Ozone Nonattainment Comes to Utah’s Uinta Basin

Utah’s Uinta Basin is poised to be labeled as a nonattainment area under the 2015 ozone standards, a designation that will trigger various emissions control planning requirements on an area with thousands of active oil and gas wells.

The Environmental Protection Agency won’t make its final decision on what areas do and don’t meet the 70 parts per billion ozone standards until fall 2017, but state regulators have already made their recommendations to the agency based on three years of air quality data. The Uinta Basin, with a three-year “design value” of 80 ppb from 2013-2015, is one of three ...