The Nickel Report

The New Source Review (NSR) program of the Clean Air Act requires major stationary sources to go through an extensive, time-consuming, and expensive review and permitting process prior to construction. Among other requirements, such sources are required to install the best available control technologies (BACT) to reduce levels of specific regulated pollutants. The NSR program also applies to existing facilities if they are modified in ways that result in significantly increased emissions.

The pace of enforcement actions has decreased in recent years, but more than a ...

The New Source Review (NSR) Program of the Clean Air Act requires large new plants (in the parlance of the act, “major” “stationary sources”) to go through an extensive, time-consuming and expensive review and permitting process prior to construction. Such sources are required through these permits, among other requirements, to install the best available control technologies (BACT) to reduce levels of specific regulated pollutants. The NSR program also applies to existing facilities if they are modified in substantial ways and if, as a result, emissions increase by significant amounts (these are known as “major modifications”).

For the first two decades of the NSR program, existing sources rarely triggered it. That is because EPA applied it in a way to be triggered only by unusual projects that would expand the capacity of the source. It is also because NSR is so time-consuming and expensive that sources generally avoided activities that would expand their capacities because they could trigger NSR.

That all changed drastically in the late 1990s.