Proposed National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants; and, in the Alternative, Proposed Standards of Performance for New and Existing Stationary Sources, Electric Utility Steam Generating Units: Notice of Data Availability

EPA issued a proposed Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) under the Clean Air Act (CAA) concerning coal- and oil-fired electric utility steam generating units (power plants) on January 30, 2004,\1\ and a supplemental proposal on March 16, 2004.\2\ The proposed CAMR represents the first-ever Federal action to regulate mercury (Hg) from this source category. The proposed rule presents two primary alternative approaches to regulating Hg and nickel (Ni) from power plants. EPA received numerous comments on its proposed regulatory approaches, including comments on the modeling results EPA obtained using the Integrated Planning Model (IPM), which is a model that predicts how the power sector will respond to a particular regulatory approach, and comments addressing the speciation of Hg. EPA is currently evaluating those comments to determine how the new data and information received in the comments, as described below, may affect the benefit-cost analysis and regulatory options under consideration. Although we recognize that the public has access to the comments in the rulemaking docket, we are issuing the NODA, in part, because the Agency received over 680,000 public comments, including almost 5,000 unique comments, and the comments present new data and information that are relevant to the two primary regulatory approaches addressed in the proposed CAMR. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------