Our team helps clients across the country evaluate and obtain required permits and authorizations for discharges or emissions resulting from manufacturing or industrial processes.  We also negotiate comprehensive permit terms and conditions that reduce the need for subsequent modifications. We represent clients before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state and local regulatory bodies and, where appropriate, assist in the proactive engagement of communities that may seek to slow or derail the permit process.

In Texas in particular, our team assists industrial and energy-sector clients in the permitting process, including handling initial applications and guiding them through the administrative review process, representing clients at public meetings, and managing all aspects of contested case hearings. We work regularly with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the State Office of Administrative Hearings, the administrative body that handles contested case proceedings.

Our permitting experience includes matters involving:

• Assisting a major chemical manufacturing facility with the reorganization and reissuance of its air emissions permits to better facilitate compliance and development activities.
• Assisting a midstream energy company in obtaining federal Prevention of Significant Deterioration permits for greenhouse gas emissions from proposed gas processing and fractionating facilities under the Clean Air Act and U.S. EPA’s Tailoring Rule.
• Counseling of project developer on contract negotiation, NEPA analysis, and environmental permitting to construct and operate a mine-mouth 1500-MW, hybrid dry cooled coal-fired electric power-generating plant on Navajo Nation lands.
• Counseling of a municipal developer on contract negotiation, NEPA analysis, and environmental permitting to construct and operate a pump storage project in California, including the construction of associated transmission lines on USFS and DOD lands.
• Negotiation of a private-public partnership between a developer client and TxDOT for the construction and operation of tolling facilities and highway expansion/improvements.
• Permits and compliance plans for hazardous and solid waste, wastewater, air and other emissions operations and facilities.
• Advice on issues arising under NEPA in the development of major infrastructure projects (e.g., LNG import terminals, hydropower and highway construction), including the successful defense of a challenge to a Deepwater Port Act license for an offshore LNG facility that involved substantial NEPA claims.
• Defense of Deepwater Port Act license in case of first impression concerning the priority of environmental considerations in licensing an offshore LNG terminal (Gulf Restoration Network v. U.S. Dept Transportation, June 2006).
• Contested permit proceedings
• Wetlands development and permitting issues
• Authorizations for the appropriation of state waters

The Environmental Strategy practice also handles New Source Review (NSR) challenges under the Clean Air Act. We provide comprehensive guidance on NSR issues such as permits, construction compliance, volatile organic compound and sulfur dioxide emissions credits trading and negotiations, and complaints related to acid rain.

Representative Matters

Our firm handles siting, permitting, regulatory issues and litigation for energy production facilities. For several key projects, we also have managed public and media relations. Our work requires complex legal and policy interaction with federal and state agencies and, in one case, with a Native American tribe to solve unique siting issues on Indian lands. Some of these projects include design and implementation of systems for corporate environmental governance, management and auditing, and counseling corporations on strategic climate change and coal-fired energy issues.

Texas Contested Case Experience

Assisted with the representation of a Fortune 500 company in a contested case proceeding before the State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) involving a Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit application for a Central Texas lignite-fired power generation facility; TCEQ issued the PSD permit without any additional terms or conditions.

Assisted with the representation of a Fortune 100 company in a contested case proceeding before SOAH and TCEQ involving a wastewater discharge permit application for a Central Texas lignite mine; TCEQ issued the wastewater discharge permit without any additional permit terms or conditions.

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