National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY <CFR>40 CFR Part 63</CFR> <DEPDOC>[EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794; FRL-6716.4-01-OAR]</DEPDOC> <RIN>RIN 2060-AW68</RIN> <SUBJECT>National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Proposed rule. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> In this action, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to repeal specific amendments to the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) for Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units (EGUs), commonly referred to as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), that were promulgated on May 7, 2024. The amendments that the EPA is proposing to repeal include the revised filterable particulate matter (fPM) emission standard, which serves as a surrogate for non-mercury hazardous air pollutant (HAP) metals for existing coal-fired EGUs; the revised fPM emission standard compliance demonstration requirements; and the revised mercury (Hg) emission standard for lignite-fired EGUs. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> <E T="03">Comments.</E> Comments must be received on or before August 11, 2025. Comments on the information collection provisions of the proposed rule under the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) must be received by the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OMB-OIRA) on or before July 17, 2025. For specific instructions, please refer to the PRA information in the “Statutory and Executive Order Reviews” section of this preamble. <E T="03">Public hearing:</E> The EPA will hold a public hearing on July 10, 2025. Please refer to the <E T="02">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION</E> section for information on registering for the public hearing. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> You may send comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794 by any of the following methods: • <E T="03">Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov/</E> (our preferred method). Follow the online instructions for submitting comments. • <E T="03">Email: a-and-r-docket@epa.gov.</E> Include Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794 in the subject line of the message. • <E T="03">Mail:</E> U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460. • <E T="03">Hand/Courier Delivery:</E> EPA Docket Center, WJC West Building, Room 3334, 1301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004. The Docket Center's hours of operation are 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday-Friday (except Federal holidays). <E T="03">Instructions:</E> All submissions received must include the Docket ID No. for this rulemaking. Comments received may be posted without change to <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov/,</E> including any personal information provided. For detailed instructions on sending comments and additional information on the rulemaking process, see the <E T="02">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION</E> section of this document. <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> For questions about this proposed action, contact Sarah Benish, Sector Policies and Programs Division (D243-01), Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, P.O. Box 12055, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27711; telephone number: (919) 541-5620; and email address: <E T="03">benish.sarah@epa.gov.</E> Individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as individuals who have speech or communication disabilities may use a telecommunications relay service. To learn more about how to make an accessible telephone call to any of the telephone numbers shown in this document, please visit the web page for the relay service of the Federal Communications Commission at <E T="03">https://www.fcc.gov/trs,</E> and a list of relay services is available on their directory page at <E T="03">https://www.fcc.gov/general/trs-state-and-territories.</E> </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <E T="03">Participation in virtual public hearing.</E> The public hearing will be held via virtual platform on July 10, 2025. The hearing will convene at 11 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) and will conclude at 7 p.m. ET. The EPA may close a session 15 minutes after the last pre-registered speaker has testified if there are no additional speakers. The EPA will begin pre-registering speakers for the hearing no later than 1 business day following publication of this document in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> . To register to speak at the virtual hearing, please use the online registration form available at <E T="03">https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/mercury-and-air-toxics-standards</E> or contact the public hearing team at (888) 372-8699 or by email at <E T="03">SPPDpublichearing@epa.gov.</E> The last day to pre-register to speak at the hearing will be June 29, 2025. Prior to the hearing, the EPA will post a general agenda that will list pre-registered speakers at: <E T="03">https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/mercury-and-air-toxics-standards.</E> The EPA will make every effort to follow the schedule as closely as possible on the day of the hearing; however, please plan for the hearings to run either ahead of schedule or behind schedule. Each commenter will have 4 minutes to provide oral testimony. The EPA encourages commenters to submit a copy of their oral testimony as written comments electronically to the rulemaking docket. The EPA may ask clarifying questions during the oral presentations but will not respond to the presentations at that time. Written statements and supporting information submitted during the comment period will be considered with the same weight as oral testimony and supporting information presented at the public hearing. Please note that any updates made to any aspect of the hearing will be posted online at <E T="03">https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/mercury-and-air-toxics-standards.</E> While the EPA expects the hearing to go forward as set forth above, please monitor our website or contact the public hearing team at (888) 372-8699 or by email at <E T="03">SPPDpublichearing@epa.gov</E> to determine if there are any updates. The EPA does not intend to publish a document in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> announcing updates. If you require a special accommodation such as audio description, please pre-register for the hearing with the public hearing team and describe your needs by June 24, 2025. The EPA may not be able to arrange accommodations without advance notice. <E T="03">Docket.</E> The EPA has established a docket for this rulemaking under Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794. <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> All documents in the docket are listed in <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov/.</E> Although listed, some information is not publicly available, <E T="03">e.g.,</E> 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. Except for such material, publicly available docket materials are available electronically in <E T="03">Regulations.gov.</E> <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  As explained in a memorandum to the docket, the docket for this action includes the documents and information, in whatever form, in Docket ID Nos. EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0234 (National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Coal- and Oil-fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units), EPA-HQ-OAR-2002-0056 (National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Utility Air Toxics; Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR)), and Legacy Docket ID No. A-92-55 (Electric Utility Hazardous Air Pollutant Emission Study). See memorandum titled <E T="03">Incorporation by reference of Docket Number EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0234, Docket Number EPA-HQ-OAR-2002-0056, and Docket Number A-92-55 into Docket Number EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794</E> (Docket ID Item No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794-0005). </FTNT> <E T="03">Instructions.</E> Direct your comments to Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794. The EPA's policy is that all comments received will be included in the public docket without change and may be made available online at <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov/,</E> including any personal information provided, unless the comment includes information claimed to be CBI or other information whose disclosure is restricted by statute. Do not submit electronically to <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov/</E> any information that you consider to be CBI or other information whose disclosure is restricted by statute. This type of information should be submitted as discussed in the <E T="03">Submitting CBI</E> section of this document. The EPA may publish any comment received to its public docket. Multimedia submissions (audio, video, <E T="03">etc.</E> ) 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://www.epa.gov/dockets/commenting-epa-dockets.</E> The <E T="03">https://www.regulations.gov/</E> website allows you to submit your comment ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 91k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━