Opinion ID: 2804920
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Wise County Background

Text: Wise County is one of 22 counties in and around the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, which reports some of the most severe NAAQS violations in the country. Although Wise County has no monitor of its own, it borders several counties with a total of seven violating monitors, the closest of which reports ambient ozone levels that exceed the 2008 NAAQS by 0.010 ppm. Moreover, because Wise County falls within the CSA of Dallas–Fort Worth, it is presumptively included within the nonattainment area. Despite Wise County’s presumptive inclusion in the Dallas–Fort Worth nonattainment area, the EPA designated it as attainment when it updated the ozone NAAQS in 1997. For this reason, Texas did not include Wise County among the nine Dallas–Fort Worth counties it recommended for nonattainment status when it submitted its initial designations 46 to the EPA in March 2009. 14 On December 9, 2011, the EPA informed Texas that it planned to include Wise County in the Dallas–Fort Worth nonattainment area due to its “comparatively high emissions” and “close proximity . . . to violating monitors.” See Texas Area Designations for the 2008 Ozone NAAQS at 13 [hereinafter Preliminary Dallas– Fort Worth Area Designations]. The EPA redesignated Wise County based on the five-part “weight of the evidence analysis” articulated in the 2008 Guidance. 15 See id. at 1–2. The second and third factors—emissions data and meteorology—factored prominently in the EPA’s decision. See id. at 13. As for emissions, the EPA concluded that oil-and-gas collection and production in the Barnett Shale reservoir—a gas-rich geological formation covering a significant portion of Wise County—resulted in Wise County’s inclusion among the eight highest emissions-producing counties in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. 16 As for meteorology, although historic wind patterns in the Dallas–Fort Worth area suggest that air does not normally move from Wise County to counties with monitors registering 14 Initially, Texas based its recommended designations on air-quality data from 2005 to 2007. On October 31, 2011, Texas updated its initial designations with certified air-quality data from 2008 to 2010. 15 As noted above, see supra § I.B–C, the 2008 Guidance initially established a nine-part test but the EPA subsequently collapsed those nine factors into five. 16 Specifically, Wise County had the fourth highest level of VOC emissions among nineteen counties in the Dallas–Fort Worth area and the sixth highest level of NOx emissions. Preliminary Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations at 6 tbl.3. 47 NAAQS violations, the EPA concluded that Wise County was upwind of the monitors on days when ozone levels at the monitors peaked. See Preliminary Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations at 10. In reaching this conclusion, the EPA used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hybrid Single Particle Lagranian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model instead of relying solely on historic wind patterns in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. See id. HYSPLIT charts the path, or “back trajectory,” that air takes before it collects in a certain area. See id. According to the EPA, HYSPLIT modeling “is specifically designed to give an estimate of the probable path a parcel of air travels in reaching a given location at a given time” and is particularly illuminating for an area like Wise County, which has “light and variable” wind patterns. Response to Comments at 59–60. After the EPA notified Texas that it planned to include Wise County in the Dallas–Fort Worth nonattainment area, numerous individuals and organizations submitted comments urging the EPA to reconsider its Wise County designation. One commenter insisted that other Texas counties were more responsible than Wise County for the NAAQS violations in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Others argued that the EPA’s use of HYSPLIT modeling was arbitrary and capricious because, when designating other areas of the country, the EPA relied solely on historic wind patterns. According to these commenters, if the EPA had done the same with Wise County, it would not have designated Wise County as nonattainment because, according to historical wind patterns in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Wise County was downwind of violating monitors more than 95 per cent of the time. For its part, Petitioner Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (Texas Commission) submitted its own data based on photochemical grid source apportionment 48 modeling. Source-apportionment modeling helps determine the potential future impact of an emissions source area (such as Wise County) on downwind monitors by “keep[ing] track of the origin of the [ozone] precursors creating the ozone.” Industrial Br. 7. It does so by combining “the meteorology/transport of air parcels during high ozone days with the emissions of [a] specific area[],” (here, Wise County), “to evaluate potential impact on ozone levels.” Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas Final Area Designations for the 2008 Ozone NAAQS at 16 [hereinafter Final Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations]. Although the EPA does not typically perform source-apportionment modeling during the NAAQS designation process, it “has used it in the past for large-scale rulemakings, such as the Clean Air Interstate Rule and Cross State Air Pollution Rule” and it considers source-apportionment modeling data if a state submits it. See Resp’t’s Br. 126. According to the Texas Petitioners, source-apportionment modeling suggests that Wise County emissions had only a negligible impact on the monitors registering NAAQS violations in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. On April 30, 2012, the EPA issued its omnibus Response to Comments, many of which addressed the objections to the Wise County designation. The EPA defended HYSPLIT modeling as an “excellent tool[]” that it generally “prefer[s] over more basic assessments of wind speed and direction.” Response to Comments at 59. The EPA found HYSPLIT modeling to be a more precise measure of wind patterns than historic data, which data, according to the agency, is “potentially misleading in cases where wind speeds are light and variable, or vary substantially across the location of the meteorological observation and the monitored high ozone concentrations.” Id. These conditions existed in the Dallas– 49 Fort Worth area. 17 Although the EPA acknowledged it could not always use HYSPLIT modeling, it nonetheless declined to ignore HYSPLIT data “where the information is available, even if the information is not available in all areas.” Response to Comments at 59. Along with its omnibus responses, the EPA issued its Final Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations, which again applied the five-factor test. In that document, the EPA addressed the source-apportionment modeling submitted by the Texas Commission. The EPA took issue with the model’s methodology and made several amendments to it. First, the EPA faulted the Texas Commission for not using data from an entire ozone season in its model. To account for this omission, the EPA examined not only the average (i.e., relative) impact of Wise County emissions on Dallas–Fort Worth monitors but also the absolute (i.e., maximum) impact of the emissions. See Final Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations at 17. The average/relative approach advocated by the Texas Commission averaged the impact that Wise County emissions might have on the monitors on all days when the monitors were expected to exceed the ozone NAAQS. As a practical matter, averaging the impact of Wise County emissions meant that the Texas Commission’s model accounted for days on which wind patterns were not expected to move air pollutants from Wise County to the violating monitors. According to the EPA, the Texas Commission’s average approach had “the effect of masking the impacts that 17 See Final Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations at 14 (emphasizing that HYSPLIT modeling is especially appropriate for Wise County because Dallas–Fort Worth area “is generally characterized as having ozone exceedances with lower wind speeds and winds from many directions”). 50 occur on days when the wind does flow from Wise County to violating monitors,” an imprecision that was aggravated by the model’s limited dataset. See Resp’t’s Br. 136 (emphasis added). To account for this imprecision, EPA chose to look at the “direct,” or “absolute,” predicted effect that Wise County emissions would have on violating monitors rather than the average effect they were expected to have. Second, the EPA noted that the Texas Commission’s source-apportionment model under-predicted peak ozone levels in the Dallas–Fort Worth area by a range of 0.005 to 0.020 ppm. As a practical matter, the under-prediction meant that the Texas Commission’s model underestimated the number of days that Wise County contributed to NAAQS violations. To compensate therefor, the EPA examined the impact of Wise County emissions not only on days when the monitors exceeded the ozone NAAQS threshold of 0.075 ppm, but also on days when the monitors reported ozone levels in excess of 0.070 ppm. After making these adjustments, the EPA reinterpreted the data from the Texas Commission’s source-apportionment model and concluded that it in fact supported including Wise County in the Dallas–Fort Worth nonattainment area. See Final Dallas–Fort Worth Area Designations at 20. Specifically, the EPA concluded that Wise County emissions (1) “resulted in 6 occurrences (over 4 days) of an impact of more than 0.75 ppb days” on Dallas–Fort Worth area monitors; (2) “had even larger impacts of up to 5 ppb on the Eagle Mountain Lake monitor,” a monitor one-half mile from the Wise County border that reported particularly severe NAAQS violations; and (3) “resulted in 9 occurrences (over 5 days) [causing] impacts of more than 0.75 ppb [to] occur[] at” Dallas–Fort Worth monitors. See id. For these reasons, the 51 EPA maintained its inclusion of Wise County in the Dallas– Fort Worth nonattainment area. Dozens of individuals and organizations filed petitions for reconsideration of the EPA’s Wise County nonattainment designation, including the Texas Commission and the other Texas Petitioners. On December 14, 2012, the EPA denied each petition for reconsideration. Before us, the Texas Petitioners’ challenges to the EPA’s Wise County designation are grouped as follows: (1) The EPA’s use of HYSPLIT Modeling and its re-evaluation of the Texas Commission’s source-apportionment modeling were arbitrary and capricious; (2) the EPA’s designation of Wise County as nonattainment violated the Commerce Clause, U.S. CONST. art. I, § 8, cl. 3, the Tenth Amendment, id. amend. X, and the Due Process Clause, id. amend. V; and (3) the EPA violated at least one of several statutory provisions, including provisions of the Clean Air Act. We address each argument in turn.