PlaNYC to Dirty Buildings: Clean Up Your Heating Oil

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg released the long-awaited update to PlaNYC 2030 yesterday. 

Among the plan’s 132 initiatives and more than 400 milestones is a plan to help buildings switch over quickly from the dirtiest heating oil to cleaner fuels.  This is an important step forward for our efforts to reach PlaNYC 2030’s top air quality goal: to achieve the cleanest air quality of any big city in the nation.

More specifically, and as the Times reported, the plan includes a new final Department of Environmental Protection rule that will phase out the dirtiest, most toxic form of heating oil (so-called “No. 6” heating oil), and will speed up the switch to cleaner “No. 2” heating oil or natural gas.

This is an issue that we’ve worked on for several years, and that I’ve written about in the past (see, e.g., here and here, among other posts in my archives).

Here’s what the new rule requires:

By 2015, existing boilers must switch from No. 6 oil to a low-sulfur version of a cleaner No. 4 heating oil or to an equivalent cleaner fuel.  When buildings install new boilers, they will have to burn an even cleaner form of fuel—i.e., either the lowest-sulfur No. 2 oil, natural gas, or an equivalent low-emission fuel.  (To get a sense of scale, today’s No. 6 oil can contain up to 3,000 parts-per-million of sulfur, but the future No. 2 oil will have its sulfur capped at 15 parts-per-million).

Here’s why this matters:

Only one percent of the city’s buildings currently burn the No. 6 heating oil, yet those buildings contribute roughly 85 percent of the soot pollution from all of the city’s buildings.

This soot pollution (technically regulated as “particulate matter”) triggers asthma emergencies, contributes to the city’s cancer rates, makes breathing more difficult for people with heart and lung ailments, and even leads to premature deaths in the city.

In fact, air pollution contributes to more than 6 percent of the city’s deaths each year.   

Yesterday, the city’s health department reported that soot pollution from all sources causes more than 3,000 deaths, 2,000 hospital admissions for lung and heart conditions and about 6,000 emergency room visits for asthma annually.   Buildings that burn heating oil emit about a quarter of this pollution, and are larger contributor to local pollution in the neighborhoods that contain many of the heavily-polluting buildings.

And, like the diesel pollution problem that I write about so often, this soot pollution problem is a solvable problem.

Converting all of the city’s buildings that currently burn the dirtiest No. 6 and the dirty No. 4 heating oil to No. 2 or natural gas will take time, and DEP’s regulation and the PlaNYC update provide ample time to do so (in fact, buildings have until 2030 to make the full switch, so any recent boiler investments aren’t stranded).  

And there’s a key next step still to be taken:  478 schools still burn the dirty No. 6 oil, and we need to come up with creative ways to finance and accelerate the clean-up of these buildings in this fiscally-challenged time.  That will be our focus in the weeks and months ahead.

But in the short run, the accelerated elimination of the city’s dirtiest heating oil is great news for anybody who breathes NYC air.

One last, well-deserved shout-out goes to Isabelle Silverman, my friend and colleague at the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked tirelessly, creatively, and successfully on this issue for years.  Many people in city government, the heating industry, and the environmental communities worked together to make this victory possible, but a huge piece of this victory belongs to her.