WASHINGTON — Congress is feuding over how quickly the federal government should move in trying to reduce deadly air pollution that comes from industrial boilers and incinerators.
The issue has aroused much controversy in Washington state and the Pacific Northwest, where the forest products industry is big business.
Fears persist among many — Republicans and Democrats alike — that the federal government will go too far in hurting the region’s economy by imposing new regulations that could result in mass layoffs.
The GOP-led House voted nearly two weeks ago to force the Environmental Protection Agency to wait another 15 months before imposing new regulations on boilers. The House plan would give companies five years to install equipment to capture more pollution, including mercury and lead.
Environmental groups oppose a delay. They say it could result in thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Members of the Washington state delegation have been particularly active in the debate on Capitol Hill in recent weeks.
Calling the plan to delay the regulations "a no-cost jobs bill," freshman Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler said that if Congress fails to act, pulp mills, papers mills and others that can’t afford to upgrade their boilers "will all shed ... thousands of jobs" in her district in southwest Washington state.
"We need to go there, but we need to do it in a commonsense way that doesn’t just handicap the economy at a time when we need it to grow," Herrera Beutler said.
And Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who represents eastern Washington state, said that every $1 billion that companies would be required to spend to upgrade their boilers would put 16,000 jobs at risk. She said that the full cost of the boiler upgrades could exceed $14 billion.
"Every dollar that a job creator has to spend complying with new regulations is a dollar he could be using to create more jobs," said McMorris Rodgers, the fifth-ranked Republican in the House.
Reflecting the issue’s sensitivity in the Northwest, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon joined a bipartisan group in July in proposing to put the brakes on the EPA, saying its new rules would "stymie the burgeoning biomass energy industry and make it very difficult for existing lumber and wood products mills to operate."
Wyden said his bill would force EPA to go "back to the drawing board and craft boiler rules that are more in line with what is realistic for mills and factories."
And earlier this month, Washington state Democrats Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray and nine other senators wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, saying the new regulations were ambiguous and raised questions of whether biomass could be defined as a hazardous material, which would increase the cost to produce it.
"At a time when our economy is struggling, it is imperative that regulations provide clarity and certainty for businesses to make investments that create and sustain jobs," the senators said in their letter.
All 11 senators who signed the letter said they had been contacted by paper mills and other businesses in their states whose leaders worried that the rules would force companies to replace biomass with fossil fuels. Cantwell and Murray did not name any of the companies involved.
Much is at stake for Washington state, one of the nation’s largest producers of biomass power.
With millions of dollars in subsidies and federal grants, at least a dozen biomass plants in the state are producing power from wood byproducts from mills and waste from forests.
One of them, Simpson Tacoma Kraft Co., a forest products company in Tacoma, generates electricity by boiling water to burn sawdust, bark and wood shavings from pulp mills and saw mills, sending the high-pressure steam into a turbine. The company declined to comment on the pending legislation.
Across the nation, the biomass boilers have become increasingly controversial as environmentalists question their safety and increased level of greenhouse emissions.
Last year, a study by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy organization, urged that all state and federal subsidies for biomass be scrapped, saying the small amount of power generated by the biomass plants is not worth the risk to the environment.
Despite the sympathy for the biomass companies, the effort to delay the EPA rules still faces a stiff fight, with environmental groups leading the charge against the legislation.
At the Natural Resources Defense Council, John Walke, the group’s clean air director, called the plan "the latest installment of the Tea Party’s unraveling of the Clean Air Act." He said the plan that passed the House would "sacrifice tens of thousands of lives, pollute the air we breathe, and expose our children, families, and communities to toxic air pollutants."
In a report issued earlier this year, the Congressional Research Service said the EPA rules would affect more than 13,000 boilers around the nation, with most of the boilers — about 85 percent — fueled by natural gas.
The report said that companies would incur capital costs of less than $7,000 to upgrade a natural gas-powered boiler. It said costs would be higher for coal-fired and biomass-fired boilers, which might need to install fabric filters to control mercury and other contaminants. The report estimated that there are 420 biomass-fueled boilers in the country.
According to the EPA, implementing the new regulations, beginning in 2013, would prevent from 1,900 to 4,800 premature deaths a year, along with 1,300 cases of chronic bronchitis, 3,000 non-fatal heart attacks and 33,000 cases of aggravated asthma, among other things.
The EPA also said the new regulations would reduce national emissions by 7 percent, including 15,000 pounds of mercury each year.
