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The Environmental Protection Agency is turning up the pressure on Utah to reduce ozone pollution along the northern half of the Wasatch Front.
On Tuesday, the agency rejected state regulators’ efforts to attribute Salt Lake City’s elevated ozone levels to Asia and natural emissions and proposed increasing the region’s nonattainment status from “marginal” to “moderate” for federal air quality standards.
Utah has made progress reducing wintertime particulate pollution, but solutions to high ozone have proven elusive.
The proposed reclassification, if finalized, would obligate the state to adopt additional measures to reduce emissions to protect human health and submit new plans for getting the impacted airshed into attainment with federal standards.
The FDA based the decision on monitoring data gathered in Salt Lake, Davis and Weber counties from 2018 through 2020.
The northern Wasatch Front is one of 24 areas across the country that the EPA determined have failed to meet deadlines for reducing ozone to within federal standards, according to a recent posting on the Federal Register.
Federal regulators are accepting public comment on the proposed reclassifications through June 13.
Ozone, a highly reactive three-atom oxygen molecule that damages lung tissues, is formed in the atmosphere when various pollutants undergo chemical transformation in the presence of sunlight. The federal standard is currently set at 70 parts per billion, a level that is sometimes exceeded in the urban Wasatch Front and rural Uinta Basin.
The basin’s ozone problem is largely a result of emissions from oil and gas operations, with episodes of high ozone occurring in the winter. In 2018, the basin was classified as “marginal” for ozone nonattainment, establishing a 3-year deadline for the state to get the airshed into compliance. On Tuesday, the EPA granted the state’s request to push back the Uinta Basin’s deadline by a year to Aug. 3.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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