The Bay Area Air Quality Management District board members have the perfect opportunity for a “win-win” solution when they consider a proposed new rule for particulate matter emissions later this month.

The board has an offer before them to reduce particulate matter emissions significantly, save thousands of jobs and avoid costly litigation. The board’s job is to balance various interests and apply common sense, leading to beneficial public policy. Our offer clearly provides that.

The proposed rule seeks to arbitrarily reduce the total particulate matter standard to 0.01 grains per dry standard cubic foot. Instead, Martinez Refining Co. has proposed a $40 million project to achieve at least 70% of the particulate matter reductions the rule is seeking.

Our project would achieve substantive emissions reductions two years earlier than the proposed rule, known as Rule 6-5, while ensuring stable, local fuel supplies for residents, businesses and governments in the state with the third-highest demand for motor fuels in the world.

If the board rejects our offer, proposed Rule 6-5 will lead to lawsuits and potentially another Bay Area refinery closing, decreasing fuel supplies and increasing prices, creating an equity issue for those who can least afford even-higher costs. The region’s reliance on fuel imports from less-regulated countries will grow.

Replacing a Bay Area refinery with a higher greenhouse gas (GHG) and particulate-emitting coal-powered refinery in China would impact Bay Area residents. GHGs have the same global impacts regardless of where they are generated, and westerly wind flows from Asia carry significant levels of particulates to California, deteriorating air quality.

Those calling for a wet gas scrubber to meet the 0.01 standard are misrepresenting its ability to comply with that standard. Incredibly, the district’s analysis indicates that 50% of the scrubbers in the United States fail to currently meet the proposed 0.01 standard and would have to be modified to meet it. Also, the district has never done an engineering analysis demonstrating that any scrubber on the three remaining fluidized catalytic cracking units in Bay Area refineries could achieve the 0.01 standard.

Further, the board should consider the significant environmental impacts scrubbers create. A scrubber at our refinery would increase GHG emissions equivalent to the electricity use of 6,000 homes and water usage equivalent to 2,000 households annually, further stressing an already electricity- and water-constrained region.

Additionally, the district’s $255 million estimate for a scrubber at our refinery is wrong. The Benicia Refinery’s scrubber cost $579 Million over 10 years ago, which puts our $800 million estimate in line with their price tag, factoring typical project inflation. The district also failed to report that our $800 million scrubber would cost 20 times more than the previous most expensive particulate reduction project in the district’s history, or that the scrubber fails the district’s own cost-benefit test.

Spending $800 million on an unproven, unnecessary scrubber would make the refinery we paid $930 million for last year even less competitive, without any guarantee we would meet the 0.01 standard. This just doesn’t make common sense. Moreover, there is no space to build a massive scrubber at our refinery. The district visited the site and knows this.

Improving emissions, saving jobs, ensuring fuel supplies, avoiding litigation and reducing Rule 6-5’s record-high cost of compliance to a reasonable level are worthy goals that our offer achieves. Reasonable people doing what is balanced makes common sense, without litigation or potential refinery closures such as Marathon Martinez, resulting in the loss of more jobs supporting working families.

Board members should take this opportunity and approve our “win-win” solution that will benefit the environment, workers and consumers, which is what they were appointed to do.

Jerry Forstell is the refinery manager at Martinez Refining Co.