Air Plan Approval and Conditional Approval; Colorado; Regulation Numbers 7 and 21 and RACT Requirements for the 2008 8-Hour Ozone Standard for the Denver Metro/North Front Range Nonattainment Area

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY <CFR>40 CFR Part 52</CFR> <DEPDOC>[EPA-R08-OAR-2024-0225; FRL-12122-01-R8]</DEPDOC> <SUBJECT>Air Plan Approval and Conditional Approval; Colorado; Regulation Numbers 7 and 21 and RACT Requirements for the 2008 8-Hour Ozone Standard for the Denver Metro/North Front Range Nonattainment Area</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Proposed rule. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to approve and conditionally approve portions of a State Implementation Plan (SIP) submission from the State of Colorado dated May 3, 2024. The submission relates to Colorado Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC or Commission) Regulation Number 7 (Reg. 7) and Regulation Number 21 (Reg. 21), and addresses Colorado SIP obligations related to reasonably available control technology (RACT) requirements for sources in nonattainment areas for the 2008 ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). The EPA is taking this action pursuant to the Clean Air Act (CAA). </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> Written comments must be received on or before September 5, 2024. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> Submit your comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA-R08-OAR-2024-0225, to the Federal Rulemaking Portal: <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> Follow the online instructions for submitting comments. Once submitted, comments cannot be edited or removed from <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> The EPA may publish any comment received to its public docket. Do not submit electronically any information you consider to be Confidential Business Information (CBI) or other information whose disclosure is restricted by statute. Multimedia submissions (audio, video, etc.) must be accompanied by a written comment. The written comment is considered the official comment and should include discussion of all points you wish to make. The EPA will generally not consider comments or comment contents located outside of the primary submission ( <E T="03">i.e.,</E> on the web, cloud, or other file sharing system). For additional submission methods, the full EPA public comment policy, information about CBI or multimedia submissions, and general guidance on making effective comments, please visit <E T="03">https://www2.epa.gov/dockets/commenting-epa-dockets.</E> <E T="03">Docket:</E> All documents in the docket are listed in the <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov</E> index. Although listed in the index, some information is not publicly available, <E T="03">e.g.,</E> CBI or other information whose disclosure is restricted by statute. Certain other material, such as copyrighted material, will be publicly available only in hard copy. Publicly available docket materials are available electronically in <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> Please email or call the person listed in the <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> section if you need to make alternative arrangements for access to the docket. <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Abby Fulton, Air and Radiation Division, EPA, Region 8, Mailcode 8ARD-IO, 1595 Wynkoop Street, Denver, Colorado 80202-1129, telephone number: (303) 312-6563, email address: <E T="03">fulton.abby@epa.gov.</E> </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> Throughout this document wherever “we,” “us,” or “our” is used, we mean the EPA. <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. What action is EPA proposing to take?</HD> As explained below, EPA is proposing to approve and conditionally approve various Colorado SIP provisions with respect to the adequacy of reporting requirements that the State resubmitted on May 3, 2024. These provisions were part of SIP submittals originally submitted by Colorado on May 14, 2018; May 13, 2020; March 22, 2021; and May 20, 2022, to address RACT requirements for purposes of the 2008 ozone NAAQS. EPA previously finalized approvals, conditional approvals, limited approvals, limited disapprovals, and disapprovals of different portions of these submittals on May 9, 2023;  <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> November 7, 2023;  <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> and December 8, 2023. <SU>3</SU> <FTREF/> As relevant to today's proposal, EPA previously issued a limited approval/limited disapproval of certain SIP provisions, with the limited disapproval portion applicable to the adequacy of the reporting requirements associated with those provisions in the May 9, 2023 action. <SU>4</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  Final rule, Air Plan Approval, Conditional Approval, Limited Approval and Limited Disapproval; Colorado; Serious Attainment Plan Elements and Related Revisions for the 2008 8-Hour Ozone Standard for the Denver Metro/North Front Range Nonattainment Area, 88 FR 29827. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>  Final rule, Air Plan Approval and Disapproval; Colorado; Serious Attainment Plan Elements and Related Revisions for the 2008 8-Hour Ozone Standard for the Denver Metro/North Front Range Nonattainment Area, 88 FR 76676. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>3</SU>  Final rule, Air Plan Disapproval; Colorado; RACT Elements for the 2008 8-Hour Ozone Standard for the Denver Metro/North Front Range Nonattainment Area, 88 FR 85511. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>4</SU>  88 FR 29827. </FTNT> On May 3, 2024, the State of Colorado resubmitted portions of the prior SIP submissions that were the subject of the limited disapproval and also submitted a letter committing to undertake additional steps to improve public access to regulatory compliance information and clarify existing SIP reporting requirements (Commitment Letter). <SU>5</SU> <FTREF/> Based on the additional information described in this letter, EPA is now proposing to approve Colorado's Reg. 7 and Reg. 21 with respect to the adequacy of reporting requirements for storage tank emission controls, storage tank and wet seal centrifugal compressor control device testing, consumer products, and architectural and industrial maintenance (AIM) coatings. EPA is basing its proposed approval on the additional information and clarification that the State provided concerning the existing reporting requirements that apply to them. Based on the additional information and commitments by the State to make additional revisions, EPA is also proposing to conditionally approve the adequacy of reporting requirements for metal parts and metal products coatings, wood products coatings, combustion equipment at major sources, and foam manufacturing. This proposed conditional approval is based on the State's commitment to make further revisions to the reporting requirements for these specific rules, and to submit those revisions to EPA for approval into the SIP, to address the deficiencies identified in the May 9, 2023 rulemaking that were the basis for the limited disapproval. <SU>6</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>5</SU>  “Resubmittal of SIP revisions following Reconsideration. EPA Docket Nos.: EPA-R08-OAR-2022-0632; EPA-R08-OAR-2022-0857; and FRL-10362-02-R8” commitment letter. Available in the docket for this action. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>6</SU>   <E T="03">Id.</E> </FTNT> Under section 110(k)(4) of the CAA, the EPA may conditionally approve a SIP submission based on a commitment from a state to adopt specific enforceable measures by a date certain no later than one year from the date of approval of the plan revision. <SU>7</SU> <FTREF/> If EPA finalizes the proposed conditional approval of the identified Reg. 7 rules, the State must meet its commitment to submit the necessary SIP revisions to EPA by May 31, 2025. <SU>8</SU> <FTREF/> If the State fails to do so, this conditional approval action would automatically become a disapproval on that date. If the State submits timely SIP revisions but EPA finds the SIP submittal to be incomplete, this conditional approval action would become a disapproval on the date of EPA's incompleteness finding. In either case, EPA would notify the State by letter that the conditional approval has converted to a disapproval. The EPA subsequently would publish a document in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> notifying the public that the conditional approval was converted to a disapproval. EPA notes that the provisions that we are proposing to conditionally approve are already part of the SIP due to our May 9, 2023 limited approval. Thus, in the event the conditional approval is converted to a disapproval, the underlying SIP provisions that were the subject of the prior limited approval/limited disapproval would remain in the SIP, but the prior limited disapproval of those provisions with respect to the adequacy of reporting requirements would return. <FTNT> <SU>7</SU>  The provisions that we are proposing to conditionally approve are already part of the SIP due to our May 9, 2023 limited approval and thus are federally enforceable by the State and EPA, notwithstanding concerns about the current reporting requirements that may limit potential enforceability by others under CAA section 304 citizen suit authority. </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>8</SU>   <E T="03">See</E> Commitment Letter, p. 13. </FTNT> If we finalize this rulemaking as proposed, Colorado will have corrected some of the deficiencies identified in our May 9, 2023 limited disapproval, and committed to correct the remaining deficiencies as described in its Commitment Letter. We are concurrently making an interim final determination to defer application of CAA section 179 sanctions associated with our May 9, 2023 limited disapproval. Consistent with applicable sanction regulations, <SU>9</SU> <FTREF/> EPA will be making the interim final determination based on this proposal to approve and conditionally approve SIP revisions from Colorado to resolve the deficienci ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 65k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━