After industry complaints, Trump’s EPA will review a chemical safety rule that aimed to protect millions
The rule would have imposed requirements on petrochemical and fertilizer facilities across the country.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will take a fresh look at a chemical disaster safety rule after petrochemical, fertilizer and mining groups pushed the Trump administration to get rid of it.
The decision was noted in a court filing in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the 2024 Clean Air Act rule, which bolstered reporting and oversight of facilities while requiring some petrochemical and chemical plants to install new safeguards to protect them during flooding, major storms or other climate disasters.
The EPA’s decision to review the rule and publish a new one came after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Chemistry Council, American Petroleum Institute and others sent a letter to the EPA in January asking that it toss the bolstered requirements.
The groups, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, said “a nebulous duty to assess and prevent against risks from external events ignores the boundaries that Congress set” and would force industry to install costly upgrades that are unnecessary.
The EPA also didn’t respond to a request for comment but said in the filing that it will review the rule and expects to publish a new final rule by 2026.
A rule that affects half the country
Adam Kron, an attorney at the environmental law firm Earthjustice who has defended the rule in court, told Landmark that the rule was a good step toward ensuring that chemical facilities across the country are better prepared for the types of storms made more likely by climate change.
He said the list of natural disasters that prompt chemical spills has only grown larger in the past decade, noting the September landfall of Hurricane Helene caused flooding as far north as Virginia. An Army ammunitions facility was among those that flooded, resulting in the release of chemicals into a nearby river.
Kron said the rule would have affected plants during normal operation, too. The Pemex Deer Park refinery outside of Houston, where a hydrogen sulfide leak allegedly went undetected by facility alarms and resulted in the death of two contractors last year, would also be the type of facility to be impacted, he said.
All told, Earthjustice says that 177 million people live near regulated facilities and that a fatal or life-threatening accident occurs at a facility every 2.5 days on average.
The so-called Risk Management Program implements requirements over time and covers approximately 12,000 facilities, according to the EPA.
“This was a recognition of the need to provide information to the public about these facilities and to establish better systems and requirements ensuring these sorts of disasters don’t happen,” Kron said.
The second round
The drama comes on the heels of a back-and-forth that started in 2017 when the Obama administration finalized a similar rule, which the first Trump administration then attempted to delay.
The last update to the the Risk Management Program before 2017 was in 1996, when it was first introduced.
Environmental groups, including Earthjustice, sued over the Trump administration’s delay and won in August 2018. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said in that opinion that the EPA’s delay was unreasonable and illegal.