Clearing the air on VOC emissions

During the past three years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has launched numerous Clean Air Act (CAA) investigations and enforcement actions against companies in agriculture-related industries. During this time, EPA has issued Clean Air Act section 114 information requests, test orders, and notices of violation, while pursuing enforcement against many companies producing and/or processing ethanol, corn products, oilseed, and sugar. These enforcement actions have resulted in more than a dozen federal and state consent decrees in the corn products and ethanol industry, affecting facilities in multiple EPA regions and more than a dozen states. Implementing these decrees has been estimated by the Department of Justice to cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars'. While we reference the ag-industry experience because it has been a focus of EPA enforcement action, the issues discussed in this article are potentially applicable to any source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including metal finishing operations that use organic-based coatings. At the heart of the enforcement actions is the emission and measurement of VOCs. As part of EPA's recent enforcement initiative against agricultural sources, the agency has used various procedures to multiply measured VOC results to create a new, larger calculated emission rate. EPA's stated rationale for doing so was that its own promulgated test methods did not account for the "total mass" of VOCs being measured.