HB2472 – Requires comprehensive full life cycle estimates of fossil fuel emissions in state environmental evaluations.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Pollett (D; 46th District; Northeast Seattle)
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Environment and Energy January 21st . Failed to make it out of committee by 2020 cutoff; dead bill.
Next step would be –
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Summary –
The bill would require the State’s environmental assessments to include the upstream emissions associated with the production, gathering, transmission, storage, and distribution of fossil fuels, and those of the energy used for extraction, processing, and transporting them. They would also have to include the emissions associated with their downstream end use or combustion.

The bill would direct the Department of Ecology to adopt a rule requiring agencies and local governments to consider upstream and downstream emissions in permitting, planning, and other regulatory processes involving the environmental review or permitting of projects that use fossil fuels as a fuel source or as the primary component of the project.  The rule is to estimate a weighted average for all the sources of each fuel; these assumptions would then be uniformly applied to covered fossil fuel proposals and projects. It’s not to create utility-specific rates, facility-specific rates, or project-specific rates. These assumptions would then be uniformly applied to covered fossil fuel proposals and projects, so these estimates would no longer be done on an individual project by project basis.

Details –
The Department of Ecology would create a rule by December 1, 2021, establishing a cumulative emissions rate for each fossil fuel including emissions that “may be presumed to occur prior to the end use of a fossil fuel or prior to or after the final point of commerce for a fossil fuel in Washington.” Ecology is to apply a precautionary principle and err on the side of applying comprehensive and inclusive assumptions about emissions rates. (The rule is also to include consideration of induced load or growth in fuel or energy consumption or electricity generation associated with a project.) (The Utilities and Transportation Commission, the chair of the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Department of Commerce would consult in the process.)

The bill amends current laws to specify the use of this method for estimating emissions in a range of State administrative processes, ranging from utility integrated resource planning to evaluations of proposed actions under the Clean Air Act.

Ecology is to review and update the rule every three years.