White House Announces New Regulation for Diesel Engines

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cleanair11may11,1,5545577.story?coll=la-home-nation

White House Announces New Regulation for Diesel Engines

Even critics praise the plan to reduce 90% of harmful pollution from off-road vehicles. The EPA says it should prevent illness.

By Elizabeth Shogren
Times Staff Writer

May 11, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Monday announced a regulation that within a decade would cut 90% of the harmful pollution from construction equipment, farm equipment and other off-road diesel engines and 99% of the sulfur from the fuel they use.

"It's a big moment in terms of clean air history," Environmental Protection Agency administrator Mike Leavitt said. "That black puff of diesel smoke will be a thing of the past."

The regulation is expected to prevent 12,000 premature deaths, 15,000 heart attacks and 6,000 asthma-related emergency room visits for children every year, according to the EPA.

...

The regulation would require the removal of 99% of the sulfur in the diesel fuel for off-road engines; it also would require controls on those engines to remove other pollutants, such as smog-forming nitrogen oxide. About 650,000 such engines are sold every year in backhoes, tractors, heavy forklifts, airport service vehicles and generators.

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The fuel would be cleaned up in two stages — first from its uncontrolled level of 3,400 parts of sulfur per million to 500 parts per million by 2007, then to 15 parts per million by 2010.

The regulation also requires diesel locomotives and commercial marine vessels, such as tugboats and river barges, to start using the cleaner fuel, but it gives them two more years to meet the goal of 15 parts per million.

The regulation does not require pollution controls on locomotives and marine vessels, but the EPA says it plans to propose additional regulations that would require these vessels to become cleaner, perhaps as early as 2011.

Depending on the type of engine, manufacturers will be required to start selling engines with pollution controls as early as 2008. All the engines will have to comply with the new requirements by 2014. By 2030, the EPA predicted, all the engines in use will be the new clean engines. ...>

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