Further to the EU environment ministers’ political agreement in June 2009, giving national authorities a transition period for implementing national ceilings for NOx, SO2 and dust, the European Parliament last week reopened the debate on the revision of the EU's industrial air pollution directive (1996 IPPC), tabling a new proposal that seeks to compromise with member states (MSs) by dropping controversial plans to introduce a 'European safety net' of minimum emission limits. The new Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) recasts 7 existing directives, including the IPPC and the Large Combustion Plants Directive (LCP), with aim to reinforce implementation and close loopholes that allowed MSs to abuse flexibility mechanisms.
The European Parliament’s (EP) latest compromise proposal aims to closer align its views with the MSs in order to reach agreement on the legislation, which will require some 52,000 industrial installations to obtain permits from national authorities to release pollutants into the air, soil or water. This new proposal also scraps the concept added to the draft law by MEPs at first reading last year, the 'European safety net', which would have created EU-wide minimum emission limit values that no operator is allowed to exceed. The idea was fiercely opposed by many MSs, which do not want to see the EU reduce their flexibility to issue permits. The modified proposal no longer requires minimum limit values as a general principle but on a sector-by-sector basis. The European Commission (EC) would be tasked with investigating the implementation of best-available techniques (BATs) in each sector and the environmental impact of the sectors. It could then adopt EU-wide minimum requirements for emission limit values, if the report deems it necessary to do so.
The new EP proposal on the IED will require the approval of a qualified majority of MEPs in plenary to be adopted as an official Parliament position, and MEPs are not only split across political parties but also across national interests. One of the biggest remaining issues will be to determine whether the decision on potential minimum emission limit values would be made according to the EC's internal comitology procedure, or by co-decision involving the European Parliament.
Following the introduction of carbon trading (EU ETS), the EC is now considering an EU-wide trading scheme for sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) to improve air quality. The idea was first mentioned in the EC’s 2007 Green Paper on market-based instruments (MBI) explored options for more intensive use of MBIs in environmental and energy policy. Several MSs already use MBIs to address air pollution, in particular taxes and charges on sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). The Netherlands, for example, applies a trading system for NOx, on top of the EU directive on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC).
EU-wide SO2 and NOx emission trading schemes could potentially replace the proposed IED in certain sectors, including the replacement of the individual permitting system based on BATs (1996 IPPC). While a report assessing the possible development of EU-wide NOx and SO2 trading schemes for IPPC installations is currently being finalised, the EC has already launched another studyto evaluate the economics of such schemes, to be finalised by 2011.
To read more about the status of the IED/IPPC in the law-making process, please click here.
To read more about the new initiative of including other gases in the EU ETS, please click here.