EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Friday announced the end of Democrats’ war against “beautiful, clean coal,” finalizing the repeal of costly regulations implemented by the Biden administration.
At Mills Creek Power Plan in Kentucky, EPA Administrator Zeldin and EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi announced the finalization of the agency’s deregulatory action to ensure affordable and dependable energy for American families.
The deregulatory action will repeal the Biden administration’s 2024 amendments to the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, namely coal- and oil-fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units (EGUs), a rule commonly known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for power plants.
The EPA will still enforce effective and robust MATS requirements without compromising access to dependable and affordable energy. The final rule is expected to save $670 million.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s anti-coal regulations sought to regulate out of existence this vital sector of our energy economy. If implemented, these actions would have destroyed reliable American energy,” Zeldin said in a written statement.
“The Trump EPA knows that we can grow the economy, enhance baseload power, and protect human health and the environment all at the same time. It is not a binary choice and never should have been,” he added.
The repeal of the Biden-era 2024 MATS requirements will:
- Relieve power facilities of revised filterable particulate matter (fPM) emission standard for coal-fired power plants
- Rescind the updated mercury standard for lignite-fired power plants
- Repeal the requirement for all power plants to use PM Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems (CEMS), which was believed to result in higher net costs
President Donald Trump has long been a champion of “beautiful, clean coal.”
Since the 2012 MATS rule was enacted, acid gas hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions have been reduced by over 96 percent, and emissions of non-mercury metals, including nickel, arsenic, and lead, have been reduced by more than 81 percent.
The repeal of the 2024 Biden-era MATS regulations is in furtherance of the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda.
EPA first established the MATS rule in 2012 to limit HAP emissions, including mercury, acid gases such as hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, non-mercury metals such as nickel, lead, and chromium, and organic pollutants such as formaldehyde and dioxins/furans from coal- and oil-fired power plants.
In 2020, the EPA completed an eight-year review of the 2012 MATS standards to find if it was necessary to update the standards; the EPA found at the time that the 2012 MATS requirements were more than enough to protect Americans’ health. Despite this finding, the Biden administration established heightened standards and continuous monitoring systems that led to more net costs as opposed to net benefits for the American people. Last March, Zeldin announced a series of sweeping actions to advance Trump’s energy dominance agenda, including reconsidering the MATS requirements.
Environmental experts believe that repealing the 2024 power plant rule is the right move.
Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), wrote:
Fast forward to 2024, and the Biden administration doubled down by significantly tightening the mercury requirements for coal-fired facilities. And there is not even $4 to $6 million in hypothetical monetized benefits from reducing mercury emissions, as there was in the 2012 rule. For this 2024 rule, the agency declined to quantify any mercury benefits. In other words, the agency tightened a rule that, if anything, should have been repealed.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment director, said last June about the EPA’s proposal to repeal the MATS rule:
President Donald Trump’s latest move to repeal the Biden Administration’s power plant regulations marks a pivotal moment in America’s energy policy. If finalized, this proposal would not only lower electricity costs for millions of Americans but also strengthen domestic manufacturing and reduce the risk of blackouts.
The new regulation, with its companion regulation to revert to 2012 standards for mercury emissions, are a bold step toward restoring energy affordability and reliability, pillars of economic growth and national security.
The EPA said in a press release last March that the Biden-era MATS rule caused significant regulatory uncertainty across the country, including Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
“EPA needs to pursue commonsense regulation to Power the Great American Comeback, not continue down the last administration’s path of destruction and destitution,” Zeldin said last March. “At EPA, we are committed to protecting human health and the environment; we are opposed to shutting down clean, affordable, and reliable energy for American families.”
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