Regional Air Quality Council leaders will present a report to a key state regulatory board in November outlining a wide swath of strategies to reduce emissions over the next 10 years in areas from oil and gas to transportation to consumer products.
“The Blueprint” will be pitched as a series of recommendations to the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission to reduce emissions that have left the Northern Front Range in severe violation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ozone limits. It will not result in any immediate regulations, despite that fact the RAQC will present it while the AQCC debates changes in the State Implementation Plan to achieve EPA compliance, though some of the recommendations involve potential adoption of future rules.
This proposal is important for business leaders to understand, however, because the AQCC, which oversees rulemaking for all state air-quality and pollution-reduction plans, could base future initiatives on ideas put forward by the influential RAQC. And the November report notably will look at a host of areas where the state has not set emissions-reduction rules yet, from off-road engine usage to commercial cooking facilities to indirect sources of emissions like warehouses and colleges that attract a lot of vehicles.
“It’s planning versus demanding. It’s not a regulatory initiative,” RAQC Executive Director Mike Silverstein said Monday to the Colorado Chamber of Commerce Regulatory Affairs Council. “A plan needs to have a goal. It needs to get to get us to (EPA) attainment rather than kicking the can down the road.”
How the blueprint could cut emissions
The plan involves three buckets of suggested actions.
The first bucket — suggestions that could be done before the end of 2026 — largely involves gathering of data and assessment of potential tools, as well as implementation of already approved plans like the state’s restrictions on gas-powered lawn and garden equipment. That includes assessment of the impact of tightening stationary-source permit limits to reflect actual emissions, assessment of new regulations on wellsite venting and blowdowns and the collection of trip data to indirect sources.
RAQC officials for the past year have been examining how to reduce traffic to these indirect sources of emissions — gathering areas that include warehouses, airports, higher-education institutions and large concert and sporting-event venues. Members have suggested incentivizing or requiring warehouses to install charging equipment for zero-emissions electric vehicles, boosting transit to these areas encouraging these destinations to do things like reserve key parking spots for electric vehicles, among other ideas.
Institutions like Fort Lewis College in Durango could be subject to rules developed to limit emissions at indirect sources.
The second bucket involves medium-term strategies that, after assessment, could be implemented in 2027 or 2028 and begin to produce emissions reductions by 2030. These include voluntary emissions-reduction actions by indirect sources, creation of non-road equipment emissions targets, adoption daily emissions limits and venting regulations considered in bucket one and assessment of new rules like commercial-cooking requirements, consumer-products emissions limits and drill-reg electrification mandates.
Non-road equipment includes heavy equipment like backhoe loaders, farm equipment like combines, tractors, motorboats, all-terrain vehicles and golf carts. Consumer products that could be subject to regulations include automotive products, cosmetics like hair spray, cleaning products, insecticides, roofing products, surface coatings and others.
Bolder actions could stir concerns
Finally, bucket three involves enactment of emissions-reduction strategies by 2030 that could have significant longer-term impacts but may take more time than objectives in the first two buckets to implement. These could involve mandates for indirect sources — only if studies show they are feasible and effective — as well as initiatives to reduce mobile-source emissions in new areas, such as forklift electrification.
Silverstein acknowledged that while the RAQC has big-picture ideas now, it will work over the next year to come up with more specific strategies for potential rulemaking. And even the broad recommendations remain in flux, he said, as the RAQC board will vote on an exact plan to endorse on Nov. 7, weeks before the Nov. 20-21 AQCC meeting.
Different sectors are likely to raise concerns with multiple aspects of the plan. Colorado Motor Carriers Association President Greg Fulton, for example, advised the RAQC Indirect Sources Technical Work Group at its June 24 meeting to not set a goal to reduce vehicle trips to warehouses, as that could mean direct cuts in business for trucking firms and not account for emissions reductions being made by fleets that have been electrified.
A commercial truck navigates a Colorado roadway.
But the big concern from business groups right now is over whether these suggestions that could result in regulations will be technically and economically feasible — and whether the environmental return on that investment will be substantial in any way. If not, many have suggested, the state should slow down on creating new rules that will not get it into compliance with EPA ozone limits anyway.
Can any cuts get the state into federal compliance?
A primary goal of the RAQC, for example, is to reduce ozone levels to less than 70 parts per billion, which is the standard required by a 2015 federal rule. But studies have shown repeatedly that much of the ozone pollution comes from natural sources, wildfires and out-of-state or even international pollution that blows across the state’s borders — all factors that no increase in regulations on state activities can affect.
Both Arizona and Utah officials, leaders of business groups have noted, have talked about applying for EPA exemptions from downward reclassification of their ozone noncompliance by arguing they can’t control emissions that their regulated industries are not producing. Angie Binder, executive director of the Colorado Petroleum Association, asked RAQC officials Monday if they have considered seeking a similar exemption from the EPA, but Silverstein said they have not and were concentrating on reducing emissions.
The RAQC’s offering of its blueprint will come not as an alternative or even supplement to the SIP update that the AQCC will consider in November — an update that could include a boost in some regulations — but as an informational presentation.
Still, it could serve as a preview of sorts to the type of initiatives that the AQCC will consider in the coming years as the state continues to try a plethora of strategies to reducing the nitrous-oxide and volatile-organic-compound emissions contributing to its ozone problem.