Breathing Poison in Granite City Because of Heidtman Steel

The Non-Financial Ledger

Granite City, Illinois is a blue-collar town that grew up around steel. The people who live there breathe the same air that surrounds the plants their families worked in for generations. When a steel facility pumps hydrochloric acid fumes into the atmosphere, the people most exposed are not executives or regulators in distant offices. They are the families whose homes sit downwind. They are the kids walking to school. They are the older residents who already carry decades of industrial air in their lungs.

Hydrochloric acid is not a nuisance chemical. Congress specifically designated it a Hazardous Air Pollutant under the Clean Air Act precisely because of what it does to human tissue. Breathing HCl vapor causes throat and airway irritation, pulmonary inflammation, and with chronic exposure, can contribute to lasting respiratory damage. The federal NESHAP system exists because Congress decided that facilities emitting this substance at scale must be held to documented, verifiable, enforceable limits. Those standards require paperwork, testing, and plans because the stakes are people’s lungs.

Heidtman’s own testing showed a potential emission rate of 110.8 tons of HCl per year before the scrubber does its job. The scrubber is supposed to be the last line of defense between industrial acid vapor and the surrounding neighborhood. For the duration of these violations, neither Heidtman nor the state of Illinois had put in place the federally enforceable controls that would guarantee the scrubber was operating as required. There was no approved operation and maintenance plan. There were no verified compliance demonstrations. Nobody on the outside had confirmed the equipment was doing what it was supposed to do. The people of Granite City had to take Heidtman’s word for it. They were given no choice.

The Clean Air Act was written because communities like Granite City bore the costs of industrial production in their bodies. The law was a promise. What this case documents is how long that promise can go unforced.

Legal Receipts

The following passages are drawn verbatim from the EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Docket No. CAA-05-2026-0024, filed May 4, 2026.

“On July 18, 2018, Heidtman conducted EPA Method 26A HCl tests at the pickle line scrubber inlet duct and exhaust stack while operating at maximum production rate. The results of the tests, provided in an August 13, 2018, report, indicate that Heidtman’s steel pickling line has the potential to emit HCl at a rate of 110.8 tpy prior to control.”

“Absent enforceable controls, since June 22, 2001, Heidtman has been required to comply with the requirements of the Pickling NESHAP at its steel pickling line, 40 C.F.R. Part 63, Subpart CCC.”

“Heidtman has not obtained a federally enforceable permit requiring the use of a scrubber to control emissions from the State of Illinois. Heidtman submitted a federally enforceable state operating permit (FESOP) application, (No. 06050035) to Illinois Environmental Protection Agency on May 9, 2006, and again on June 4, 2009. The State of Illinois concluded that Heidtman qualified for a Lifetime Operating Permit (LOP). The LOP was issued by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency on July 30, 2009.”

“Respondent submitted a Pickling Line Scrubber System Operation and Maintenance (O&M) Plan to EPA for approval and EPA approved the plan on February 9, 2026.”

Regulatory Gray Zones: How a State Permit Became a Federal Blind Spot

The central mechanism that kept Heidtman operating outside full federal oversight was a specific jurisdictional gap between state-issued permits and federally enforceable controls.

• The “Lifetime Operating Permit” loophole: Illinois concluded that Heidtman qualified for a Lifetime Operating Permit (LOP) and issued one on July 30, 2009. This sounds like strong protection. Under federal law, it provided almost none. The Clean Air Act requires that emission controls be “enforceable by the Administrator” to count toward a source’s potential-to-emit calculation. A state-level LOP that was not federally enforceable did not satisfy that standard. Heidtman was a major source of HCl under federal definitions the entire time the LOP existed.
• The FESOP application that disappeared: Heidtman submitted a Federally Enforceable State Operating Permit (FESOP) application in May 2006, and again in June 2009. Rather than process those applications to create the federal enforceability Heidtman needed, Illinois issued the Lifetime Permit instead. The FESOP path, which would have created federally binding obligations, was abandoned in favor of a state-level instrument that satisfied neither the Title V nor NESHAP requirements.
• Two NESHAP clocks running simultaneously: The Pickling NESHAP compliance deadline was June 22, 2001. The Boiler NESHAP compliance deadline was January 31, 2016. Both applied to Heidtman. Because the facility never obtained a federally enforceable permit, neither set of NESHAP obligations was operationalized. The two regulatory frameworks sat on paper while the facility operated without verified compliance under either of them.

Public Deception: The Gap Between State Paper and Federal Reality

The structural gap between what Illinois’s permitting system acknowledged and what federal Clean Air Act obligations actually required created a situation where the public had reason to believe the facility was operating under regulatory oversight, when the enforceability of that oversight was fundamentally limited.

• What the permit suggested: The Illinois Lifetime Operating Permit, issued in July 2009, signaled that Heidtman’s facility had been reviewed and authorized to operate. The existence of a permit implies oversight. In reality, the EPA’s CAFO confirms the LOP was not federally enforceable, meaning the scrubber operation requirement it may have included could not be enforced by the federal government and did not satisfy the Clean Air Act’s major-source obligations.
• What NESHAP compliance requires vs. what was in place: The Pickling NESHAP requires a complete, approved scrubber operation and maintenance plan, initial and continuous compliance demonstrations, verified operating limits, and active recordkeeping. The CAFO documents that Heidtman failed to comply with all of these. The EPA did not approve Heidtman’s O&M plan until February 9, 2026, meaning no EPA-approved plan existed for the entire period of the violations.
• The Boiler NESHAP compliance gap: The Boiler NESHAP required completion of a boiler energy assessment, regular tune-ups, compliance notifications, and tune-up compliance reports by January 31, 2016. The CAFO documents that Heidtman failed each of these. No public-facing disclosure indicated these obligations had not been met.