Air Plan Approval; New Jersey; NOX SIP Call and Removal of CAIR

<RULE> ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY <CFR>40 CFR Part 52</CFR> <DEPDOC>[EPA-R02-OAR-2024-0110, FRL-12093-02-R2]</DEPDOC> <SUBJECT> Air Plan Approval; New Jersey; NO <E T="0735">X</E> SIP Call and Removal of CAIR </SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Final rule. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is approving the removal of the New Jersey Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) nitrogen oxides (NO <E T="52">X</E> ) Trading Program regulations from the New Jersey State Implementation Plan (SIP) and is conditionally approving the removal of the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program regulations from the New Jersey SIP. On August 23, 2018, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) submitted a SIP revision requesting the removal of the State's CAIR NO <E T="52">X</E> Trading Program and NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program regulations from the New Jersey SIP. NJDEP submitted a supplement to the revision on May 31, 2024, that commits NJDEP to develop a Memorandum of Agreement with the EPA that indicates how the State of New Jersey will maintain compliance with the State's NO <E T="52">X</E> SIP Call obligations for the types of large non-electricity generating units (non-EGUs) that were previously regulated under the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> This rule is effective on October 3, 2024. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> The EPA has established a docket for this action under Docket ID Number EPA-R02-OAR-2024-0110, at <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> All documents in the docket are listed on the <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov</E> website. Although listed in the index, some information is not publicly available, <E T="03">e.g.,</E> Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) (formally referred to as Confidential Business Information (CBI)) or other information whose disclosure is restricted by statute. Certain other material, such as copyrighted material, is not placed on the internet and will be publicly available only in hard copy form. Publicly available docket materials are available electronically through <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov.</E> <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Fausto Taveras, Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, Air Programs Branch, 290 Broadway, New York, New York 10007-1866, at (212) 637-3378, or by email at <E T="03">Taveras.Fausto@epa.gov.</E> </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> Throughout this document, whenever “we,” “us,” or “our” is used, we mean EPA. The <E T="02">Supplementary Information</E> section is arranged as follows: <EXTRACT> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">I. Background</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">II. What comments were received in responses to the EPA's proposed action?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">III. What action is the EPA taking?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">IV. Incorporation by Reference</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">V. Environmental Justice Considerations</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">VI. Statutory and Executive Order Reviews </FP> </EXTRACT> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. Background</HD> On July 18, 2024, the EPA proposed to approve the removal of the New Jersey Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) nitrogen oxides (NO <E T="52">X</E> ) Trading Program regulations from the New Jersey State Implementation Plan (SIP) and proposed to conditionally approve the removal of the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program regulations from the New Jersey SIP. <E T="03">See</E> 89 FR 58306. In that proposed action, the EPA proposed approval of the removal of the New Jersey CAIR NO <E T="52">X</E> Trading Program (N.J.A.C. 7:27—Subchapter 30) from the New Jersey SIP. The State rule established allowance allocations for use under the Federal CAIR trading programs. Since the EPA no longer administers the Federal CAIR trading programs, the removal of Subchapter 30 from the SIP will have no consequences for any sources' operations or emissions or for the attainment or maintenance of the NAAQS in any area, now or in the future. In the July 2024 proposed rulemaking, the EPA also proposed to conditionally approve the removal of the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program (N.J.A.C. 7:27—Subchapter 31) from the New Jersey SIP. Although EPA no longer administers the NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Trading Program and approved the sunset provision of the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget program in a previous action ( <E T="03">see</E> 72 FR 55672), New Jersey has outstanding obligations under the NO <E T="52">X</E> SIP Call. <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> Accordingly, on March 7, 2024, and May 31, 2024, NJDEP submitted letters committing the State to submit an Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that will outline how NJDEP will comply with the NO <E T="52">X</E> SIP Call for the types of non-EGUs previously regulated by the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program by March 7, 2025. <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  New Jersey's large non-EGUs no longer participate in a NO <E T="52">X</E> Ozone season trading program, the NO <E T="52">X</E> SIP Call regulations at 40 CFR 51.121(r)(2) as well as anti-backsliding provisions at 40 CFR 51.905(f) and 40 CFR 51.1105(e) require the State to meet its ongoing obligations under the NO <E T="52">X</E> SIP call with respect of these types of non-EGUs in an alternative manner. </FTNT> In the State's March 7, 2024, commitment letter, New Jersey committed to develop a MOA between the EPA and NJDEP that outlines how NJDEP will comply with the NO <E T="52">X</E> SIP Call, specifically for the types of non-EGUs that were previously regulated by the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program (N.J.A.C. 7:27—Subchapter 31) and were not included in the subsequent CAIR FIP trading program. Subsequently, on May 31, 2024, New Jersey submitted an updated commitment letter to revise and replace the previous March 7, 2024, letter. This revision occurred due to NJDEP conducting further analysis to determine what units would have been classified as a non-EGU under the applicability criteria of the New Jersey NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program (N.J.A.C. 7:21—Subchapter 31), as in effect as of September 30, 2008. As a result of this analysis, the value of the non-EGU budget was adjusted. <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> The revised letter adjusted the non-EGU budgets for the affected units' aggregated emissions during the ozone season and revised the date by which the State will submit the MOA to the EPA. In New Jersey's May 31, 2024, letter, the State commits to submitting the MOA to the EPA by no later than March 7, 2025. New Jersey provided a date certain for purposes of CAA 110(k)(4), which authorizes the EPA to conditionally approval a plan revision based on a commitment by the State to adopt specific enforceable measures by a date certain, but no later than one year after the date of the plan approval. As indicated in New Jersey's commitment letter, the EPA would take action to incorporate by reference the finalized MOA as an enforceable SIP revision by no later than one year from the date the EPA conditionally approves the New Jersey SIP revision—Removal of CAIR and NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Programs, which was submitted on August 23, 2018. <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>  NJDEP analysis determined that the natural gas turbine unit located at cogeneration facility, EF Kenilworth, was subject to the NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program as a small EGU ( <E T="03">i.e.,</E> an EGU serving an electricity generator with nameplate capacity of at least 15 MW but not greater than 25 MW). </FTNT> The specific details of New Jersey's SIP Submittals, subsequent commitment letter which outlines the content of the forthcoming MOA, and the rationale for the EPA's final action are explained in the EPA's proposed rulemaking and are not restated in this final action. For this detailed information, the reader is referred to the EPA's July 18, 2024, proposed rulemaking (89 FR 58306). <HD SOURCE="HD1">II. What comments were received in response to the EPA's proposed action?</HD> In response to EPA's July 10, 2024, proposed rulemaking on New Jersey's SIP revisions, the EPA received one supportive comment during the 30-day public comment period. The specific comment may be viewed under Docket ID number EPA-R02-OAR-2024-0110 on the <E T="03">http://www.regulations.gov</E> website. <E T="03">Comment:</E> A private citizen commenter supports the EPA's proposed rule to approve the removal of New Jersey's CAIR program, as well as the conditional approval of the removal of the NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program since, “. . . the proposed rule aligns itself with the Clean Air Act and acts in accordance with the spirit of progress. The removal of these programs will not adversely affect air quality or compliance.” <E T="03">Response:</E> The EPA acknowledges the commenter's support of the EPA's proposed rule. This concludes our response to the comments received. No changes have been made to the final rule. <HD SOURCE="HD1">III. What action is the EPA taking?</HD> On August 23, 2018, NJDEP submitted a SIP revision requesting that the EPA update the New Jersey SIP to reflect the removal of New Jersey's CAIR NO <E T="52">X</E> Trading Program establishing the State's allowance allocations under the Federal CAIR trading programs (Subchapter 30) and New Jersey's NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program (Subchapter 31) from the SIP. The State rule provision sunsetting the State's NO <E T="52">X</E> Budget Program was already approved into the SIP by EPA in 2007, and the State's CAIR allowance allocation rules have had no effect since EPA discontinued administration of the Federal CAIR trading programs ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 29k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━