The Marathon refinery in Detroit is shown Monday, January 4, 2016.
Michigan, USA (AP) — Michigan environmental regulators are poised to allow the Marathon refinery in south-west Detroit to increase emissions of at least eight air pollutants.
The state Department of Environmental Quality said it proposes to approve revised permits for refinery modernisation and expansion that would increase emissions of oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, small particulate pollution and sulfuric acid mist.
This, on the heels of the Paris climate talks in December where 195 countries, including the US, agreed to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emission with a view to keeping global temperature rise this century well below two degrees Celsius and driving efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The proposal would increase emissions of sulfur dioxide in an area that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has designated as being out of compliance with federal air pollution standards, the Detroit Free Press reported, but the agency’s analysis of Marathon’s permit requests notes that the emissions increases all fall within allowable state and federal regulations. The permit requests involve installation of equipment by Marathon to produce lower sulfur gasoline that will meet new EPA standards.
“The project will enable the facility to produce fuels that comply with the EPA regulation by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions from gasoline,” Marathon spokesman Jamal Kheiry said in an e-mail to the Free Press.
Kheiry added that the refinery’s emission levels “will continue to be well below those allowed under its existing permit”. Changes at the facility triggered the DEQ’s permit process.
Four Detroit-area state senators — Coleman Young II, Morris Hood III, Bert Johnson and Vincent Gregory — want the DEQ to reject the permits.
“When we allow our refineries and coal-fired power plants to belch toxic fumes into our neighbourhoods, we set ourselves up for a legacy of poor health and skyrocketing medical bills,” said the lawmakers, all Democrats.
Ray Holland, 60, who has lived in a nearby neighbourhood his whole life, doesn’t like the idea of the proposed changes.
“I think they should leave it like it is — or put more pollution controls on it,” he said of the refinery.
The DEQ plans an information session and public hearing tonight at the River Rouge High School auditorium in nearby River Rouge. The agency plans to consider public comments prior to taking final actions on Marathon’s permit applications.