Image-conscious Houston has finally achieved world-class status as the millennium draws to a close. As of October 7, when ozone levels in Deer Park left citizens gasping for breath, Houston became a world-class Shit City, the most polluted in the United States.
Trying to put the best possible spin on a grim situation, Governor George W. Bush and his mouthpieces on the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission have announced "historic" and "aggressive" measures to reverse the trend that has catapulted Houston past smog-bound Los Angeles as the nation's dirtiest. These measures, still being considered, include reducing industrial emissions by 90 percent, mandatory restrictions on personal vehicle use and other, lesser sacrifices (such as a ban on lawn mowing in the early morning).
Keith Henderson has an idea that can help Houston get a handle on its air pollution problem. The chemical engineer from Louisiana has developed a way to calculate emissions from petrochemical storage tanks that appears to be far more accurate than the method used by the state of Texas and most everyone else. With more than 13,000 tanks in the region pumping out tons of emissions by the day, an accurate estimate would seem necessary, especially as Houston desperately scrambles to meet federal clean-air mandates.
Henderson has been pitching his method, which he calls EquiVap, to state and federal environmental authorities and industry officials. The collective response has not been positive. Not because the science is deficient: Henderson has published and presented his research numerous times, most recently at a November gathering of private- and public-sector chemical engineers, with nary a challenge. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy's Strategic Petroleum Reserve has adopted his method to calculate the emissions from its 575 million barrels of crude.
Rather, the problem with EquiVap is that it tends to show that storage tank emissions are much higher than are predicted by the existing method, known as Reid Vapor Pressure. According to various researchers, Reid can understate actual emissions by as much as 1,000 percent; Reid misjudged Strategic Petroleum Reserve emissions by 300 percent, which equates to thousands of tons of toxic gas. "Storage tanks are undoubtedly the largest source of undetected emissions that industry is putting out," Henderson says.
All of which spells big trouble for EquiVap's chances for widespread approval. If Henderson's method were employed in Houston, for example, then the estimated volume of emissions on which the "historic" and "aggressive" cleanup plan is based would have to be adjusted upward. Reductions even more far-fetched than those on the table would have to be found to satisfy the EPA. "It has huge implications, because it means the numbers they're using [in the plan] are completely bogus," says Neil Carman, Clean Air Program director for the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club.
Against that backdrop, EquiVap seems more like a giant headache to those with vested interests than a tool to help ensure the public health.
The state of Texas, always cozy with Big Oil, won't be demanding accurate data anytime soon. Reid Vapor Pressure is actually written into TNRCC regulations as the required method for estimating storage tank emissions. Still, says Kathy Pendleton, program director of TNRCC's Emissions Inventory Section, if the EPA or industry asked the state to use EquiVap, it would certainly be considered. Until that happens, Pendleton says, "We haven't seen the need to spend our resources [employing EquiVap]."
The EPA has looked at Henderson's method and concluded that further testing would be a good idea. "We don't have any problems with it necessarily," says David Misenheimer, group leader of the agency's Emission Factor and Inventory Group. "Basically we needed more information."
Even if his method were further validated by more testing, which Henderson would himself have to fund to the tune of at least $25,000, it might flounder around in the bureaucracy for years before formal adoption. Using EquiVap might then become an option -- along with Reid. "It's something that each industry or state would make a decision on," Misenheimer says.
The odds of companies embracing a technology that would show higher emissions (which they would then have to curtail) are zero. Karen Madro, a Shell environmental official in Houston, says the company has other pollution priorities at the moment. "Our feeling was that fugitive emissions was something that we would deal with down the road," Madro says.
A more telling comment came from Exxon-Mobil executive Jeffrey Siegell, who sits on a federal panel that addresses environmental management issues in the petrochemical industry. He'd be willing to consider new methods, Siegell wrote in an e-mail to Neil Carman (who also sits on the panel) -- as long as the results showed no increase in the numbers. "Any improvements in the prediction of [storage tank emissions] would still need to result in the same actual emissions," Siegell wrote.
Siegell was at the meeting in November when Henderson presented EquiVap and had ample opportunity to challenge the method. "He just sat there, silent," recalls Carman.
Clearly, industry and its minions would rather cling to Reid, which was developed in 1926. Petroleum refining and storage technology has changed dramatically since then, but Reid hasn't. "Can you imagine NASA using 1926 methods to put up the space shuttle?" Carman asks.
Henderson isn't holding out much hope of an attitude adjustment from the EPA, which has the ability to force EquiVap's acceptance, and plans to pursue the matter in court. "They won't change until something like a two-by-four comes their way," he says.
So EquiVap will not be part of Houston's smog-reduction plan, a fact that only amplifies what most folk in the know are saying privately: The plan is a joke. Among other flaws, it doesn't specifically take into account the tons of ozone-forming chemicals that will spew into the air every year if the proposed Bayport complex is built. Nor does it include unreported or underreported emissions, such as the October release alleged at the Chevron plant in Baytown that TNRCC believes helped push the city past Los Angeles as the nation's smog capital. "That's just the tip of the iceberg," says Carman.
But the TNRCC will submit the plan, based almost entirely on computer models, and the EPA will probably accept it.
Carman points out that earlier state-generated models have already proven wrong in field tests. Estimates of emissions from vehicles and "biogenic" sources (trees, for example) have been too high; those for industry have been too low. The state has corrected some of those numbers, but the calculations remain very fuzzy and theoretical. "There's real problems with the accuracy," Carman says. "Nobody really knows how big the numbers are."
As difficult as it has been to juggle the numbers, that's the easy part of the clean-air equation. The plan, which assumes that specific reductions will actually happen, is rife with flying pigs. The likelihood that industry will voluntarily hack its emissions by 90 percent, for example, is slim. Bush is too dependent on campaign contributions from industry (he has already raised millions from Texas polluters) to start pissing them off with pricey demands.
The state will have little more success with the citizens, who have shown a particular resistance over the years to carpooling, bus riding or otherwise changing their smog-producing behavior. Good luck trying to revive the strict auto emissions testing program that the Legislature aborted in 1995 after voters complained it was too expensive and inconvenient (and which eventually cost taxpayers $140 million to settle a resulting lawsuit). And no doubt, there'll be a huge stink when the police start arresting scofflaws who mow their lawns between six and ten in the morning.
The TNRCC says we'll have no choice, that everyone will have to roll up their sleeves and pitch in. Coming from an agency that has shown a chronic aversion to the word "enforcement," such tough talk rings hollow. In fact, what the state, industry and most everyone else may really be hoping for is something other than a hard-nosed, unified effort to improve air quality. In the past, says Carman, the TNRCC has declined to aggressively attack the problem in favor of lobbying to delay or weaken standards. And he sees no evidence of change, which may solidify Houston's position as Shit City well into the next century. "That's their strategy," he says. "They're gonna get Bush in the White House, and they're gonna try and gut the Clean Air Act."