Virginia will run its own coal ash permit program starting Nov. 23, but its 25 coal combustion residuals units won’t be done with the federal rules. EPA published its approval Oct. 22, and it covers only part of the program. Every permit Virginia has already issued sits outside it.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality counts 25 CCR units at eight facilities: seven landfills and 18 surface impoundments. Those are the sites where closure, cap and groundwater work lives, and where engineers and contractors will now be working under a split regime.
Which coal ash rules Virginia’s program replaces
Virginia’s regulations track the federal CCR rule at 40 CFR part 257, subpart D, as amended through Dec. 14, 2020. EPA approved that version to operate in place of the federal rule. The state didn’t adopt EPA’s 2024 Legacy Rule or the February 2026 CCR management unit deadline extension, so those federal provisions apply directly at Virginia sites.
Some of what stays federal is practical. The broader 2024 definitions of owner and operator still apply. So does the rule that a fugitive dust control plan must be amended within 30 days after certain changes. The closure-by-removal standards and the matching groundwater corrective action requirement remain federal, along with longer record retention for the operating record and the facility’s CCR website.
EPA also declined to approve three Virginia provisions: vegetative cover for slope stability, suspension of groundwater monitoring and groundwater protection standards for appendix IV constituents with no maximum contaminant level. That last one is under reconsideration at EPA after a court challenge.
Why existing CCR permits get no shield
This is the piece owners will notice. Once a CCR permit is issued under an approved state program, its terms become the enforceable requirements, and the facility gets a permit shield against direct enforcement of the underlying rules. VADEQ told EPA in March that it didn’t want its existing permits reviewed as part of this approval.
So those permits don’t carry the shield. They only join the approved program after a major modification that includes public notice and comment on the entire permit. VADEQ has committed to review and modify them after approval, and EPA says it’ll look at the modified permits in a later program review. Until then, owners have to comply with the federal rules directly.
One detail for design teams: under Virginia’s program, a “qualified professional engineer” means a professional engineer certified to practice in Virginia.
What the partial approval means for closure work
EPA took 14 written comments. Some argued VADEQ couldn’t be relied on to run the program, pointing to EPA’s 2024 denial of Alabama’s program. EPA approved Virginia’s anyway and published its responses in the docket, EPA-HQ-OLEM-2025-3325.
States keep taking over federal environmental permitting, from coal ash to Colorado’s Class VI carbon storage permits. Virginia’s version is narrower than it looks. For a closure contractor, the practical question on each Virginia site is which rulebook a given task falls under, and the answer won’t be settled until VADEQ reissues the permits.