum 

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refining process that are destined for insertion into a 

gasification unit to produce synthesis gas. See 67 Fed. Reg. 

13,684 (March 25, 2002). That proposal differed from the 

query in the 1998 Notice of Data Availability in that it

proposed that those materials would be exempt whether or not 

the gasification unit was part of a petroleum refining 

operation. Id. at 13,690 (codified at 40 C.F.R. 

§ 261.4(a)(12)(i)).

Also unlike the original 1998 Notice of Data Availability,

the proposed Gasification Exclusion Rule conditioned the 

exemption from RCRA on compliance with a series of 

conditions on the syngas-creation process: (1) the system into 

which the material is inserted must meet the proposal’s 

definition of a “gasification system;” (2) the gasification 

system must generate a synthesis gas that meets the 

specifications for synthesis gas fuel that the EPA would 

exempt from the definition of solid waste; (3) the residual 

waste materials generated from the gasification system must 

not be placed on the land if they exceed the applicable 

regulatory standards for chromium, lead, nickel, vanadium, 

arsenic, or antimony; and (4) the oil-bearing hazardous 

secondary materials employed to create syngas must not be 

placed on the land or speculatively accumulated prior to 

insertion into the gasification system. 67 Fed. Reg. at 13,690.

Petitioners Sierra Club and Environmental Technology 

Council, as well as other members of the public, submitted

comments on the proposed rule that expressed substantial 

concern about the potential for environmental harm if 

gasification units were allowed to operate without RCRA 

regulation, and offered suggestions to expand or alter the 

EPA’s proposed conditions. See, e.g., Comments of the 

Environmental Technology Council, Docket No. EPA-HQRCRA-2002-002-0049 (Sept. 10, 2002); Comments of Sierra 

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Club Lone Star Chapter, Docket No. EPA-HQ-RCRA-2002-

0002-0060 (Sept. 10, 2002). In particular, those comments

voiced concern that the proposed exclusion, even with the 

proposed conditions, would fail to regulate hazardous air 

emissions produced by the gasification process adequately, 

and Sierra Club explained that the resulting environmental 

risks would disproportionately affect the low-income and 

minority neighborhoods where many refineries are located. 

See id.

When the rule was finalized on January 2, 2008, 

however, the EPA simply appended “gasification” to the list 

of refining processes wholly exempted from RCRA in 40 

C.F.R. § 261.4(a)(12)(i), abandoning all of its originally 

proposed conditions, and rejecting those suggested by 

commenters. See 73 Fed. Reg. 57, 58 (Jan. 2, 2008). As a 

result, under the final Gasification Exclusion Rule, oil-bearing 

hazardous secondary materials that are otherwise hazardous 

wastes under Section 6921 of RCRA are exempted from 

RCRA regulation if they are eventually inserted into a 

gasification unit located at some petroleum refinery and used 

to produce synthesis gas. See id.

 

II

As a preliminary matter, Industry-Intervenors argue that

this court lacks subject matter jurisdiction over Petitioners’

challenge to the Gasification Exclusion Rule. They contend 

that Petitioners lack standing, and that their petition to this 

court for review of the Rule was rendered untimely by their 

subsequent administrative petition to the EPA seeking the 

agency’s reconsideration of the Rule. We hold that 

Petitioners Sierra Club and Louisiana Network both have 

standing and timely sought review, but that the Environmental 

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Technology Council’s petition must be denied for failure to 

state a legal claim. 

A

The requirement that a party invoking federal court 

jurisdiction establish standing is an essential, structural 

constraint on the power of Article III courts that enforces the 

Constitution’s separation of powers. See Hollingsworth v. 

Perry, 133 S. Ct. 2652, 2661 (2013); Susan B. Anthony List v. 

Driehaus, No. 13-193, slip op. at 7 (U.S. June 16, 2014)

(“The law of Article III standing, which is built on separationof-powers principles, serves to prevent the judicial process 

from being used to usurp the powers of the political 

branches.”) (quoting Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 133 S. Ct. 

1138, 1146 (2013)). The “irreducible constitutional 

minimum” for standing is (i) the party must have suffered a 

concrete and particularized injury in fact, (ii) that was caused 

by or is fairly traceable to the actions of the defendant, and 

(iii) is capable of resolution and likely to be redressed by 

judicial decision. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 

555, 560-561 (1992).

When, as here, petitioners assert “representational 

standing” to bring suit on behalf of their members, they must 

demonstrate that at least one of their members would 

otherwise have standing to sue in his or her own right; that the 

interests they seek to protect are germane to their

organizations’ purposes; and that neither the claim asserted 

nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual 

members. See Defenders of Wildlife v. Perciasepe, 714 F.3d 

1317, 1323 (D.C. Cir. 2013); see also Friends of the Earth, 

Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 

181 (2000). 

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The EPA does not dispute Sierra Club’s or Louisiana 

Network’s standing at all. But Intervenors, the American 

Petroleum Institute and the Gasification Technologies 

Council, contend that Petitioners lack standing, arguing 

specifically that Petitioners have not been injured because 

they have not sufficiently identified a refinery near their 

members that, at the time of the petitions, was relying on the 

Gasification Exclusion Rule. That argument misunderstands 

both the law and the record.

When, as here, the party seeking judicial review 

challenges an agency’s regulatory failure, the petitioner need 

not establish that, but for that misstep, the alleged harm 

certainly would have been averted. Rather, the petitioner 

need demonstrate only a “‘substantial probability’ that local 

conditions will be adversely affected, and thus will harm 

members of the petitioner organization.” American 

Petroleum Inst. v. EPA, 216 F.3d 50, 63 (D.C. Cir. 2000); see 

also Susan B. Anthony List, No. 13-193, slip op. at 8 (“An 

allegation of future injury may suffice if the threatened injury 

is ‘certainly impending,’ or if there is a ‘substantial risk’ that 

the harm will occur.”) (quoting Clapper, 133 S. Ct. at 1150 

n.5); Sierra Club v. EPA, No. 13-1014, slip op. at 11 (D.C. 

Cir. June 13, 2014) (“Because ‘[e]nvironmental and health 

injuries often are purely probabilistic,’ the court has 

‘generally require[d] that petitioners claiming increased health 

risks to establish standing demonstrate a substantial 

probability that they will be injured[.]’”) (quoting Natural 

Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 464 F.3d 1, 6 (D.C. Cir. 

2006)).

1

 1 There is no dispute in this case that, if the asserted injuries are 

sufficient, the causation and redressability prongs of standing are 

satisfied. The EPA’s exclusion of gasification from RCRA 

regulation is a direct cause of the asserted injuries, and a judicial 

order invalidating the rule would remediate that asserted injury. 

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The record in this case documents the very substantial 

and concrete risk of harm that some of Petitioners’ members 

face. Petitioners’ declarations identified four individuals who 

live or work in close proximity to three specific refineries—

Frontier El Dorado Refining Company in El Dorado, Kansas, 

Motiva Enterprises in Delaware City, Delaware, and Exxon 

Mobil Corporation in Baytown, Texas. See Petitioners’

Opening Br., Declarations Addendum 5-6 (declaration of 

Sierra Club member Lyle English); id. at 10-13 (Sierra Club 

and Louisiana Network member William Fontenot); id. at 17-

22 (Sierra Club member Karla Land); id. at 26-29 (Sierra 

Club member Amy Roe). At the time the petition for review 

was filed in this court, each of those refineries already had a 

gasification unit in place, ready and able to process the very 

hazardous materials that are the subject of the challenged 

regulation. See id. The declarations further explained those 

individuals’ particularized fears of serious health and 

environmental consequences from the gasification process, 

and their individual behavioral changes prompted by the toxic 

exposure that Petitioners aver the regulatory exemption will 

cause. See id.

In addition, the EPA itself, in assessing the costs and 

benefits of its Rule, identified by name those same three

refineries as expected to take advantage of the Gasification 

Exclusion Rule, and detailed the over 100,000 tons of oilbearing hazardous secondary material those three refineries

alone could process in a given year. See 73 Fed. Reg. at 68-

69; EPA Assessment of the Potential Costs, Benefits, and 

Other Impacts of the Exclusion for Gasification of Petroleum 

Oil-bearing Secondary Materials—Final Rule at 12 (2007), 

Docket No. RCRA-2002-0002-0089. Chevron Texaco 

confirmed that assessment, explaining in its comments on the 

Rule that “[t]here are currently over 70 Chevron Texaco 

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owned or licensed gasifiers operating or under construction 

around the world,” including “the gasifier at Frontier Oil’s 

refinery in El Dorado, Kansas (refinery once owned by 

Texaco). That gasifier has been operating 6 years now.”

Comments of Chevron Texaco, Docket No. RCRA-2002-

0002-0058 (Sept. 10, 2002). 

 

Intervenors American Petroleum Institute and the 

Gasification Technologies Council invoke this Court’s 

decision in American Petroleum Institute v. EPA, supra, 

which found no standing to challenge a different RCRA 

exemption. The differences in the factual records of the two 

cases, however, actually underscore Sierra Club’s and 

Louisiana Network’s standing here. The American Petroleum 

petitioners lacked standing to challenge the EPA’s exemption 

of the petroleum coking process from RCRA because those 

organizations put nothing at all in the record sufficient to 

demonstrate a substantial probability that their affiants would 

be exposed to hazardous materials as a result of the 

exemption. See 216 F.3d at 67-68 (“[N]othing is averred to 

the effect that * * * hazardous waste quenching currently 

exists or is substantially likely to exist in those facilities 

generating coke product to which members of environmental 

petitioners’ organizations are exposed.”); see also Sierra 

Club, No. 13-104, slip op. at 11 (finding that environmental 

petitioners failed to demonstrate standing because they 

offered “no evidence” and made “no attempt” to tie the EPA’s 

actions to a substantial probability that their members would 

suffer diminished air quality). Here, by contrast, the 

declarants have identified with specificity the substantial risks 

they face from neighboring refineries’ existing gasification 

systems and the adverse effects of the Gasification Exclusion 

Rule on their everyday behavior. And the record reconfirms 

the industry’s commitment to undertaking the gasification 

process authorized by the challenged Rule. 

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The Institute and Council nevertheless characterize 

Petitioners’ concern that refineries will use the Exclusion that 

they specifically sought from the EPA as “a matter of 

speculation” insufficient to establish standing. Intervenors’

Br. 12. But once the EPA promulgated the Gasification 

Exclusion Rule, it was “a hardly-speculative exercise in naked 

capitalism” to predict that facilities with existing gasification

units on site would take advantage of the Exclusion for which 

they lobbied. See American Trucking Ass’n v. Federal Motor 

Carrier Safety Admin., 724 F.3d 243, 248 (D.C. Cir. 2013) 

(quoting Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental 

Drugs v. Eschenbach, 469 F.3d 129, 135 (D.C. Cir. 2006)); 

see also Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, No. 98-

1379, slip op. at 11-12 (D.C. Cir. June 27, 2013). 

Moreover, the Institute and Council surely cannot believe 

their own argument. When intervening in this litigation, they 

established Article III standing for themselves by confirming 

that their members “would” be injured should the Rule be

vacated by this court because they would be deprived of the 

affirmatively desired opportunity to burn oil-bearing 

secondary hazardous waste in their gasification systems free 

of RCRA regulation. Intervenors’ Br. 19. Similarly, in the 

Institute’s comments on the 1998 Notice of Data Availability, 

it stated that “many of [the Institute]’s members own and 

operate petroleum refineries that generate oil-bearing 

secondary materials that are, or can be, reused at a refinery in 

production processes such as gasification. * * * Thus, [the 

Institute] has a strong interest in the subject matter of the 

[Notice of Data Availability] on whether the * * * exclusion 

should apply to refining industry oil-bearing secondary 

materials inserted into gasification units.” Comments of the 

American Petroleum Institute, Docket No. F-98-PR2A-FFFFF

(Oct. 13, 1998) (emphasis added).

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When EPA solicited comments on the Gasification 

Exclusion Rule again in 2002, the Institute reiterated its 1998 

comments, and re-emphasized its stake in the rulemaking, 

explaining that “several of [its] members already employ

gasification technology at their refineries.” Comments of the 

American Petroleum Institute, Docket No. F-2002-RPRPFFFF (Sept. 10, 2002) (emphasis added).

Furthermore, in its motion to intervene in this Court, the

Institute asserted that it “has a very substantial interest in the 

outcome of this case” because several of [the Institute]’s 

members “employ the gasification process at issue here.”

American Petroleum Institute Motion to Intervene, Docket 

No. 1114593, at 3 (April 30, 2008) (emphasis added). In 

addition, the motion emphasized that a “remand or setting 

aside of the challenged regulation could therefore operate to 

the economic detriment of [the Institute]’s members.” Id. 

The Intervenors’ comments and intervention papers thus 

highlight the present-tense reality of their gasification 

activities and abilities; their “very substantial interest” in 

employing the process exempted by the Gasification 

Exclusion Rule, id.; and correspondingly, the substantial 

present-tense threat posed to their petitioning neighbors.

Standing, in other words, is not a game of heads the 

industry intervenors win; tails petitioners lose. The

“opportunity injury” that the Institute and Council assert 

means that they are “able and ready,” both technologically 

and programmatically, to exercise the opportunity that the 

regulation affords them. See Northeastern Florida Chapter of 

the Ass’n of General Contractors v. City of Jacksonville, 508 

U.S. 656, 666 (1993); Dynalantic Corp. v. Department of 

Defense, 115 F.3d 1012, 1016 (D.C. Cir. 1997). The very 

opportunity that the Institute and Council seek is the same 

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opportunity that Petitioners attest poses a substantial threat to 

their health and living environment. Petitioners, for their part, 

need not wait to bring suit until they can actually detect the

toxic contaminants exuding.

2

B

Petitioner Environmental Technology Council filed its 

own separate petition in this court, No. 08-1145, challenging 

the Gasification Exclusion Rule on the same substantive 

grounds as those articulated in the petitions filed by Sierra 

Club and Louisiana Network, Nos. 08-1144, 12-1295. This 

court has repeatedly held, however, that the Council lacks 

prudential standing under RCRA to litigate “either directly or 

as a proxy for the environmental interests of the public for 

whose protection the Act was presumably passed.” Sierra 

Club v. EPA, 292 F.3d 895, 902-903 (D.C. Cir. 2002) 

(Environmental Technology Council lacks “prudential 

standing” under RCRA because it is a self-proclaimed 

“national trade association of commercial firms that provide 

technologies and services for recycling, treatment, and secure 

disposal of industrial and hazardous wastes,” whose only 

interest in RCRA regulation is to promote “ever more 

stringent regulation ‘to improve the business opportunities of 

treatment firms’—an end we have consistently and repeatedly 

held lies outside the ‘zone of interests’ protected by RCRA.”)

(quoting Hazardous Waste Treatment Council v. Thomas, 885 

F.2d 918, 925-926 (D.C. Cir. 1989)); accord Cement Kiln 

Recycling Coalition v. EPA, 255 F.3d 855, 871 (D.C. Cir. 

2001). 

 2 Because Petitioners have established standing based on the 

asserted injuries that arise from their exposure to the gasification 

process, we need not address their claims of informational and 

procedural injury.

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The Supreme Court has recently clarified that 

“‘prudential standing’ is a misnomer,” and that the “zone of 

interests” inquiry is in fact a question of whether a plaintiff 

“falls within the class of plaintiffs whom Congress has 

authorized to sue,” not a question of standing. Lexmark Int’l, 

Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 1377, 

1386-1388 (2014). But whether characterized as prudential 

standing or legal capacity to state a claim under RCRA, the 

Environmental Technology Council has failed in this case to 

make any showing in the briefs or record that it has a legally 

cognizable interest in this litigation. See Sierra Club, 292 

F.3d at 903. 

To be sure, had the Council joined a single petition with 

the Sierra Club or Louisiana Network, then our determination 

that at least one of the joint petitioners had standing and a 

legally cognizable claim would have averted this question.

See, e.g., Comcast Corp. v. FCC, 579 F.3d 1, 6 (D.C. Cir. 

2009). But because the Council initiated its own independent 

petition for review, creating its own distinct case in this court, 

the Council has no co-parties to its suit who could establish 

standing or could assert a legally cognizable claim for relief. 

While the Council’s petition was later consolidated with those 

of the Sierra Club and Louisiana Network, the mere clerical 

act of consolidating multiple petitions for efficient review 

does not obviate the need for each petition on which a 

judgment issues to independently establish standing or (after 

Lexmark) its legal capacity to prosecute the action.

We therefore hold that the Environmental Technology 

Council lacks a “legislatively conferred cause of action” that 

encompasses its RCRA claims, Lexmark, 134 S. Ct. at 1382, 

and we accordingly deny its petition, No. 08-1145.

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C

The Institute and Council also argue that this court lacks 

jurisdiction because Sierra Club and Louisiana Network 

petitioned the EPA for administrative review of the 

Gasification Exclusion Rule in the form of a “Petition for 

Reconsideration,” rather than in a “Petition for New 

Rulemaking.” In their view, that titling rendered the Rule

non-final and thus non-appealable.

That is not correct. Regardless of how they captioned 

their administrative petition, Sierra Club and Louisiana 

Network explicitly sought the EPA’s substantive review of a 

final rule, for which the only remedy was a new rulemaking. 

Indeed, one of Petitioners’ primary objections to the 

Gasification Exclusion Rule was that its promulgation did not 

comply with the APA’s notice and comment rulemaking 

requirements. That is a fault that could only be repaired with 

a new rulemaking and new opportunity for public comment.

See Petition for Reconsideration at 5-8 (“Because EPA relied 

on the ‘original proposal suggested in the July 15, 1998’ 

NODA and not on the 2002 proposed rule to formulate the 

Hazardous Waste Gasification Rule, the final rule was not a 

logical outgrowth of the proposed rule and the public was 

denied the opportunity for notice and comment in several 

critical areas.”); see generally American Mining Congress v. 

EPA, 907 F.2d 1179, 1185 (D.C. Cir. 1990) (holding that a 

petition for “administrative reexamination” was, despite its 

label, a petition for new rulemaking, where the record of the 

case made clear that was how the EPA would have treated the 

petition).

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Furthermore, a petitioner’s stylistic mislabeling could not 

singlehandedly revert the EPA’s final Gasification Exclusion 

Rule to a non-final proposal—the type of tentative agency 

judgment that could have been amended without proceeding 

through new notice and comment rulemaking. See Columbia 

Falls Aluminum Co. v. EPA, 139 F.3d 914, 919 (D.C. Cir. 

1998) (“Once a rule is final, an agency can amend it only 

through a new rulemaking.”). We thus hold that the

administrative petition here was a request for new 

rulemaking, which does not “pose any problem for our subject 

matter jurisdiction.” Id. Sierra Club and Louisiana Network 

timely filed their 2008 petition for review of the final 

Gasification Exclusion Rule, No. 08-1144, and we therefore 

have jurisdiction over both that petition and their timely 2012 

petition for review of EPA’s denial of their administrative 

petition for reconsideration, No. 12-1295. 

III

Turning, at long last, to the merits, the question in this 

case is whether the Gasification Exclusion Rule violates the 

statutory mandate in Section 6924(q) of RCRA that the EPA 

regulate “[h]azardous waste used as fuel.” 42 U.S.C. 

§ 6924(q). Because Congress has charged the EPA with 

enforcing RCRA, 42 U.S.C. § 6934(e), we review that rule

under the familiar, two-step framework of Chevron U.S.A. 

Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837

(1984). First, we determine whether Congress has directly 

spoken to the precise question at issue. Id. at 842-843. If it 

has, “that is the end of the matter,” and we must give effect to

the “unambiguously expressed intent of Congress.” Id. If, on 

the other hand, the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect 

to the specific issue, we deferentially review the agency’s 

reading of the statute to determine whether it is reasonable.

Id. at 843. In this case, as in Natural Resources Defense 

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Council v. EPA, No. 98-1379, supra, our analysis begins and 

ends at Chevron’s first step.

Section 6924(q) is direct and unqualified in its compass. 

The EPA “shall” regulate facilities that “produce a fuel [] 

from any hazardous waste identified or listed under section 

6921,” burn such a fuel, or distribute or market such a fuel.

42 U.S.C. § 6924(q)(1). To drive the provision’s 

comprehensiveness home, Congress not once, not twice, but 

eleven times employed the all-embracing adjective “any” to 

describe when hazardous wastes used as a fuel are covered.

See id. “[Ten] ‘any’s’ in one sentence” and an eleventh a few 

lines later, “and it begins to seem that Congress meant the 

statute to have expansive reach.” United States v. Clintwood 

Elkhorn Mining Co., 553 U.S. 1, 7 (2008).

There is, moreover, no serious question that the 

Gasification Exclusion Rule exempts from RCRA hazardous 

materials that are “listed under section 6921.” 42 U.S.C. 

§ 6924(q)(1). The “oil-bearing hazardous secondary 

materials” at issue here are identified as hazardous materials 

in the regulations the EPA adopted implementing Section 

6921. See 73 Fed. Reg. at 58; 40 C.F.R. §§ 261.31-261.33. 

But for their use in the production of syngas fuel, they would 

unquestionably be regulated as hazardous waste under Section 

6921. Indeed, it is precisely their usage to “produce a fuel” 

that puts the materials squarely within Section 6924(q)’s 

grasp. 42 U.S.C. § 6924(q)(1)(A). 

The EPA’s efforts to extricate its Rule from that plain 

text all fail. First, the EPA argues that the hazardous 

materials can be liberated from RCRA’s regulatory mandate 

on the ground that their use to make the fuel syngas means 

they are not hazardous “waste,” because they are not 

discarded within the meaning of RCRA’s definition of “solid 

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waste,” 42 U.S.C. § 6903(27). That reading would stand 

Section 6924(q) on its head. By its plain terms, that Section

applies to hazardous waste precisely because it is used to 

“produce a fuel.” 42 U.S.C. § 6924(q)(1)(A). The materials’

use in the production of fuel thus cannot simultaneously put 

them within and without RCRA.

Second, the EPA argues that its exception is confined to 

the creation of syngas fuel as part of an ongoing production 

process. The problem with that argument is that Congress 

wrote no such qualification into Section 6924(q); the 

provision’s eleven “any’s,” in fact, defy such limitation. See 

National Ass’n of Clean Water Agencies v. EPA, 734 F.3d 

1115, 1128 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (“The word ‘any’ is usually 

understood to be all inclusive, and EPA presented no 

compelling reason why ‘any’ should not mean ‘any.’”) 

(quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Natural 

Resources Defense Council v. EPA, No. 98-1379, slip op. at 

15 (“From the statute’s mandatory and inclusive language we 

can only conclude the Congress intended to require that EPA 

regulate the production, burning for energy recovery and 

distributing/marketing of all such fuels derived from all listed 

hazardous wastes—with the sole express exclusions of (1) 

certain oil-containing petroleum refinery wastes that are 

converted into petroleum coke and (2) certain oil-containing 

petroleum refinery wastes and facilities that burn only de 

minimis quantities of hazardous waste, see 42 

U.S.C.§ 6924(q)(2)(A)-(B).”). 

Third, the EPA’s reasoning forgets that Congress enacted

Section 6924(q) specifically to overturn the EPA’s exclusion

from regulation of those very same materials under that very 

same rationale. See, e.g., S. Rep. No. 284, supra, at 37 (1983)

(clarifying that the amendment applies to “hazardous wastederived fuels, fuels blended with hazardous wastes, and 

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hazardous wastes burned without being blended as fuels,” and 

that EPA may no longer interpret such materials as non-

“wastes”); H.R. Rep. No. 198, supra, at 39 (1983) (“Section 

[6924(q)] corrects a major deficiency in the present RCRA 

regulations by requiring EPA to exercise its existing authority 

over hazardous waste-derived fuels by regulating their 

production, distribution and use. * * * The Committee wants 

to assure that EPA will exercise its authority over all facilities 

that blend or burn hazardous waste for energy recovery.”)

(emphasis added). 

Fourth, the EPA contends that this court’s decision in 

AMC I, 824 F.2d 1177, requires the categorical exclusion of 

materials that are reused within ongoing production processes 

because they are not discarded as “solid waste.” In its view, 

AMC I forbids the EPA to regulate facilities producing syngas 

from hazardous materials through the gasification process, 

since those materials too are not discarded, and thus are not 

“solid waste.”

That argument overreads AMC I. AMC I involved not 

Section 6924(q), but RCRA’s general definitional section 

pertaining to “solid waste,” 42 U.S.C. § 6903(27), and the 

EPA’s undifferentiated subjection to RCRA regulation of a 

broad variety of materials that are reused or recycled as part 

of ongoing petroleum refining processes. 

In rejecting that categorical expansion of RCRA, the 

AMC I court went out of its way to separate out from its 

ruling the “specific problem” of hazardous wastes “used as 

fuel,” which would subject them to Section 6924(q). 824 

F.2d at 1189. Hazardous residuals used as fuel, the court 

explained, were different because Congress statutorily 

deemed such materials to be “discarded” and therefore within 

the statutory definition of “solid waste.” Id. (citing H.R. Rep. 

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No. 198, supra, at 40 (1983)). “For the purpose of 

interpreting section 6924(q),” then, the term “discarded” is 

not an ambiguous term, and “EPA therefore has no discretion 

to ‘reasonably’ construe the term to exclude hazardous-wastederived fuels from regulation.” Natural Resources Defense 

Council v. EPA, No. 98-1379, slip op. at 16. 

In other words, “AMC I involved an altogether different 

facet of waste disposal governed by a different statutory 

section—i.e., the scope of the RCRA term ‘solid waste’”—

and not the EPA’s right and responsibility under Section 

6924(q) to regulate facilities producing fuels from materials 

that are unquestionably “hazardous waste” otherwise subject 

to RCRA. Horsehead, 16 F.3d at 1263. 

Indeed, as we explain today in Natural Resources

Defense Council v. EPA, No. 98-1379, while AMC I focused 

only on Congress’s concern with the burning of commercial 

chemicals as fuels when it passed Section 6924(q), that 

Section’s compass is “far broader than that.” See slip op. at 

16 n. 7. In amending the statute by adding this provision, 

Congress made clear that “[h]azardous waste, as used in this 

provision [6924(q)] includes not only wastes identified or 

listed as hazardous under EPA’s regulations, but also 

includes any commercial chemical product (and related 

materials) listed pursuant to 40 C.F.R. § 261.33, which is not 

used for its original intended purpose but instead is burned or 

processed as a fuel.” Id. 

In addition, AMC I involved the reuse or recycling of 

materials that are “reinsert[ed] into the refining process along 

with the normal crude feedstock.” AMC I, 824 F.2d at 1180. 

Syngas, by contrast, is produced by taking certain secondary 

materials left over from the petroleum refining process and 

putting them not back into the normal refining process, but 

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into a gasification system. That distinct fuel production 

process falls squarely within Section 6924(q)’s plain text.

Accordingly, just as we concluded in Natural Resources 

Defense Council v. EPA, No. 98-1379, we hold here that 

Congress meant in Section 6924(q) what it said. See slip op. 

at 14-17. The EPA cannot carve out of RCRA one of the very 

activities that Congress commanded it to regulate. Section 

6924(q)’s plain text deprives the EPA of the authority to 

remove oil-bearing secondary hazardous wastes from 

RCRA’s reach when, through gasification, those materials are 

used to produce a fuel.

3

* * * * *

In closing, we note that Section 6924(q) does not, by its 

terms, require the EPA to subject all hazardous wastes used to 

produce a fuel to the full panoply of RCRA regulation. 

Instead, Congress directed the EPA to promulgate those 

standards that the EPA reasonably determines “may be 

necessary to protect human health and the environment.” 42 

U.S.C. § 6924(q). The EPA thus retains the ability to regulate 

such wastes in a manner that promotes goals like efficient 

resource recovery and reuse as long as it also comports with 

Congress’s protective command. The Gasification Exclusion 

Rule’s wholesale exemption of hazardous wastes used as fuel, 

however, does not fit that bill. We accordingly hold that

Petitioners Sierra Club and Louisiana Network have standing; 

their petitions for review were timely; and the Gasification 

 3 Because we grant the Sierra Club and Louisiana Network petitions

on the ground that the regulation conflicts with the plain statutory 

text, we need not address the Petitioners’ alternative argument that 

EPA failed to provide adequate notice of the final rule, as required 

by 5 U.S.C. § 553.

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Exclusion Rule violates the plain statutory text of 42 U.S.C. 

§ 6924(q). 

For the foregoing reasons, we deny the petition for 

review in No. 08-1145 and grant the petitions for review in 

Nos. 08-1144 and 12-1295. The Gasification Exclusion Rule 

is vacated. 

So ordered.

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