The Biden administration appears to have not met a regulation it didn’t like. In less than a single term, the Biden administrated has already imposed nearly $1.7 trillion in new regulatory burdens, nearly twice what the Obama administration imposed in 8 years. Ruling by executive fiat, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under a broad and overreaching interpretation of “unreasonable risk,” are using the amended Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to propose rules on 10 chemicals currently in use in the United States. Unelected bureaucrats are seeking to massively expand the government’s ability to effectively ban the safe production and use of chemicals needed to grow our economy and power our future.
Later this month, the EPA is expected to release its final rule on perchloroethylene (PCE). PCE has several applications, including in the manufacturing of refrigerants that lower global warming potential, known as hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs), and in the production of protective skin for planes used by NASA, U.S. military, and commercial airplane manufacturers.
But there’s one application of PCE that, if the EPA has its way, could severely impact our everyday lives. According to industry experts, PCE is used in and critical to processes that go into gas blends that make up 45% of the gasoline pool in the United States. Should the EPA effectively ban the production of PCE, it would severely impact the production and supply of gasoline.
Without PCE, the gasoline refining process becomes less safe. PCE is critical to safety in refining plants, allowing the processes to run at lower reaction temperature, which reduces both dangers inherent in the process and carbon dioxide emissions. PCE also reduces benzene and sulfur content in gasoline to meet the EPA’s own fuel standards. Furthermore, almost all the alternatives to PCE in the gasoline manufacturing process are less efficient or more hazardous, and would inevitably face the same scrutiny by the EPA in the future.
These TSCA rules could lead to higher costs, including on gas prices, a possibility raised by the EPA’s own chemical chief last year. The effect of this rule will not only fall on the backs of hard-working Americans who rely on reliable and inexpensive energy, it would impact millions of jobs in the oil and natural gas industry, a sizable sector of our nation’s economy.
The EPA may not consider the economic impacts of their decisions, but these assessments carry with them devastating, far-reaching consequences that reverberate across the country.