Good News In Texas

Less pollution with sensible regulation:

To get the surprising back story about how Houston's air got cleaner, it's worth a visit to Harvey Jeffries, at the University of North Carolina's school of public health in Chapel Hill. As this retired professor tells the story, air pollution regulators were on the verge of making a multibillion-dollar mistake. They were going all-in against one of the pollutants that create smog, while downplaying the role of other emissions from the petrochemical plants.
Ozone (often called smog) forms when nitrogen oxides react in sunlight with chemicals called volatile organic compounds. Regulators were focusing their efforts overwhelmingly on nitrogen oxides, cranking down on them so hard that compliance would cost $4 billion a year. Jeffries says that was a big mistake.
"If you spent the $4 billion, if you did all the cleanup, they were controlling the wrong thing and ... they wouldn't do anything to prevent the true cause of the highest ozone," Jeffries says. He made that argument to the state and local officials.
Jeffries said the most bang for the buck would come from cutting back on volatile organic compounds like ethylene, which is used to make polyethylene plastic. Chemicals like these are produced in abundance along the ship channel.
"You're talking about billions of pounds of fluids and liquids a day, being produced in Houston. And if you only lose .001 percent of that, it's a massive amount of material, and that was being ignored, totally, completely," he says.
Jeffries pointed to a massive scientific study the state of Texas had funded in the year 2000. Results from that showed that volatile chemicals were a big culprit. Happily for industry, they were also a cheaper problem to fix.
It turns out that routine day-to-day emissions were not the biggest problem. On occasion, plants put out large bursts of chemicals. That could be when they were starting up or shutting down, or simply trying to avoid a disaster when a process went awry. Ethylene gas is commonly vented to the air.

The companies ended up cleaning up leaks and reporting requirements forced them to change to keep from getting bad publicity.  I'm generally not a fan of Texas, but when something goes right, I'll say something positive.