The Natural Refrigeration

IIAR’s newest task force has completed a gap analysis to assess OSHA and EPA’s 30-year-old PSM/RMP programs. The “NH3 Overdue Regulation Modernization,” or NORM, task force will ask regulators to remove regulatory burdens that overlap across agencies or defer to IIAR standards when the standards and regulations overlap. The task force’s long-term effort will be to shift some funding and enforcement from federal regulators to state and local authorities.

The NORM task force was formed to operate in a rare federal environment in which the Trump administration has opened the door to regulatory reform through Executive Order 14192, which requires agencies to take 10 deregulatory actions for every new regulation.

IIAR president Gary Schrift said the organization formed the task force initially to respond to EPA’s reconsideration of the AIM Act, which may raise a phaseout limit to allow 700GWP refrigerants for cold storages until 2032.

While that seemed like an initial setback given the industry’s effort to communicate the goals of the AIM Act, in the bigger picture, it was also an opportunity to accomplish some longstanding IIAR goals.

“We want to promote natural refrigerants, we’re not trying to eliminate other [refrigerants] in this current administration, so we started asking…how do we make lemonade out of this lemon?” said Schrift.

“Right away, we hit on over-burdensome regulatory requirements as one of the biggest things preventing natural refrigerants from getting used. Paperwork is a major barrier to entry for natural refrigerants.”

“At this point, you have to be a compliance specialist to understand what OSHA and EPA require. So, we decided to form a task force and use this current administration’s desire to get rid of overburdensome or duplicative regulations to benefit our industry,” said Schrift.

As the new task force began working through the details to perform IIAR’s gap analysis – which put OSHA and EPA standards and IIAR regulations side-by-side – it quickly became apparent that “80% of our regulatory tasks require the same stuff for all three: EPA, OSHA, and IIAR standards,” said NORM Task Force Chair Kurt Liebendorfer.

“The light bulb went off, and we started asking – why are these two agencies imposing the same things but then changing the specifics of the requirements independently of each other? It creates a maze of duplication.”

“The compliance people on the NORM task force were really the ones who highlighted this first because they already navigate this day in and day out,” said Liebendorfer. “But for the non-compliance people, it was a real eye opener, and it reinforced our idea that one agency duplicating the requirements and then independently changing them is very confusing to the industry.”

From a policy standpoint, the NORM task force’s work is an effort to engage IIAR’s membership not only in the specific regulatory changes that IIAR will eventually propose, but also in raising the bar on compliance.

“We want to engage our membership to support this effort because this affects everyone,” said Liebendorfer. The NORM task force evaluated 18 topics across EPA and OSHA, including 17 specific RMP items and 14 specific PSM items.

Of those, 13 sections have duplication or overlap between PSM and RMP, and 11 sections also overlap with IIAR standards, showing that IIAR already provides coverage across many of these areas.

Now that NORM has identified the areas of duplication, the task force will work to finalize a specific “ask list” of proposed changes as phase one of the task force’s goals.

“The first opportunity in this phase-one part of our work is already here,” said Liebendorfer. “There’s an opening created by the EPA because they’re already working through a proposed change to RMP – so we have this window of opportunity to move faster to get a quick win.”

Liebendorfer said NORM plans to submit a formal request list to EPA this summer to enter any rulemaking cycle. As for the specifics of that “ask list,” IIAR is mainly asking EPA not to duplicate requirements that OSHA already imposes, and to defer to IIAR for compliance functions that the industry already mandates through IIAR codes and standards.

“Many of these requests are based on anecdotal reports we’ve gotten on duplicative enforcement activities,” said Schrift, citing an example scenario “where one facility gets fined, then inspectors go out to the other facilities owned by the same company to look for the same violation without giving the company time to correct the original violation across the board.”

“This is the kind of thing that’s burdensome and dissuades people from choosing ammonia,” said Schrift.

In addition to streamlining enforcement and fine structures that are paperwork related to reduce the administrative burden on the industry, the NORM task force is considering three other avenues to reduce the amount of regulation the industry faces: defaulting to IIAR standards, modernizing the EPA and OSHA’s approach to the general duty clause, and shifting funding from the federal enforcement level to local training, education, and inspection.

The NORM task force said it hopes to show EPA that ASHRAE has defaulted to IIAR for ammonia codes and to ask whether EPA would do something similar when IIAR standards overlap.

Second on the task force’s ask list is modernizing the EPA approach to General Duty Clause enforcement by deferring to IIAR codes for safe design and operational practices for NH3 Refrigeration Systems, rather than referencing an EPA General Duty Clause guidance document, which only creates more confusion.

The third major ask being planned by NORM is to shift EPA federal enforcement funding to state-level work to support industry
training, education, and inspection review.

IIAR’s Schrift said the organization will soon begin a wide-ranging research project that will use industry data to quantify many of the issues behind the requests the NORM task force plans to make.

“We’re pursuing a new project to dig into our industry data to see what trends are there,” said Schrift. “We’re hoping that some of the data can point to trends that will help our case with government regulators.”

One statistic, for example, might look at the total number of incidents that cause injury to determine which occurred because IIAR safety standards weren’t followed versus which were the result of other factors.

“IIAR and the industrial refrigeration industry stands to do a much better job of mitigating and preventing maintenance problems, far more than any PSM or RMP can help when it comes to mechanical integrity,” said Liebendorfer. “Our task is to demonstrate to the federal government that the education of our industry through best practices is a more effective place to put resources than the surveillance of people who are already working hard to do their best on safety. That’s the important point we’re trying to make.”

IIAR also hopes to find evidence in the industry data of how current regulations can obscure the industry’s actual safety picture. Liebendorfer pointed to a 2020 IIAR tech paper, Case History: A Study of Incidents in the Ammonia Refrigeration Industry, which outlines the problem of overreporting of minor releases. Page 8 of that tech paper outlines how the EPA’s 15-minute release reporting requirement has led to overreporting of minor releases that can’t be quantified within that timeframe.

“We believe in many cases the industry routinely reports releases that do not meet the 100 lb reporting threshold because they don’t know in the moment what the actual release quantity is, and they can’t quantify it in 15 minutes because systems are large and working to stop or mitigate a leak should be the first priority,” said Liebendorfer.

“What led to that is EPA’s really aggressive reporting requirements, so this is an example of where we might use our data to advocate for that 15-minute window to be longer.”

After NORM’s data collection research project and initial effort with the EPA this summer, the task force is eyeing a more comprehensive plan to find ways to get regulators to shift money from enforcement efforts to local education, inspection and response.

“We’re hoping to convince EPA and OSHA – instead of spending time and money on PSM/RMP and General Duty Clause enforcement pertaining to ammonia refrigeration systems– to find a way to shift resources to local enforcement bodies using IIAR standards,” said Schrift.

“That approach will be less burdensome than a federal-level organization coming in with untrained inspectors and huge fines who know little about ammonia. Involving a local authority in enforcement activities is more beneficial for everyone because those are the people who are more apt to work directly with businesses in their community.”

For now, that effort will look more like a future business plan developed by NORM after the immediate steps to streamline regulations are underway.

“We want to simplify the regulatory criteria as it exists now first, by eliminating unnecessary duplication, before we advocate for big changes in how regulations are enforced,” said Liebendorfer.