Strife
in the Coalfields
Dominion’s
plans to build a coal-fired plant stir worries
about greenhouse gases, ozone, smog, dirty coal
trucks and mountaintop removal.
Outside
Oxbow Center civic hall in St. Paul one night just
before Christmas, blue and yellow CSX diesels
growled as they pulled a unit train filled with
loaded coal hoppers. Inside, more than a dozen
concerned mountain folk listened intently as a
young man with a beard worked his Apple laptop
through a Power Point presentation.
“And
this is what mountaintop removal looks from
above,” said Mike McCoy, an environmental
activist with the Charlottesville office of
Appalachian Voices, an ecology and cultural group.
The aerial photo showed a gigantic moonscape of
what was once a mountain.
Flipping
his laptop keys, McCoy registered to-scale images
of the St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal and
the Golden Gate Bridge to give sense of size to
the destruction. All easily fit within the surface
mine that McCoy said was in Wise County, the
state’s major coal-producing county and home to
St. Paul.
Mountaintop
removal is but one of the curses that ecological
activists say will befall the coalfields of
Southwest Virginia if Dominion is allowed to
proceed with a 585 megawatt, $1.6 billion
coal-fired plant nearby that will churn out
electricity to 146,000 homes in Dominion’s
market area far to the east.
Among
their fears: The plant would generate huge volumes
of greenhouses gases, inflict pollution that
causes potentially fatal respiratory disease,
employ heavy coal trucks that will crumble
highways, and encourage mountaintop removal, a
method of surface mining on a vast scale that
Virginia has so far largely escaped.
A
number of local citizens and even the normally
staid regional newspaper, the Bristol Herald
Courier, have joined forces in opposing
Dominion’s project. Underscoring all of their
worries is the region’s experience with another
coal-fired electrical plant: American Electric
Power’s Cabo plant, built in the 1950s a few
miles from St. Paul, which is the second worst air
polluter in the state.
AEP's
Cabo plant. (Photo by Camille A. Galuszka)
Countering
the activists, Dominion officials assert that
their so-called Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center
will be among the least-polluting new coal-fired
facilities in the country. It will use what is
called a circulating fluidized bed technology that
should greatly reduce emissions. It is supposed to
be so efficient that it can burn abandoned piles
of coal, called “gobs,” along with logs from
fallen trees, instead of high-priced, low-sulfur
coal. Dominion needs the new coal-fired plant to
help meet new demand, says utility spokesman Dan
Genest. The electricity it generates will go only
to Virginia customers of Dominion, and the energy
is needed to meet the extra 4,000 megawatts of
power that the utility estimates it must generate
by 2017, Genest says.
A
key hurdle for Dominion will come Tuesday, Jan. 8,
when the State Corporation Commission will hold a
hearing on issuing a permit. Another needed permit
would come from the State Air Pollution Control
Board, which has been considering the matter for
at least three years. If the two permits are
approved, Dominion could start building the new
plant about two miles west of St. Paul on U.S. 58
by this April with completion in 2012.
Back
in St. Paul, opposition forces are massing for a
vigorous assault. “We’re preparing a petition
a mile long,” says Kathy Selvage, a resident of
Stephens who endured the effects of mountaintop
removal next to her Wise County house. She and
dozens of other activists plan on chartering buses
to make certain their voices are heard at the SCC.
A slew of ecology groups is involved, including
the Sierra Club, the Chesapeake Climate Action
Network, the Southern Environmental Law Center and
Appalachian Voices.
Indeed,
it’s hard not to sympathize with Selvage and
other residents of the Southwest Virginia
coalfields. Coal has historically been a boon and
bane to the hardscrabble and largely Scots-Irish
settlers who have inhabited a part of the Old
Dominion different from any other. The region’s
western tip is about as far west as Detroit.
Several other state capitals are closer than the
one in Richmond where many Virginians long
regarded mountaineers as alien and laughable
hillbillies.
When
coal mining began in earnest at the turn of the
20th century, shyster land agents from far-away
companies and law firms preyed upon the ignorance
of the locals to win one-sided mineral rights.
Deep mines provided jobs that were dirty, unsafe
and payable only in script or company money.
Scores died in accidents. Attempts to organize
unions were brutally put down by some mine
operators and their hired thugs.
Starting
in the 1940s, surplus earth-moving equipment came
on the market from such distant spots as
coral-covered Pacific islands where they had been
used to build air bases for Japan-bound bombers.
Throughout Appalachia, the gear ripped apart the
sides of mountains to get at coal cheaply and
without care for the aftermath. I know of this
personally since I spent part of my childhood in
central West Virginia where I played on abandoned
strip mines with their left-behind earth movers
and skeletons of animals dead from the yellow,
sulfurous ponds of toxic, coal-tainted water.
One
well-worn mountain parable states that if the
cards had been played right long ago, the entire
Appalachian region from Pennsylvania to Alabama
could be brimming over with money from energy
projects with wonderful schools, hospitals, parks
and other services. If anything, the opposite has
been true. Wealth flowed out of the area into the
pockets of unscrupulous coal operators and big-
time mineral lease holders such as railroads and
oil companies. Appalachia became a code word for
poor health and bad education. Throughout much of
the Virginia coalfields, unemployment rates had
traditionally been in the double digits until a
recent back-to-work program lowered the rate to
about 5 percent – better than it had been, but
still worse than in the rest of the Old Dominion.
The
people of Wise and adjacent Russell County,
however, have concrete reasons for their fears
about Dominion's St. Paul facility. AEP’s Clinch
River Plant at Carbo is the No. 2 air polluter in
the state, emitting more than 37 million tons of
waste a year. As the Bristol Herald Courier
notes, smog from plants like Carbo contributes to
asthma and is a factor in fatal heart attacks. If
built, Dominion’s new plant would place between
No. 8 and 9 on the list of top state air
polluters.
Coal
is an attractive prospect for utilities. AEP,
based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the most
coal-dependant utilities in the U.S., using
massive coal resources up and down the Ohio River
Valley and in Appalachia. Some of its giant
generating plants are “mine-mouth” facilities
located adjacent to operating coal mines, so there
is no significant transportation cost for the
fuel.
Such
favorable economies make AEP one of the cheapest
power producers in the country, giving it a strong
advantage as it tries to market electricity beyond
its normal markets to areas served by high-cost
utilities. But AEP is also one of the country’s
biggest single polluters. Not long ago, attorneys
general in Massachusetts and New York banded
together to oppose AEP’s pollution while it was
trying to sell cheaper electricity in the
Northeast. Pollutants from AEP’s plants were
causing smog and ozone carried by winds to the
Northeast, while the Midwestern utility enjoyed
the revenue from out-of-state power sales.
AEP
is under constant legal pressure to clean up its
sites. The Carbo plant, for example, is under a
federal court order to restrict emissions by 2009.
Residents
around St. Paul couldn’t ask for a better (or
worse) example than the Carbo plant. But Dominion
says its Virginia City facility will be light
years ahead in clean technology.
According
to Dominion's Genest, the fluidized bed
technology will dramatically decrease the new
plant's pollutants. The technology, which has been
around for at least 30 years, uses air jets to
keep coal suspended mid-air as it burns.
Pulverized limestone is sprayed into the flames to
draw off much of the polluting sulfur dioxide. The
resulting material is gypsum, which Dominion hopes
can be sold for other uses. Moreover, Genest says,
a dry scrubber system will reduce about 95 percent
of nitrous oxides and mercury and most of the fly
ash.
The
fluidized-bed system is so efficient that it can
burn lower grades of coal ranging from 4,000 to
11,000 BTUs per pound, Genest says. Recently, some
utilities had to go to a much-higher cost coal
ranging in the 13,000 BTUs per pound and 0.7
percent sulfur levels to meet air pollution
standards. Genest says that the new technology
will allow Dominion to scour the Southwest
Virginia fields looking for “gob” coal that
had been abandoned as unsuitable at surface mines,
deep mines and preparation plants. Drawing down
the gob piles, which leach acidic run-off into
creeks and streams, will be a significant
environmental bonus.
The
fluidized-bed technology also will be able to burn
fallen logs in forests, although Genest says that
Dominion will not log live trees for fuel. As much
as 20 percent of the plant’s total fuel could
come from wood.
Some
local residents remain unconvinced. Pete Ramey of
Big Stone Gap, who has worked in the coal mining
industry for three decades, says a truly clean
technology to burn coal hasn’t been invented.
“The industry refuses to invest in clean
technology,” he says.
Ramey’s
not the only naysayer. The U.S. Forest Service
complained that the project could pollute the
ecological sensitive Pisgah National Forest and
its Linville Gorge Wilderness not far away in
northwestern North Carolina. The Virginia
Department of Environmental Quality raised similar
concerns. Last month, Dominion reached agreement
with the state and U.S. Forest Service to decrease
its sulfur dioxide emissions, purchase permanent
offsets for sulfur dioxide emissions and buy
sulfur dioxide allowances from other polluters,
Genest says.
Even
so, activists raise still more worries:
-
Local
roads already have too many heavy coal trucks
that mash up pavement and spread coal dust;
Dominion will overload local roads with more.
Genest confirms that Dominion does plan to use
trucks to bring in coal. The utility predicts
that it will use about 580 truckloads of coal
a day but that is only about 3.2 percent of
the total daily vehicular volume of 18,400
daily on U.S. 58. A CSX rail line runs nearby
and a spur could eventually be built to the
plant.
-
The
plant won’t bring much to the party in terms
of payroll. True, more than 800 workers will
be employed during the four-year construction
phase, but the number will fall drastically
when the plant goes in operation.
-
The
Dominion plant will increase the practice of
mountaintop removal in Virginia. However,
there seems to be some confusion over the
definition of “mountaintop” removal.
Surface or strip mining has been going on for
years in Virginia. “Mountaintop” removal,
which began in earnest in the 1990s in West
Virginia and Kentucky, involves stripping a
mountain down from the top to reach coal
seams. Instead of being pushed back into
something close to the original mountain
contour, the overburden is shoved into stream
and creek valleys, creating havoc with
wildlife and watersheds. McCoy of Appalachian
Voices asserts that there are about 30 or more
mountaintop removal projects in the state,
involving about 25 percent of Wise County.
However,
Mike Abbott of the state Division of Mined Land
Reclamation in Big Stone Gap says that under
state definitions, “mountaintop” removal
includes mines where the state has granted
variance from reclamation laws that require that
the overburden be pushed back to the original
contour. Only six of those variances have been
granted so far and, of them, only two are in
Wise County. Genest of Dominion says that the
utility hasn’t decided where to source its
fuel, effectively dodging the issue and raising
questions about media statements that Dominion
will use only Virginia coal.
-
Virginia
should be looking for ways to conserve energy
and generate new power through non-polluting
sources such as windmills, activists say,
claiming that Dominion could capture 585
megawatts of power through conservation alone.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s new energy plan
supposedly calls for similar goals.
As
the back and forth shows, the issues confronting
the coalfields are exceptionally myriad and
complex. As anyone who has ever lived in the
coalfields, including me, can tell you, even
restoring the land's original contour has its
limitations: Once the top soil is stripped out,
not much will grow in the generally toxic dirt
pushed back. I remember what ridges in West
Virginia looked like in the 1960s – horrible
gashes of earth that stretched mile after mile.
They’ve now been pushed back, thanks to a 1977
federal law, but they will still be scarred
forever with bands of vegetation-less “dead
zones.”
In
the Dominion case, there is yet another issue that
confounds. Dominion does need to find new
generating capacity. It is trying other forms of
power, such as adding to its North Anna nuclear
power station. As Bacon’s Rebellion has
recently reported (see "Rethinking
North Anna"), that plan has its own
issues surrounding a new and uncertified model of
a nuclear reactor. The Virginia City Hybrid Energy
Center cannot produce a Chernobyl-style nuclear
disaster, obviously. But no matter how you slice
it, the new plant will contribute to greenhouse
gases at levels impossible at a nuclear plant or a
windmill. Conservation alone can’t serve all
future power demands.
Do
I have the answer? I do not, although I have my
doubts about the new coal-fired plant. One thing
is certain, however: I’d hate to see coalfield
people get screwed over yet again just so the
nouveau riche in Loudoun or Prince William or
Henrico can enjoy their McMansions.
--
January 5, 2008
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