By ROBIN SHANNON

L’Observateur

LAPLACE – Representatives from Nucor Steel filed a response Monday to a federal court ruling aimed at halting construction of its new iron manufacturing plant in St. James Parish until court challenges of its air quality permits are resolved.

In court documents filed in New Orleans Monday, the Charlotte, N.C., based firm contends that a lawsuit filed in April by neighboring grain elevator Zen-Noh Grain Corp. should not stop construction because the work at the site, near Romeville, is occurring under proper air permits.

Nucor is constructing a $750 million direct reduced iron plant on a 4,000-acre site along the Mississippi River. The natural gas-fueled plant will prepare iron ore pellets used in steelmaking. The plant is the first in a proposed five-phase steel and iron manufacturing complex at the site worth more than $3.4 billion.

Nucor’s response says that Zen-Noh already has two pending state court suits against the state Department of Environmental Quality regarding permits related to the Nucor project. The grain elevator company earlier this year also filed a petition with the Environmental Protection Agency asking for a review of the process DEQ used in issuing the permits to Nucor. Zen-Noh is concerned about air quality impacts on the purity of its grain.

In that ruling, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson agreed to object to the state permits issued to the Nucor property on grounds that the permits did not adequately address two “threshold issues,” whether the permits for the two facilities should be combined and whether DEQ then improperly applied information from permits for one of the facilities to permits for the other.

In a previous response sent to the EPA, Louisiana DEQ explained that the two separate permits were not an attempt to get around stricter regulations designed to prevent an area’s air quality from violating federal standards. The EPA has policies in place to prevent a larger facility from breaking up its operations into separate permits in order to fall below the air quality threshold, but DEQ officials said that does not apply in the Nucor case because both facilities have gone through additional review.

“Defendants contend that unless and until the permits are revoked or modified by LDEQ or EPA or there has been a finding on the merits by the 19th Judicial District Court or a Louisiana appellate court that CEM is constructing the DRI facility without a permit, the court does not have the power to enjoin the construction,” read Nucor’s response in part.

CEM stands for Consolidated Environmental Management Inc., a company affiliated with Nucor named in Nucor air permits. At issue in the lawsuit is a switch in iron reduction technology that Nucor made after the initial air permits were issued in January 2011. Nucor switched from the process supplied by one company, Midrex, to another, Tenova HYL.

The lawsuit is trying to determine whether the switch is a minor or major change and which of two air permits should have been modified: the pre-construction permit or the operational permit for the DRI plant.

Zen-Noh says the pre-construction permit, called a prevention of significant deterioration permit, should have been changed, requiring new air emissions models and more public comment. Nucor asked DEQ to modify its Part 70 operational permit last year instead to reflect the changes and did not submit new models.

A telephone status conference is set for 10 a.m. June 14 with Judge Sarah Vance.