Two years ago, Madeline Darnell cheered on EPA’s plans to require coke manufacturers to track emissions of a cancer-causing air pollutant around their plants. The Pittsburgh retiree had a different reaction to the agency’s recent use of a secretive stratagem to allow the industry up to two more years to comply.
“I was surprised,” she said in an interview.
But if Darnell and the general public were frozen out of the backdoor maneuvering, the handful of companies that make the distilled coal product were fully plugged in as EPA embraced their aid in crafting the case for delay, internal documents show.
The correspondence — only months into President Donald Trump’s second term — offers a revealing glimpse of how the administration’s tilt toward polluting industries plays out in practice.
“I apologize that it has taken so long,” an EPA staffer emailed a SunCoke Energy vice president in late June as the agency rushed to postpone looming regulatory updates put in place last year. “I know that you all had some overarching rationale for extending the deadlines, but if there are any specific examples you could point to, that would be very helpful.”
Meeting minutes also filed in the online docket show that participation was limited to EPA employees and industry representatives. In an earlier exchange, a trade group head asked the EPA staffer, a career employee named Jonathan Witt, to set up a time “to review draft text for the Interim Final Rule.”
Witt replied that the agency could not share the document before publication.
“However, we do welcome suggestions,” he added, “and we would be more than happy to set up another call to discuss further.”
Last month, EPA issued the final version of that rule, giving coke plants until mid-2027 to begin monitoring for carcinogenic benzene and pausing other scheduled pollution control measures. By resorting to an interim rule, which is generally supposed to be used only in emergencies, EPA didn’t have to provide the public with advance notice of its plans or the opportunity to comment.
That approach has since spurred a lawsuit from environmental groups. Still, it could be months before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit renders a decision. Only this week, a three-judge panel gave the agency until mid-September to address the challengers’ initial bid to stay or overturn the rule.
EPA said the added time was needed to provide “a fair chance to respond.” The Pennsylvania-based Clean Air Council and other plaintiffs unsuccessfully objected that the effect would be to burden nearby communities with continued “excess toxic air pollution.”
Neither Witt nor David Ailor, president of the trade group known as the American Coke and Coal Chemicals Institute, could be reached for comment Wednesday. EPA officials have defended their use of an interim final rule on the grounds that swift action was needed to grant the industry relief from “infeasible” compliance deadlines.
In response to emailed questions, EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said Thursday that “discussions over technical details and information with industry is a commonly accepted practice for regulators.” Not doing so, Hirsch added, leads to “bad outcomes for the American people and ultimately requires additional resources to fix those uninformed regulations in the future.”
Cancer risks and exposure concerns
Coke is refined from raw coal baked in ovens at temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees to remove impurities and create a more potent fuel.
The metallurgical variety is essential to powering the blast furnaces used by the dwindling number of traditional “integrated” steel mills that start with iron ore and end with a finished product.
By EPA’s count, there are just 11 active coke-making plants left in the U.S., the bulk of them in the Midwest. Five belong to Illinois-based SunCoke. The remainder are mostly split between U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, the only steelmakers that still runs integrated operations.
The industry burst into the news last week after an explosion at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh killed two people and sent others to the hospital. The disaster was the latest in a string of mishaps at the aging plant. The company, now part of Nippon Steel, has said that the blast occurred during the flushing of a gas valve.
But to critics, the coke industry’s overall environmental and public health impact is a longer-run calamity.
People living near coke plants tend to be disproportionately people of color and have low incomes, demographic data shows. They also face 26 percent higher cancer risks than the national average, according to a report issued last fall by Industrious Labs, which seeks to decarbonize heavy industry.
“These facilities release hundreds of different types of toxics that could be contributing to those numbers,” Hilary Lewis, the organization’s steel director, said in an interview. Besides benzene, pollutants may include cyanide compounds, hydrochloric acid and ammonia.
Clairton, often deemed North America’s largest coke producer, reported more than 430 tons of emissions in 2023, according to the most recent final numbers available from EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.
While that total was down significantly from 2014, air pollution from other plants has risen, the data shows. At a SunCoke plant in Middletown, Ohio, for example, annual releases reported to the TRI grew from about 16 tons to 24 tons during the same period, the data show.
A beleaguered rulemaking process
Like dozens of other industries, coke manufacturers are covered by hazardous air pollutant rules that EPA is supposed to periodically revisit to see whether improved technology makes further emission cuts possible.
Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the agency moves slowly in carrying out that task. By the time President Joe Biden’s administration in 2023 rolled out a set of proposed updates to coke industry rules, the existing version was almost two decades old.
The proposal included the benzene monitoring requirement, coupled with a series of steps predicted to cut overall hazardous pollutant releases by about 4 tons.
Among those applauding the draft was Darnell, a former teacher who describes herself as “a run-of the-mill citizen.” In written comments she told EPA that she was “enraged” by the Clairton works’ pollution. “Why should a highly profitable business be allowed to continue to harm the lives of so many people,” she asked in the September 2023 submission.
For advocates, keeping tabs on airborne benzene levels is key to informing nearby residents of their potential exposure to a compound linked to leukemia and other serious blood disorders.
But an industry coalition fronted by Ailor and known as the Coke Oven Environmental Task Force accused EPA of attempting to unlawfully foist monitoring on some coke operations. The task force also raised technical caveats to other provisions.
The coalition got backup from several Republican members of Congress, including Vice President JD Vance, who was then an Ohio Republican senator. In similarly worded letters, they highlighted coke’s importance to steelmaking and the fact that a number of other production plants had closed in recent years.
The final version of the update released last year was notably weaker than the draft. Only six of the 11 plants were now covered by the benzene monitoring requirement while EPA no longer expected other new standards to yield any “guaranteed” emission reductions.
The industry pushback nonetheless continued. SunCoke, U.S. Steel, and the coke institute all filed administrative reconsideration petitions. In March, EPA agreed to relook key provisions of last year’s update, including some features of the benzene monitoring requirements.
In a small concession to critics, the agency has since agreed to hold an after-the-fact public hearing next month on the interim rule and also allow more time for written comments.
Asked whether she thought any resulting feedback would make a difference in the administration’s stance, Lewis replied: “I hope that they will listen to the people because that is who they are accountable to.”
Reach this reporter on Signal at SeanReilly.70.
