FARMINGTON – A regional air quality meeting for the Four Corners offered this takeaway: The entire region remains below stricter ozone health quality standards enacted one year ago.
On Thursday, the Four Corners Air Quality Group, an organization of local, state, federal and tribal agencies created almost a decade ago, held its annual meeting at San Juan College in Farmington.
Lisa Devore, an air quality planner engineer with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said monitoring data throughout the Four Corners showed levels do not exceed 70 parts per billion, a tighter standard the Environmental Protection Agency set in 2015.
As a result, the area will be listed under compliance – as opposed to a noncompliance designation, which would bring a list of rules and regulations to bring down ozone levels.
The only monitoring station with ozone levels nearing the 70 ppb standard was the Ignacio location, which Devore said was just 3 to 4 ppb under the standard. She said there’s a threat the station could exceed 70 ppb in years of wildfires or other circumstances that would affect the area’s air quality.
“But on the whole, we’ve seen a decrease in ozone concentrations,” Devore said. “And that’s good news.”
Decreases in ozone, as well as other chemical compounds, such as sulfur dioxide, can be attributed to a number of factors, Devore said, including advanced pollution controls, stricter regulations and the shift from coal power plants to natural gas.
Maureen Gannon, a representative of Public Service Co. of New Mexico (PNM), which operates the San Juan Generating Station coal plant west of Farmington, said monitoring from 2005 to 2015 shows a “very good story to tell.”
For the reasons listed above, as well as the addition of renewable energy sources, the company has seen a 44 percent reduction in nitrogen dioxide, a 71 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide, a 72 percent reduction in particulate matter and a 99 percent reduction in mercury emissions.
And with the shutting down of two of the plant’s four units in 2017, Gannon said PNM expects total carbon-dioxide emission to be cut by 23 percent.
Patrick Cummins, a senior policy adviser for the Center for New Energy Economy, said that if the energy industry continued “business as usual,” the Western states would meet the standards of the proposed Clean Power Plan, which calls for a 32 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 2030.
The plan is in litigation from a challenge by 27 states as well as numerous companies that claim the EPA over-stepped its authority to enforce the Clean Air Act.
Cummins said even if President-elect Donald Trump and his administration make good on promises to relax environmental regulations and repeal the Clean Power Plan, industry trends (the shift from coal to cheaper, cleaner natural gas) and the need to address climate change will continue.
“We are going to continue making progress regardless,” Cummins said. “But for long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that we need to achieve to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need a regulatory tool to use to continually make progress.”
Cummins also cited a report that shows in 2015 the electric generation capacity additions for renewable energies, namely wind and solar, for the first time exceeded all other forms of energy production.
Air-quality researchers on Thursday did not discuss the Four Corners methane hot spot, choosing to wait until further reports are released by NASA.
jromeo@durangoherald.com