Air Plan Approval; West Virginia; Regional Haze State Implementation Plan for the Second Implementation Period

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY <CFR>40 CFR Part 52</CFR> <DEPDOC>[EPA-R03-OAR-2025-0174; FRL-12731-01-R3]</DEPDOC> <SUBJECT>Air Plan Approval; West Virginia; Regional Haze State Implementation Plan for the Second Implementation Period</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Proposed rule and withdrawal of proposed rule. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to approve the regional haze State implementation plan (SIP) revision submitted by West Virginia (West Virginia, WV, or the State) on August 12, 2022, to address applicable requirements under the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the EPA's Regional Haze Rule (RHR) for the regional haze program's second implementation period. The EPA is proposing this action pursuant to the CAA. The EPA is also withdrawing its previous proposed rule to disapprove West Virginia's regional haze SIP revision as published in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> on January 21, 2025. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> <E T="03">Comments:</E> Written comments must be received on or before May 19, 2025. As of April 18, 2025, the proposed rule published on January 21, 2025, at 90 FR 6932, is withdrawn. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> Submit your comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA-R03-OAR-2025-0174, at <E T="03">www.regulations.gov.</E> For comments submitted at <E T="03">Regulations.gov,</E> follow the online instructions for submitting comments. Once submitted, comments cannot be edited or removed from <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> . For either manner of submission, 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, please contact the person identified in the <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> section. Commenters who would like the EPA to consider any comments relevant to this proposed rulemaking that they provided on the January 21, 2025 rulemaking proposing to disapprove West Virginia's regional haze SIP submission must resubmit those comments to the EPA during this proposal's comment period. For the full EPA public comment policy, information about CBI or multimedia submissions, and general guidance on making effective comments, please visit <E T="03">www.epa.gov/dockets/commenting-epa-dockets.</E> <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Michael Gordon, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 3, 1600 John F. Kennedy Boulevard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103-2852, at (215) 814-2039, or by email at <E T="03">gordon.mike@epa.gov.</E> </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <EXTRACT> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">I. What action is the EPA proposing?</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">II. Background and Requirements for Regional Haze Plans</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">III. Requirements for Regional Haze Plans for the Second Implementation Period</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">IV. Withdrawal of Prior Proposed Disapproval</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">V. The EPA's Rationale for Proposing Approval</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">VI. The EPA's Evaluation of West Virginia's Regional Haze Submission for the Second Planning Period</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">VII. Proposed Action</FP> <FP SOURCE="FP-2">VIII. Statutory and Executive Order Reviews</FP> </EXTRACT> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. What action is the EPA proposing?</HD> The EPA is proposing to approve West Virginia's regional haze SIP revision for the second implementation period, also referred to as the second planning period. As required by section 169A of the CAA, the RHR calls for State and Federal agencies to work together to improve visibility in 156 national parks and wilderness areas, known as mandatory Class I Federal areas. <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> The rule requires the States, in coordination with the EPA, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and other interested parties, to develop and implement air quality protection plans to reduce the pollution that causes visibility impairment in mandatory Class I Federal areas. Based on our change in policy discussed in section V of this document, the EPA proposes that West Virginia's regional haze SIP meets the statutory and regulatory requirements for the regional haze second planning period. <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>   <E T="03">See</E> 40 CFR part 81, subpart D. </FTNT> <HD SOURCE="HD1">II. Background and Requirements for Regional Haze Plans</HD> A detailed history and background of the regional haze program is provided in multiple prior EPA proposal actions. <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> For additional background on the 2017 RHR revisions, please refer to section III of this document. Overview of Visibility Protection Statutory Authority, Regulation, and Implementation of “Protection of Visibility: Amendments to Requirements for State Plans” of the 2017 RHR. <SU>3</SU> <FTREF/> The following is an abbreviated history and background of the regional haze program and 2017 Regional Haze Rule as it applies to the current action. <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>   <E T="03">See, e.g.,</E> 90 FR 13516 (March 24, 2025). </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>3</SU>   <E T="03">See</E> 82 FR 3078 (January 10, 2017), located at <E T="03">www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/10/2017-00268/protection-of-visibility-amendments-to-requirements-for-State-plans#h-16.</E> </FTNT> <HD SOURCE="HD2">A. Regional Haze</HD> In the 1977 CAA Amendments, Congress created a program for protecting visibility in the nation's mandatory Class I Federal areas, which include certain national parks and wilderness areas. <SU>4</SU> <FTREF/> CAA section 169A. The CAA establishes as a national goal the “prevention of any future, and the remedying of any existing, impairment of visibility in mandatory class I Federal areas which impairment results from manmade air pollution.” CAA section 169A(a)(1). <FTNT> <SU>4</SU>  Areas statutorily designated as mandatory Class I Federal Areas consist of national parks exceeding 6,000 acres, wilderness areas and national memorial parks exceeding 5,000 acres, and all international parks that were in existence on August 7, 1977. CAA 162(a). There are 156 mandatory Class I Areas. The list of areas to which the requirements of the visibility protection program apply is in 40 CFR part 81, subpart D. </FTNT> In CAA section 169A(a)(1), Congress established the national goal of preventing any future and remedying any existing impairment of visibility in mandatory Class I Federal areas that results from manmade (anthropogenic) air pollution. The core component of a regional haze SIP submission for the second planning period is a strategy that addresses regional haze in each Class I area within the state's borders and each Class I area outside the state that may be affected by emissions originating from within the state, CAA section 169A(b)(2)(B), 40 CFR 51.308(f)(2), and makes “reasonable progress” toward the national goal based on consideration of the four statutory factors in CAA section 169A(g)(1)—the costs of compliance, the time necessary for compliance, the energy and non-air quality environmental impacts of compliance, and the remaining useful life of any potentially affected sources. <SU>5</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>5</SU>  CAA section 169A(g)(1); 40 CFR 51.308(f)(2)(i). </FTNT> Regional Haze is visibility impairment that is produced by a multitude of anthropogenic sources and activities which are located across a broad geographic area and that emit pollutants that impair visibility. Visibility impairing pollutants include fine and coarse PM ( <E T="03">e.g.,</E> sulfates, nitrates, organic carbon, elemental carbon, and soil dust) and their precursors ( <E T="03">e.g.,</E> SO <E T="52">2</E> , NO <E T="52">X</E> , and, in some cases, VOC and NH <E T="52">3</E> ). Fine particle precursors react in the atmosphere to form fine PM (PM <E T="52">2.5</E> ), which impairs visibility by scattering and absorbing light. Visibility impairment reduces the perception of clarity and color, as well as visible distance. <SU>6</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>6</SU>  There are several ways to measure the amount of visibility impairment, <E T="03">i.e.,</E> haze. One such measurement is the deciview, which is the principal metric used by the RHR. Under many circumstances, a change in one deciview will be perceived by the human eye to be the same on both clear and hazy days. The deciview is unitless. It is proportional to the logarithm of the atmospheric extinction of light, which is the perceived dimming of light due to its being scattered and absorbed as it passes through the atmosphere. Atmospheric light extinction (bext.) is a metric used for expressing visibility and is measured in inverse megameters (Mm-1). </FTNT> To address Regional Haze visibility impairment, the 1999 RHR established an iterative planning process that requires both states in which Class I Areas are located and states “the emissions from which may reasonably be anticipated to cause or contribute to any impairment of visibility” in a Class I Area to periodically submit SIP revisions to address such impairment. CAA section 169A(b)(2);  <SU>7</SU> <FTREF/> see also 40 CFR 51.308(b), (f) (establishing submission ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 97k characters. 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