USA: Hydrogen Fluoride Refinery Suit Gets First Hearing In Federal Court―Just One Battle in a Longer War

[pfpcnews]

Hydrogen Fluoride Refinery Suit Gets First Hearing In Federal Court―Just One Battle in a Longer War

Random Lengths News - June 25, 2026

By Paul Rosenberg

A lawsuit to force strict regulation, if not elimination, of hydrogen fluoride (HF) in oil refineries got its first hearing at the federal courthouse in downtown LA on June 10. HF has the potential to form lethal toxic acid clouds if released in an accident, such as nearly happened 11 years ago as a result of an explosion at the Torrance Refinery. In that case, a 40-ton piece of debris landed on the scaffolding surrounding an HF tank, coming within five feet of puncturing the tank itself, and releasing a toxic cloud that could have killed or injured thousands of nearby residents.

Citing that case as just one example, the suit filed last July argues that “current refinery use of HF… presents unreasonable risks of injury to health and the environment,” and seeks to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “to eliminate those risks through prompt rulemaking,” as required by the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The suit was brought by the Clean Air Council (CAC), Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), after the EPA rejected their 2025 petition to address refinery HF’s needless risks.

The June 10 hearing, before Judge Michael Fitzgerald, was on EPA’s motion to dismiss the suit primarily on the grounds that people living near such refineries lack “standing” to bring the case in federal court. In their April 10 response, NRDC lawyers argued that standing required three elements: “a plaintiff must have an injury in fact that is (1) actual or imminent, (2) traceable to the defendant’s actions, and (3) redressable by the court” and that all three were present: “Plaintiffs’ members face credible threats of harm from refinery-related HF use and transportation. Their injury is traceable to EPA’s continued refusal to act, and redressable by a court order requiring EPA to start a Section 6(a) rulemaking to address the unreasonable risks posed by refinery-related HF use and transportation.”

While EPA had argued that people living near such refineries don’t face threats “that are actual or imminent and not speculative” or “conjectural,” NRDC argued “These threats are not ‘conjectural’ or ‘generalized anxieties’… Rather, all the conditions needed for harm to occur exist here and now,” and that “Living within an identified threat zone is one factor that makes Plaintiffs’ members’ risk of harm ‘credible’ rather than ‘conjectural.’”

At one point, NRDC argued that “Harm to Plaintiffs’ members does not rely on speculative what-ifs” by spelling out what speculative what-ifs actually look like:

If plaintiffs’ members lived hundreds of miles from any HF-using refinery or transportation route, or if they asserted only that they might one day move near a refinery that may use HF, or if they averred fears that a state-of-the-art refinery with a pristine safety record might someday start using HF, the standing analysis would be different. The inquiry would also be different if HF were a stable substance that remained in more containable liquid form when released, or if it were only mildly toxic over a long period of exposure. But reality is the opposite.

NRDC also argued that EPA fundamentally mischaracterized the law, and its public duty: “Congress included Section 21 in TSCA to guard against its ‘lax administration’ in cases just like this one. … TSCA does not allow EPA to sit back and wait for refinery-related HF use to cause further serious harm. EPA must act to protect health and the environment by issuing a Section 6(a) rule sufficient to eliminate the unreasonable risks Plaintiffs have described.”

“The emphasis here is really on preventing injury and harm to the environment before it happens,” NRDC senior attorney Margaret Hsieh told Random Lengths News after the hearing. “We don’t want to wait for there to be a mass casualty event in which people get hurt and say, ‘Oh, now we have evidence that we need to do something to regulate.’

“The point is that there’s enough information out there that establishes that we do have this risk, we have a concrete, we have an imminent risk. We have enough information to take action under the statute to eliminate that risk before people get hurt. And I think that’s a real emphasis in Tosca [TSCA]. It’s there in the legislative history, the idea that we should be doing things before the consequences the adverse consequences happen.”

EPA basically ignored the proactive purpose here because it’s “definitely not favorable to them, so it’s not something that they want to emphasize,” Hsieh said. “They just want to emphasize, ‘Oh, we haven’t seen something bad happened yet, and therefore we don’t have enough evidence that it’s going to happen.’

“But I think that’s not true,” she said. “It’s actually the case, and I think the plaintiffs have shown to a pretty detailed extent, there’s been a really extensive history of incidents and near incidents involving hydrogen fluoride.

“For example, if you just look at the Torrance refinery, there’s been about 15 releases, if you look at the Wilmington refinery there’s been about six releases. And we have about 40 or so refineries across the country where there has been this history of both specifically HF-related releases and also more general safety incidents.”

Finally, although EPA cited multiple cases in which standing arguments prevailed, NRDC argued that they all differed from this case in significant ways. In contrast, in the hearing itself, NRDC attorney Vivian Wang began by citing a very recent case that’s almost identical.

“Your Honor, Eng v. EPA resolves the question of standing here,” Wang said. “The Ninth Circuit just a couple of months ago found that Dr. Eng had standing because asserted deficiencies in operating practices could, in the conditional, could conceivably threaten residents within several miles of the HF using refinery in Wilmington. We have members who are concerned about that very facility and others like it. And, indeed, Dr. Eng himself is a member of plaintiff NRDC.”

The Eng case “is directly on point because it deals with facts that are very, very similar and we don’t think that that case can be distinguished in any meaningful way,” Hsieh said.

In a preliminary ruling issued before the hearing, the judge “was inclined to grant the motions to dismiss, but to give plaintiffs a leave to amend their complaint,” Hsieh said.

The ruling is non-public, but the judge explained his reasoning at the start of the hearing, and it was framed in very general terms, “that there are and must be limits to the uses to which lawsuits are put,” and that the principle of standing “serves the purpose of keeping the judiciary within its bounds.” Whether he still holds to that line of reasoning in light of the Eng case and other arguments presented orally remains to be seen.

A ruling could be issued any day, up to as long as two months from now, Hsieh said. But even if he does rule in favor of the EPA, the judge himself said at the end of the hearing that he would allow the suit to be amended and refiled. So whatever the outcome, it’s just one battle in a longer war.

SOURCE:
https://www.randomlengthsnews.com/archi ... suit/76250