Updated:
6/15/2009 2:00:00 AM
Navistar Says EPA Favored SCR by Setting Guideline Illegally
By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the June 15 print edition of Transport Topics.
Truck and engine manufacturer Navistar Inc. last week leveled new allegations against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accusing the federal regulator of privately and illegally giving its competitors the green light to deploy a selective catalyst reduction emission control technology that could be implemented only with an “illegal relaxation” of EPA’s 2010 nitrogen oxide emission standard.
The new allegations were included in a 10-page document filed June 8 that opposed a request by several of Navistar’s competitors to be granted “friend of the court” status in Navistar’s petition for federal appeals court review, filed earlier this spring (click here for previous story).
“Navistar filed the petition be-cause EPA has been diverted from its environmental mission and somehow talked into an environmentally hostile action,” the Navistar document said.
Navistar’s court brief said that EPA “illegally accommodated SCR manufacturers outside of the public eye and allowed them to deploy an emission control technology that can only be implemented with a de facto and illegal relaxation of the NOx emission standard.”
Navistar has asked the court to review several issues related to EPA’s February 2009 memorandum giving engine makers guidance on SCR, after the agency had said years earlier that it did not believe SCR would be feasible.
The Warrenville, Ill., corporation, manufacturer of International trucks, said EPA skipped an important regulatory step in allowing SCR technology after expressing serious doubts in 2001 that it would work.
Navistar is the only manufacturer planning to use exhaust gas recirculation to meet the 2010 EPA NOx emissions standard, first spelled out in EPA’s 2001 heavy-duty truck rule. All other truck and engine manufacturers plan to use SCR, which requires a urea-water solution called diesel exhaust fluid.
In its recent document, Navistar specifically alleged that an attorney for the Engine Manufacturers Association on behalf of the SCR manufacturers “convinced EPA that EPA had no choice but to reverse course and conclude that SCR was a viable technology for meeting the 0.20 g NOx standard.”
“In reality, the SCR manufacturers who led the effort to get
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