Sunday, September 4, 2011
By Glenn Evans
Longview News Journal
State environmental advocates this past week applauded energy companies doing business in East Texas for announcing closure of coal-fired power units in response to stricter federal pollution standards. But they said more could be done to meet a Jan. 1 deadline to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions.
Karen Hadden of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition and Stephanie Cole of the Sierra Club also said Luminant energy could meet the deadline if it had the corporate will to do so.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in July added Texas to its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which requires coal-fired power plants to cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 64 percent of 2010 levels by the coming new year.
Sulfur dioxide is a major contributor to acid formation in the atmosphere. Too much in the air can affect aquatic life and enters the human food chain, causing developmental disorders as it rains down on area lakes.
Hadden and Cole focused their comments on Luminant, which operates three East Texas plants — Martin Lake in Harrison County, Monticello outside Mount Pleasant and Big Brown near Corsicana — which supply power to Texas’ major power grid.
Those three plants also contribute 42 percent of the sulfur dioxide emissions in Texas, they said. A Luminant spokesman did not respond to a request to verify or dispute that figure.
The two spoke to a lesser extent about AEP Southwest Electric Power Co., which runs the Pirkey plant outside Hallsville and the Welsh plant near Pittsburg.
SWEPCO’s coal-fired plants feed a separate grid, the Southwest Power Pool, serving most of Northeast Texas including Longview. Luminant feeds the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT is the power grid for much of the rest of Texas, including Tyler.
Since the EPA’s announcement, SWEPCO has said it will shutter one of three units at the Welsh plant to meet the lower emissions benchmark.
But Luminant has not announced its response other than to outline four options: reducing electrical production, conducting rolling shutdowns, installing equipment designed to neutralize acid gasses or mothballing unidentified plants.
A Luminant spokesman declined to say this past week what the company might do beyond those considerations, which were announced in mid-July.
"We have said all along that this rule, if it is implemented on Jan. 1, 2012, without significant changes, it will have a negative impact on reliability in the ERCOT market," Luminant spokesman Allan Koenig said in an email response to questions. He added that options the environmentalists outlined cannot be done by the January deadline.
Hadden and Cole recommended companies producing coal-generated power use lower-sulfur coal mined from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, instead of Texas’ dirtier lignite, and that they install and fully use scrubbers. Those emissions reducers don’t neutralize acid gas but capture it before it reaches the air.
The two environmentalists estimated the cost of retrofitting the three Luminant plants with clean-air technology at $3.6 billion — not the best option given the youngest East Texas plant, Pirkey, is 27 years old.
"It’s throwing money after bad to keep them open," Cole said. "It would be billions of dollars."
"They can build new gas(-fired) plants for less, and faster."
The two recommended, instead, that Luminant close the plants and invest in solar, wind and geothermal power.
"There’s things that could happen in Northeast Texas in terms of jobs and energy production," Hadden said. "These things can be combined, the various forms of renewables."
Koenig did not respond to an email question about jobs created by investing in renewable power sources.
"We are one of the largest taxpayers in the state and, as an example of this, are a significant taxpayer around Martin Lake to the tune of about $22 million in 2010 alone," he wrote. "We are also a significant employer, and many of our jobs have a ripple effect in the community. Very simply put, this rule threatens those taxes and those jobs across our system – not just near Longview."
Hadden also produced a map of abandoned oil East Texas oil wells.
"We can tap the (geothermal) heat off these wells," she said. "And it’s pretty easy. It would require (power transmission) lines. There will be expense in the lines, too, but it would mean jobs."
Still, she said it is clear American power producers are not going to abandon coal outright.
"We should certainly be transitioning today," she added. "It’s going to get harder and harder, just like oil. It’s getting harder, now."
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