This story was updated at 4:46 p.m. EDT.
A federal appeals court has handed a victory to industrial boiler operators who argued that EPA unlawfully applied a hazardous air pollution rule to equipment built before the standards were even proposed.
In a unanimous, unsigned opinion issued Tuesday, three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the 2022 rule, which was proposed in 2020, unfairly encompassed boilers built after 2010 for use in the agriculture, paper and other industries.
The U.S. Sugar Corporation, one of the challengers of the EPA rule, said it spent $65 million to build a boiler at a Florida sugar facility to replace three older and higher-polluting boilers. The company built the boiler — known as Boiler No. 9 — to comply with the strictest emissions standards at the time, which were finalized by EPA in 2011, and it surpassed standards for existing boilers in EPA’s 2020 proposed rule.
