Sierra Club v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
65 ERC (BNA) 1114, 37 Envtl. L. Rep. (Envtl. Law Inst.) 20226, 499 F. 3d 653 (2007)
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Rule of Law:
The Clean Air Act's requirement for "Best Available Control Technology" (BACT) does not compel the EPA to consider alternatives that would fundamentally redesign a proposed facility. The EPA has the authority to distinguish between a pollution control technology and a change to the fundamental scope of a project, and its determination is entitled to judicial deference.
Facts:
- Prairie State Generating Company planned to build a 1,500-megawatt coal-fired electrical plant in southern Illinois.
- The plant was designed as a "mine-mouth" facility, sited directly adjacent to a coal seam containing 240 million tons of high-sulfur coal.
- The design included a half-mile-long conveyor belt to transport the high-sulfur coal directly from the mine to the plant.
- Using an alternative, low-sulfur coal would require transporting it from mines over a thousand miles away.
- Switching to low-sulfur coal would necessitate significant design changes to the plant's coal-receiving facilities, such as adding a rail spur and equipment for unloading and handling coal from rail cars, making the conveyor belt system superfluous.
Procedural Posture:
- The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, exercising delegated federal authority, issued a permit to Prairie State Generating Company.
- A group of environmentalists petitioned the U.S. EPA's Environmental Appeals Board to reverse the issuance of the permit.
- The Environmental Appeals Board denied the petition and upheld the permit.
- The environmentalists (petitioners) sought review of the Environmental Appeals Board's decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
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Issue:
Does the Clean Air Act's requirement for "Best Available Control Technology" (BACT) compel the EPA to consider requiring a proposed "mine-mouth" power plant, specifically designed to burn high-sulfur coal from an adjacent mine, to fundamentally redesign its operations to accept and burn low-sulfur coal transported from a distant source?
Opinions:
Majority - Posner
No. The EPA's interpretation of the BACT requirement to exclude a fundamental redesign of a proposed facility is a reasonable exercise of its administrative authority. The court reasoned that while the Clean Air Act explicitly includes "clean fuels" as a control method, this cannot be interpreted so broadly as to require an applicant to change the entire scope of its project, such as converting a coal plant to a nuclear one. The court deferred to the EPA's expert judgment in drawing the line between a mere change in control technology and a fundamental redesign of the facility. Here, the EPA reasonably concluded that requiring a mine-mouth plant, whose intrinsic purpose is to use co-located coal, to reconfigure itself to accept rail-transported coal from a distant source constituted a redesign, not simply the adoption of a control technology. This type of major change falls under the Act's separate provision for considering "alternatives" to a project, which was not at issue in this case.
Analysis:
This decision significantly reinforces the principle of judicial deference to administrative agencies, particularly the EPA, in interpreting complex statutes within their area of expertise. It clarifies the scope of the "Best Available Control Technology" (BACT) analysis, establishing that the EPA can permissibly limit BACT to pollution controls for a project as proposed, without forcing applicants to alter the fundamental business purpose or design of their facility. This provides greater certainty for industrial applicants by distinguishing between the BACT requirement and the separate, broader analysis of project "alternatives," thereby preventing the BACT process from being used to litigate the core nature of a proposed project.
