Alternative future environmental regulatory approaches for petroleum refineries

Recently, many industrial, regulatory, and community leaders have expressed concern that the current environmental regulatory structure disregards multimedia environmental impacts, provides few incentives to develop and use new technologies, and fails to consider site-specific conditions. For the US petroleum refining industry, faced with the need to produce higher-quality fuels from poorer-quality feedstocks, such criticisms are expected to increase. This article offers two alternative environmental regulatory approaches for existing petroleum refineries to use in the future. These alternative approaches are multimedia in scope, provide for new technology development and use, and allow flexibility in the means for meeting environmental goals. They have been reviewed and critiqued by various stakeholders, including industry representatives, regulators, and local and national community and environmental organizations. The integration of stakeholder comments and findings of ongoing national and international regulatory reinvention efforts in the development of these approaches positions them for potential use by other industries in addition to petroleum refineries.