Mercury ruling hits coal plants in state

By Jack Money

Published: February 9, 2008

A major electric provider will delay improvements to a coal-fired power plant in northeast Oklahoma after federal mercury emissions standards were struck down Friday by a federal appeals court.

Another provider, though, said Friday that improvements at its two coal-fired plants already are in place.

State air quality regulators said the court's decision wasn't a surprise. They add that members of Oklahoma's Air Quality Council still have to decide whether Oklahoma should wait on the federal Environmental Protection Agency to create new rules or adopt stricter standards proposed by a national air quality interest group that would require mercury emission reductions of 90 percent by coal-fired power plants.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on Friday that the EPA violated the Clean Air Act when it created a cap and trade systems for mercury emissions from coal-fired plants.

The cap and trade system would have allowed power companies violating the emission standards to meet them by buying credits from other companies that were emitting less than permitted. The system gradually would have lowered mercury emissions nationally from 48 tons annually to about 15 tons — about 70 percent — by 2018, according to the EPA's Web site.

Oklahoma's Air Quality Council met in January to consider its options.

Then, environmentalists urged the group to adopt the stricter standard, saying that Oklahoma had some of the highest mercury contamination in the nation and that the condition causes health problems for pregnant women, women of child-bearing age and children.

Any rules ultimately adopted by the council must be approved by the Environmental Quality Board of Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality and Oklahoma's Legislature.

"I'm not surprised,” said Eddie Terrill, DEQ's air quality division director, about Friday's court ruling. "That is what we expected.”

Terrill said the agency's Air Quality Council will have another chance to make a decision about the proposed rules when it meets again in April.

Representatives of Oklahoma's major utility companies described the court's ruling as a setback.

Brian Alford, a spokesman for Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co., said his company already has spent about $4.5 million to get monitoring equipment installed so the company could comply with the new rule at its two coal-fired power plants.

"The good news is, we will have to monitor, no matter what,” Alford said on Friday. "Our equipment was installed ahead of the original deadline, and we were fully prepared to administer the rule as it existed.”

He said OG&E has two coal-fired power plants. One, at Muskogee, has three coal-fired power generation turbines that each put out about 500 megawatts in power. The other plant — the Sooner Plant at Red Rock — has two coal-fired turbines. Each one generates about 500 megawatts in power.

Alford said the utility installed mercury sensor equipment designed to measure mercury emissions at the plants' stacks.

Would the cap and trade system struck down by the court have been good for OG&E?

"It would depend on what the monitoring showed, obviously,” Alford said. "We do have some of the more efficient, high performance plants in the country.

"But again, the monitoring would give us the indication on where we would be.”

Public Service Co. of Oklahoma, meanwhile, said it will wait to make some improvements to its power generation plant in Oologah. The plant there has four power generation units — two fired by coal, each capable of generating about 460 megawatts of power, and two others fired by natural gas.

A spokeswoman for American Electric Power, which owns the PSO, said Friday the company had been preparing to make upgrades to the Oologah plant designed to help reduce mercury emissions and to take care of other pollution caused by the plants.

Between now and 2010, AEP plans to spend about $5.1 billion on all of its plants on broad pollution controls. Another $100 million had been earmarked to make mercury emissions improvements at plants generating about 5,000 megawatts of power.

Oologah's plant was one targeted for mercury emissions improvements, said Melissa McHenry, the spokeswoman. McHenry said AEP would re-evaluate its plans because of the court decision.

"It would not be prudent to move forward with a mercury reduction retrofit before we know what the final reduction requirements will be, since that will determine exactly what steps we need to take to reduce emissions,” she said Friday.

Comments