Nucor Steel-Ark. v. Pruitt

摘要

Nucor has employed the CAA's procedure for petitioning the EPA to object to a state-issued Title V permit, and has now filed a complaint in this Court that maintains that the agency has failed to grant or deny its petition within the required timeframe. Thus, the immediate subject of Nu-cor's lawsuit is a mere procedural violation, but Nucor's stake in the substantive outcome of this litigation is allegedly very real, because the Title V permit that is the subject of Nucor's petition enables Big River Steel to operate a new steel mill just twenty miles away from Nucor's two steel-manufacturing facilities. There is no dispute that all three plants are in the same county and in the same air quality control region, and Nucor alleges that it has pending construction plans at one of its preexisting mills that will require PSD review, and therefore will be meaningfully constrained by Big River Steel's consumption of the applicable PSD increment for the region. For the reasons explained above, this Court concludes that, at this early stage of the litigation, Nucor has said enough to allege a concrete and particularized injury that is fairly traceable to the EPA's failure to timely respond to Nucor's petition, and that Nucor's complaint contains sufficient facts to support a plausible claim that the injury Nucor faces (in the form of Big River Steel's consumption of the PSD-increment) is imminent and would likely be redressed by a favorable outcome. Accordingly, the allegations of Nucor's complaint sufficiently support Nucor's contention that it has standing to pursue the relief that it seeks in this lawsuit, which means that, as set forth in the accompanying order, the EPA's motion to dismiss for lack of standing must be DENIED.