Kingsport Clears the Standard by Eighteen Hundredths
EPA proposed this morning to take Eastman's home county out of SO2 nonattainment, and the model the proposal rests on clears the standard by eighteen hundredths of a part per billion. Also on the file: Olin papered the credit facilities for the Huntsman combination, Stepan has already spent its full-year restructuring budget with a quarter to go, and refining became a defense industrial resource.
Tennessee's attainment model for Sullivan County returns 74.82 parts per billion.
The standard is 75.
"How much room is actually left in an air plan that passes by eighteen hundredths?"
Less than the county's own growth list already spends.
Kingsport Comes Off the List
EPA proposed this morning to redesignate the Sullivan County SO2 nonattainment area to attainment and write source-specific limits for two facilities into the state implementation plan.
Those two are Eastman Chemical and Primester, a cellulose plant good for 1.1 tons a year of SO2. Eastman is everything else: the area's primary SO2-emitting point source, making organic acids, esters, cellulose esters, specialty plastics and acetate fibers.
The area has sat in nonattainment since October 4, 2013, missed its 2018 statutory attainment date, and got here by way of a 2021 consent decree with the Sierra Club and two other plaintiffs.
What carries the proposal is modeling rather than monitoring. The four monitors read 26 to 57 ppb on 2023-2025 design values, while TDEC's AERMOD run, with every permitted source at its allowable rate, returns 74.82 against the 75 ppb line (chart below).
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