Coal-fired power plant: blessing or curse?

A consortium of five power companies, led by Dominion, has proposed building an enormous, new, coal-fired power plant near St. Paul, VA, about three hours north of Asheville. With Dominion now just beginning to seek government permits and approvals, the plant is projected to begin construction in 2008 and begin operation in 2012. The plant's "circulating fluidized bed" (CFB) technology would enable it to burn waste coal (a byproduct of coal processing that's mostly rock) and biomass (trees or construction waste) as well as regular coal. It would generate 500-600 megawatts of electricity–enough to power as many as 360,000 homes, far more than are located anywhere nearby. The people who do live in this mostly rural, disproportionately poor part of Virginia already suffer the ill effects of some of the worst air quality in the nation, largely due to emissions from other coal-fired power plants in the region. Points of view Clean-air advocates are encouraged by the proposed plant's relatively tight air-pollution controls, about as good as coal-fired power plants get at minimizing smokestack emissions of the main toxins associated with burning coal. But they're wary of the plant's potential use of biomass and waste coal, as it's not clear how well pollution controls devised for regular coal will work with those alternative fuels, which create different combustion products. Global-warming activists, generally opposed to building any new fossil-fuel burning facilities, are particularly opposed to the proposed plant's relatively inefficient CFB technology, which extracts roughly half the energy from the same amount of coal and greenhouse-gas production as "gasification," a different kind of coal-burning technology. Worse still for global warming is the proposed burning of waste coal, which produces even more greenhouse gas (and more toxic wastes, too) per kilowatt of electricity. Water-quality advocates are concerned about the plant's effects on the Clinch River, as Dominion has already struck a deal with the county's public utility authority to take one million gallons of water per day, about 20 percent of which will be discharged after use, according to a Dominion spokesman. The potential for rainwater leaching out toxins from the vast quantity of ash this plant will produce, polluting waterways and aquifers, is an additional concern. If waste coal is burned, that concern grows: if you burn 100 tons of waste coal, about 85 tons of ash remain. Dominion has been describing the proposed plant as a "clean coal power station," with state-of-the-art pollution controls. It has also emphasized its intention to buy coal for the plant in Virginia, as a benefit to the area's economy. However, people concerned about the ill effects of large-scale strip mining in the region say that the label "clean coal" shouldn't be applied to the end product of a process that destroys landscapes wholesale. Throughout Appalachia's coalfield region, hundreds of thousands of acres of forested mountains–some of the richest, most biodiverse temperate-climate hardwood forests in the world–have been turned into barren moonscapes by large-scale strip mining in recent years, including more than 100,000 acres in Virginia. In Wise County, where the proposed plant would be located, more than 41,000 acres are currently permitted for surface mining. Dominion, together with local and regional political and business leaders, has also been touting the jobs the proposed plant will add to the local economy. Skeptics note that most of those jobs will be temporary, for construction work at the plant, and that likely much or most of that work will be done by specialist contractors from outside the region, rather than by local contractors and workers. The big picture Most people–corporate spokesmen, government officials and private citizens alike–have particular interests and are more concerned about some factors relating to this power plant proposal than about others. But the potential impact of the plant can't truly be assessed without looking at all of these factors at once, and looking at the plant's wider context as well. A key part of that wider context is the old and very dirty coal-fired power plant operated by AEP along the Clinch River in Carbo, just a few miles from the site of the proposed new plant. Operating since the 1950s and lacking modern pollution controls, the smokestacks at Carbo emit as much as a quarter of a million pounds of sulphuric acid and two million pounds of hyrdrochloric acid each year, along with mercury and other toxins. Shutting this plant down would be a pure blessing for everyone who cares about acid rain and water quality, or who breathes the air in this region–except perhaps for the people who have jobs at Carbo, where other jobs are scarce. However, those jobs are likely to be lost anyway–perhaps sooner if the new plant is built, as AEP is part of the consortium proposing the plant. So far, AEP has avoided installing pollution controls at the Carbo plant by cleaning up other, more modern plants it owns elsewhere, under federal cap-and-trade rules. It apparently has no intention of making similar upgrades at the plant at Carbo, but surely must expect that someday either the state or the federal government will no longer allow it to pump out as much pollution as the plant does today. When that day comes, it's a good guess that AEP will shut the Carbo plant down rather than upgrade it. AEP's stake in the new power plant, so close to its old one, certainly makes closure of the old plant look more likely. Dominion's claim that the proposed plant means a gain in local jobs thus looks even more hollow. The proposed plant's wider context surely also includes its fuel sources. Local sourcing of any fuel for such a large plant would have devastating effects locally. If biomass is a significant part of the fuel mix, many thousands of acres of forest will be stripped. If waste coal is used, vast quantities of toxic ash will be produced. If regular coal is used, the proposed plant will create a large demand for coal for the next 50 years or more–while it's typically projected that if coal mining continues at anything like its current rate, Appalachian coal will be pretty much mined out in 20 to 30 years. Worse still, most of that coal would likely come from strip mining, which has already proved devastating to the region's environment, economy and local communities. In the past half-century (roughly the time the Carbo plant has been in operation), as the way coal is produced in Appalachia has shifted away from underground mining toward large-scale surface mining, coal production in Virginia has doubled while jobs for miners have mostly vanished. These trends have accelerated in recent years–as recently as 1990, more than 10,000 miners were employed in Virginia; in 2004, only 4,000 such jobs remained. There's no reason to believe that the jobs picture in coal mining will improve in the decades ahead, as the last of the coal is mined out. Far from stimulating long-term economic life in the region, local sourcing of fuel for the proposed plant would strip the region's coalfields and forests on an accelerated, short-term schedule before presumably moving on to other sources of fuel, leaving scant basis for any economic or community life here in the future.