Navistar: EPA Conspired With SCR Engine Makers

This story appears in the July 13 print edition of Transport Topics.

Truck and engine manufacturer Navistar Inc. has accused the Environmental Protection Agency of attempting to remove documents from official records and allowing the Engine Manufacturers Association to write the draft of its selective catalytic reduction guidance document for 2010 “in secret collaboration with certain engine makers.”

Navistar’s documents, filed with a federal appeals court, alleged the public records EPA wanted removed would bolster the truck maker’s claims the agency skipped an important step in the rulemaking process, and that “much of the 2009 SCR guidance was drafted by the EMA on behalf of the SCR manufacturers, not by EPA.”

“EPA deliberately has excluded from the record documents that are clearly relevant to EPA’s decision to reverse its position on SCR technology and to relax the 0.20 [gram] NOx standard,” Navistar said in a 187-page July 2 legal filing.

Joe Suchecki, an EMA spokes-man, denied that any of his association’s communication with the EPA was improper.

“As is normally the case, we will provide comments to EPA and in the normal course of business we will provide suggested language — and we’ve done that since EMA was started,” Suchecki said. “That’s just the normal course of business in working with regulatory agencies on potential regulations.”

An EPA spokeswoman declined to comment.

Navistar’s filing is the latest development in the lawsuit it filed in March asking a federal appeals court to review several issues related to EPA’s February 2009 memorandum giving engine makers guidance on SCR. For several years prior to the release of that document, EPA had said it did not believe SCR would be a feasible way to meet the 2010 rules.

Navistar claimed that in e-mails it obtained, EPA and California Air Resources Board officials routinely re-ferred to the SCR guidance as “the EMA guidance document.” CARB provided technical advice on the 2010 engine requirements.

For example, a CARB official told an EPA official in a November 2008 e-mail, “We met yesterday and this morning to finish going over the EMA guidance document.”

In that same e-mail, the CARB official also expressed frustration with EPA and EMA.

“I have issues with EMA presenting you proposals getting your buy off and then sending them to me requesting harmonization,” the CARB official said. “This is a game they seem to play and I plan on pushing back hard with Jed [Mandel, EMA president] on this.”

In another e-mail, dated Jan. 22, Mandel tells an EPA official, “We have had a number of internal phone calls about the SCR guidance document and I am pleased to report that we have convinced everyone to drink the kool-aid. Enclosed are a few minor clean up type edits and one clarification.”

Navistar’s lawsuit maintains that EPA skipped an important regulatory step in allowing SCR technology after expressing doubts back as far as 2001 that it would work.

Navistar, Warrenville, Ill., manufactures International trucks and is the only engine maker planning to use exhaust gas recirculation to meet the 2010 NOx emissions standard.

Navistar said that on May 18, EPA filed its initial listing of 66 certified records it said were relevant to the issues being raised by Navistar. About a month later, on June 15, EPA asked the court to amend its list of documents, seeking permission to eliminate numerous documents Navistar claimed could not be located even in EPA’s public docket center in Washington.

The amended EPA index filing lists only 30 documents, according to court records.

Navistar said one of the documents EPA wants to remove from the file contains an e-mail regarding “guidance comments on poor diesel emission fluid detection, a critical issue given that poor quality DEF fluid can cripple the SCR system.” (SCR systems require DEF to reduce NOx emissions.) Another document questions whether SCR catalysts create the carcinogen dioxin.

The documents that EPA requested be removed also included three November 2007 EPA tables relating to driver inducements to encourage them to add DEF, Navistar said.