Environmental lawsuits are pipeline for endless taxpayer dollars to lawyers, today EPA lost one in Michigan

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8/8/12, "EPA loses in court over oil and gas regulation," Greenwire, E&E, Lawrence Hurley

"A federal appeals court has ruled in a closely watched case that U.S. EPA has not done enough to show that several gas facilities located near each other in Michigan can be regulated as a single stationary source under the Clean Air Act.

The Cincinnati, Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday that EPA had no basis to find that the natural gas sweetening plant and sour gas production wells owned by Summit Petroleum Corp. in Rosebush, Mich., are "adjacent" under the statute and therefore a single source just because they shared some similar functions.

It is an important case for the oil and gas industry because it is the first appeals court ruling to address a recent EPA move seeking to more aggressively "aggregate" various nearby sources of air pollution at oil and gas facilities for permitting purposes (Greenwire, Oct. 14, 2009).

Industry groups object because it can bring the individual sources under the umbrella of more stringent Clean Air Act permitting requirements.

The court ordered EPA on a 2-1 vote to consider again whether the facilities, spread over a 43-square-mile area, are "adjacent" under the "plain-meaning of the term," which focuses only on physical proximity.

The plant processes gas for around 100 sour gas wells. The gas is piped to the plant using pipes owned by Summit, but the property between the wells is not owned by Summit and the well sites do not share common boundaries.

Judge Richard Suhrheinrich wrote in the majority opinion that he had "little hesitation" in rejecting EPA's interpretation of "adjacent," noting that it was inconsistent not just with the plain meaning of the word but also with EPA's own interpretation of it in the past.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Karen Nelson Moore said the court should have deferred to EPA's "reasonable interpretation of its own regulation."

She noted that the majority's ruling did not prevent EPA from reaching the same conclusion as it did previously "so long as it bases that conclusion on the considerations that the majority today deems appropriate."

Howard Feldman, director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, said the case is important because there are many wells and processing facilities that are not directly adjacent to each other.

"To treat them as being at the same location does not reflect physical reality," Feldman said.

Both API and the American Exploration and Production Counsel had filed briefs in support of Summit.

Click here to read the ruling." via Climate Depot, via Junk Science

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