Opinion ID: 722370
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Background Specific to AMP-Ohio's Claims

Text: 28 Section 405(c)(2) of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act directs the EPA to grant certain fossil-fueled utility units a number of emission allowances equal to the product of the unit's baseline multiplied by the lesser of its actual 1985 emissions rate or its allowable 1985 emissions rate, divided by 2,000. 42 U.S.C. § 7651d(c)(2). Section 402(16) of these amendments defines the term actual 1985 emission rate for an electric utility unit to mean the annual sulfur dioxide ... emission rate in pounds per million Btu as reported in the NAPAP Emissions Inventory, Version 2, National Utility Reference File. 42 U.S.C. § 7651a(16). No statutory provision, however, suggests how the EPA should define an existing unit's actual emission rate should the unit not appear in the NURF-NAPAP database named in § 402(16). 29 The EPA addressed this gap in the statutory scheme through a notice published along with the second version of the National Allowance Data Base (NADB), the national database that catalogs the number of allowances granted to a particular unit. See Acid Rain Provisions, 56 Fed.Reg. 33,278 (July 19, 1991). This July 1991 Notice allowed a utility to submit a claim for allowances for a unit that was not listed in the NURF-NAPAP database, but it required that the utility also submit certain information, including the unit's actual emission rate and some supporting data, including the sulfur content and ash retention of the fuel burned at the unit, that could be used to verify the submitted rate. See id. at 33,283-85. 30 In response to this July 1991 Notice, AMP-Ohio submitted to the EPA a request for allowances for one of its facilities--the Richard Gorsuch generating station--accompanied by various information about that unit. This information included an actual emission rate for the facility, but did not include the other data required by the July Notice. Though AMP-Ohio later supplemented its submission with additional information, it again omitted the critical supporting data. Nonetheless, EPA included the Gorsuch facility in its third proposed version of the NADB. See Acid Rain Allowance Allocations and Reserves, 57 Fed.Reg. 29,940, 30,000 (July 7, 1992). In this version, the EPA granted some allowances to the Gorsuch facility, but far fewer than AMP-Ohio had expected. 31 AMP-Ohio protested this result during the appropriate comment period, and alleged a number of errors that the EPA made in calculating its allowances. The EPA corrected several computational and other errors. AMP-Ohio, however, still did not submit the supporting data that was necessary to confirm the emission rate it had asserted in its application, and the EPA did not specifically encourage AMP-Ohio to submit this information. 32 In its final version of the NADB, the EPA granted the Gorsuch facility a total of almost 20,000 allowances, see Acid Rain Allowance Allocations and Reserves, 58 Fed.Reg.15,634, 15,684 (Mar. 23, 1993), which was roughly half of the number of allowances AMP-Ohio expected from the data it had submitted. EPA subsequently informed AMP-Ohio that it had received fewer allowances because the EPA had based the allowances, not on the emission rate submitted byAMP-Ohio, but on an emission rate calculated using the average sulfur content of the fuel burned by utilities in Ohio in 1985. The EPA stated that it used this calculated rate because it did not have the supporting data necessary to verify the accuracy of AMP-Ohio's claimed emission rate. The EPA has since explained that this rate was calculated according to a technique used to compute emission rates for other databases, including the NURF-NAPAP database that § 402(16) specified was to be used for defining a unit's actual emission rate. See 42 U.S.C. § 7651a(16). 33 AMP-Ohio challenges this result on both substantive and procedural grounds.