U.S. chemical industry comes out swinging against new Senate plant security bill
citizen petitions to the department to demand federal investigation of suspected security shortcomings at particular sites.
“This Lautenberg bill obviously follows the environmental agenda to a T,” said Jim Cooper, vice president for petrochemicals at the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA). “This is an environmental bill as much as it is a security measure,” he added.
Cooper argued that the Lautenberg bill even went beyond the IST provisions of the House-passed measure in that it requires chemical plant operators and the DHS to undertake much broader studies and analyses of the potential and application of wide-ranging inherently safer technology options for hundreds, perhaps thousands of facilities.
“The amount of analysis and study required for IST in the Lautenberg bill would create paralysis by analysis,” Cooper said, “and it would divert resources that otherwise could be used to actually make plant sites more secure.”
He said that NPRA would oppose the Lautenberg IST provisions, as the trade group did with the House-passed bill, “because as a matter of principle, you cannot objectively measure IST, and there is no recognized, objective way to tell which process might be better than another, so there’s no way you can regulate it.”
Cooper also was critical of the private right of action provision in the Lautenberg bill, arguing that similar PRA provisions in environmental laws have in many instances disrupted enforcement actions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“Private right of action can be very disruptive, when you look at EPA over the years, in generating court orders that accelerate enforcement and end with a less effective regulation,” he said. “I sure hope we don’t go down this path,” Cooper added, referring to the IST and private action provisions.
SOCMA president Lawrence Sloan noted that DHS secretary Janet Napolitano has recently hailed the existing CFATS program’s performance standards that “protect individual facilities against threats without compromising their unique operational characteristics or efficiency.”
“Senator Lautenberg’s bill runs counter to the secretary’s emphasis on a balanced approach to the existing CFATS program,” Sloan said.
Like Cooper, Sloan argued that the Lautenberg bill has a major flaw “because it mandates implementation of a process safety concept - not a security measure - a clear definition of which cannot be agreed upon by experts and which cannot be measured.”
Sloan also argued that while the new Senate bill ostensibly was aimed at protecting chemical plants from terror attacks, “this bill takes aim at the manner in which the U.S. manufacturers chemicals [and] has the potential to alter common goods that Americans rely on every day.”
Earlier, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) also raised objections to the Lautenberg bill.
The Lautenberg bill might come up for consideration in the last week of July before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which has primary jurisdiction over CFATS and infrastructure protection.
That panel hearing also was expected to consider the House-passed bill and a bipartisan measure sponsored by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would simply extend the existing CFATS regulations for another five years.
