EPA denies the Sierra Club petition to reconsider the Gasification Rule. The Sierra Club and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network filed a petition with the EPA on April 11, 2008 asking the EPA to reconsider the “Gasification Rule”. The Gasification Rule was adopted by the EPA in December 2007 and allows refineries to process oil bearing hazardous material such as sludge and petroleum coke to produce synthetic gas using a gasification process.

With this rule the EPA allows refineries to gasifiy petroleum coke and sludge as a routine refining process. The gasification process is added to the already approved processes distillation, catalytic cracking and fractionation as recognized refinery processes for converting oil waste products. The process allows refiners to convert waste products to valuable products such as fuel. The process does not contribute to the creation of additional hazardous pollutants. Actually, syngas is easier i.e. cheaper to clean and there may be applications where the refiners will clean the syngas and, in this case, the volume of hazardous material may be reduced.

This rule is a logical and intelligent decision by the EPA. However, the Sierra Club and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network did not agree and petitioned the EPA to reconsider the Gasification Rule.

The EPA disagreed with the assertions made in the petition and found that the Sierra Club and Louisiana Environmental Action Network did not submit any new information to the EPA. Since the petitioners did not submit any new information, the EPA did not find that there was a valid reason to go back and reconsider the matter.

For these reasons, the EPA denied the petition to reconsider the Gasification Rule.