You will hear argument first this morning in case 231229, Environmental Protection Agency versus Calumet-Streport refining.

Mr. Stewart.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, this case provides a paradigmatic example of the result that the Clean Air Act's venue provision was intended to avoid.

The April and June 2022 denial actions at issue here

resolved a total of 105 exemption petitions filed by refineries in 18 different states

within eight judicial circuits. The agency based those denials on a new statutory

interpretation and economic analysis it had not previously applied.

Under the approach to venue adopted by the Court of Appeals, however, several different

regional circuits would have been required to consider substantially similar challenges to the

agency's approach, wasting judicial resources and creating a heightened risk of inconsistent

outcomes.

Congress amended the venue provision in 1977 to prevent those results.

The judgment of the Court of Appeal should be reversed.

I welcome the Court's questions.

Mr. Stewart, are there any limits to aggregating different claims and thereby determining venue in D.C.?

I don't know that there are limits to the agency's authority to publish different decisions

in the same Federal Register notice. We do think that there is some room for judicial scrutiny

of whether what the agency

describes as a single action should be regarded in that way. And so, for example, if the agency

in one federal register notice disapproved a SIP proposed by the state of Ohio and simultaneously

denied an exemption request for a small refinery in Louisiana.

You couldn't cogently regard that as a single action, even if it was published in the

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