Air

Clean Air Practice

The team’s experienced regulatory and litigation members have long worked with career staff at EPA headquarters, EPA regions, state agencies or legislatures, and on Capitol Hill. We move readily between national and state issues to site or company-specific applications.

Nationally, our efforts on behalf of companies and trade associations helped shape provisions of the 1990 Amendments, as well as most key developments since. On behalf of coal and power industry clients, our lawyers have most recently provided comments on, and analyses of, EPA’s Utility MACT rule, the greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding and associated Tailoring Rule, as well as EPA’s recent greenhouse NSPS proposal for power plants. We have negotiated complex New Source Review settlements with EPA and citizens groups for clients in the power and other industries. Our lawyers have also long shaped parallel state programs, including those for Title V permits, SIPs and state emission trading rules.

At the plant level, we have permitted numerous projects, facilities or facility expansions, earning recognition for our ability to identify critical paths and unravel major source PSD/NSR, SIP and operating permit tangles. We have helped clients develop Title V permit applications, operating scheme flexibility provisions and compliance certification support for thorny past possible transgressions. We have successfully defended both state and federal air enforcement actions, often by persuading the agency to withdraw the action.

Climate Change

McGuireWoods has assembled a climate change practice group of experienced practitioners and consultants from our environmental, energy, corporate, corporate finance and capital markets, litigation, and government relations teams.

Although a relatively new legal sector with unique issues, climate change also presents many similar challenges and opportunities that are successfully managed every day by McGuireWoods lawyers and consultants —who collectively offer extensive, multidiscipline experience in environmental regulatory programs; energy and other project development; the generation and exchanges of environmental credits and offsets; securities; venture capital; compliance, and legislative and regulatory development.

Our integrated team provides clients with carbon-specific representation on energy projects, carbon credits and trading, corporate disclosure and governance, corporate self-assessments, mergers and acquisitions, greentech investments, green building development, government relations and policy, regulatory developments and compliance, and litigation.