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All across Illinois — at town-hall meetings, in
federal courts, in the Capitol — battles are raging over coal power,
the outcome of which could very well determine the role of the black
rock in the nation’s energy future.
Illinois is at the heart of the national debate
because in no other state have coal interests pushed for more new
investment — with critical support from the state’s
governmental leaders. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s
National Electric Technology Laboratory, a year ago Illinois had proposals
for more new coal-based electric-power plants — 16 — than any
other state, and the plants proposed for Illinois would have the capacity
to generate twice as much electricity as even the most ambitious proposals
for any other state. According to the report, “Coal’s
Resurgence in Electric Power Generation,” which was issued on May 1,
2007, more than 10 percent of all new generating capacity from coal-based
power plants would be built in Illinois. With 22 coal-burning power plants
already providing 49 percent of Illinois’ electricity, the state was
unusually reliant on coal for its energy needs. Keep in mind that in the
previous seven years, only 10 coal-based power plants had been constructed
in all of the United States.
A year after the Department of Energy’s
announcement, the Sierra Club has claimed “victory” against all
but five of the previously proposed plants, but those remaining five are
among the biggest of the proposed projects and they would add substantially
to the state’s capacity to generate electricity and air pollution. “We started our coal campaign in Illinois
because more [coal-based power] plants were proposed in Illinois than
anywhere else,” says Becki Clayborn, regional representative of the
Sierra Club. Nowhere has the battle been sharper than in Franklin
County, where EnviroPower LLC wants to build a 600-megawatt CFB
(circulating fluidized bed) coal-burning power station near Benton. On Oct.
17, 2006, U.S. District Court Judge Phil Gilbert halted construction on the
plant when he agreed with the Sierra Club that EnviroPower was attempting
to build the plant under an expired air-pollution permit. Celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz later joined
EnviroPower’s legal team to appeal Gilbert’s ruling. On Jan.
24, 2007, he lashed out at the Sierra Club: “The Sierra Club’s
latest salvo to stop all coal-fired power plants in the Midwest threatens
America’s energy independence,” he said, adding that the case
was critical to America’s future energy policy.
The U.S. Appeals Court of the 7th Circuit heard oral
arguments on the case on Oct. 29, 2007. “We are still waiting for an
opinion,” says Stephen Soble, legal counsel for EnviroPower.
“The project is teed up and ready to go.”
Proponents and opponents of coal both say the stakes
are much higher than just the tens of billions of dollars that could be
invested in the Illinois economy: A whole way of life is being called into
question. Some industry sources say that environmentalists oppose
coal-based electric power because they are trying to cause a severe energy
crisis to force consumers to dramatically change the way they live in order
to drastically reduce their energy use; some environmentalists deride any
process that uses coal, no matter how sophisticated, as 19th-century
technology with global-warming pollution that will destroy vital
ecosystems.
THE GOVERNOR AND THE INDUSTRY Environmentalists don’t get a sympathetic
hearing at the top levels of Illinois state government, where the current
governor is one of the fuel’s top advocates.
Marcelyn Love, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rod
Blagojevich’s Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, says
the governor is very supportive of coal-based energy projects around the
state — for economic reasons. “Coal is very important to Illinois’
economy,” Love says, and will be even more so in the future as oil
and natural gas prices continue to rise. The governor has suggested that,
as other fossil fuels become scarcer, Illinois’ “coal
wealth” could rival Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth. Coal is so important to Illinois that in 2002 the
state initiated a Coal Revival Program, which provides grants to assist
with the development of new, coal-fired electric-power plants in Illinois.
In July 2003, Blagojevich signed legislation that expanded the program by
offering $300 million in state-backed bonds to help finance the
construction of “advanced technology” coal-fueled projects. In
June 2005, he signed legislation that expanded the program to include
coal-gasification plants or integrated gasification-combined cycle plants.
A second piece of legislation that the governor signed that year lets any
natural-gas utility enter into a 20-year supply contract with a company
that produces synthetic gas from coal if the company has begun construction
of a coal-gasification plant by July 1, 2008. On Oct. 12, 2006, he
announced $3 million in state grants to help Power Holdings of Illinois LLC
develop a plant to produce synthetic gas from coal. To Clayborn, Illinois’ commitment to coal
looked more like an addiction than wise energy policy. “We think the
trend is very frightening,” she says. Coal-burning power plants, she
says, already are the Illinois’ largest source of air pollution,
“causing asthma attacks, emphysema, and even deaths.”
According to Environment Illinois, a statewide
environmental advocacy organization, the existing 503 coal-fired power
plants in the United States are responsible for 25 percent of the
smog-forming nitrous oxides put into the air each year, annually triggering
33,000 asthma attacks in Illinois alone; 66 percent of soot-forming sulfur
dioxides; 35 percent of the mercury; and 40 percent of climate-changing
carbon dioxide.
Proposed coal-based power plants would spew less
sulfur and nitrous oxides into the air than older plants, but would not do
much about carbon dioxide, and that, Clayborn says, is a problem. “We are at a crossroads,” she says.
“Either we continue adding to global warming problems or we look for
alternatives.” That is a big part of why the Sierra Club has two of
the remaining coal-based power projects — the Prairie State Energy
Campus, in Lively Grove, and the Taylorville Energy Center, in Taylorville
— squarely in its sights.
PRAIRIE STATE ENERGY CAMPUS While the Blagojevich administration has backed the
Prairie State Energy Campus as “among the cleanest coal plants in
America and a model for new generation,” the Sierra Club has derided
it as “dirty coal.”
The $2.9 billion campus combines a mine, owned by
Peabody Energy, with a 1,600-megawatt supercritical coal-fueled power plant
owned by a partnership consisting of American Municipal Power-Ohio, the
Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, the Indiana Municipal Power Agency, the
Kentucky Municipal Power Agency, the Missouri Joint Municipal Electric
Utility Commission, the Northern Illinois Municipal Power Agency,
Prairie Power Inc., the Southern Illinois Power Cooperative, and
Lively Grove Energy, a subsidiary of Peabody Energy. The construction
project is so huge, and has soaked up so much construction equipment, that
construction in St. Louis, 60 miles away, has been slowed by the lack of
equipment, according to Darren Jaycox, president of Budrovich Excavating, a
major excavation and crane-service company. A supercritical coal-fueled power plant burns coal
more efficiently — by using hotter temperatures and higher pressures
— and hence at lower cost and with less pollution than a conventional
coal-fueled power plant. A spokesman for Prairie State, a St. Louis-based
public-relations specialist who insisted that he not be quoted by name,
says the new plant, which is expected to start operating in 2011 or 2012,
“will be among the cleanest U.S. plants with emission rates that are
approximately 80 percent lower than the average U.S. coal plant operating
in 2006.” Even the carbon dioxide emission rate, he says, “will
be approximately 15 percent lower than that of the typical U.S. coal
plant.”
Clayborn counters that even an 80 percent reduction
in pollution “doesn’t mean it is the cleanest plant
around.” According to Clayborn, the Prairie State Energy Campus will
add “25 thousand tons of toxic air pollution” into the
atmosphere of Washington County and nearby East St. Louis, thereby
endangering the health of “the more than 50,000 asthmatic adults and
children” living in the area. In addition, she says, the plant will
threaten wildlife and fish in the Kaskaskia River ecosystem and dump 270
additional pounds of mercury into Illinois lakes, streams, and rivers each
year. According to the Sierra Club, the Prairie State
Energy Campus will put seven times as much sulfur into the air per megawatt
of capacity as will a comparison plant that first turns coal into gas and
then burns the gas. It would put twice as much mercury into the air as that
comparison plant and four-and-a-half times as much carbon monoxide.
Comparing Prairie State with an existing natural gas-fired power plant, the
Sierra Club says that Prairie State would put almost 400 times more sulfur
into the air and 21 times as much carbon monoxide, and adds that a natural
gas-fired power plant does not cause mercury pollution. “Prairie State has and will meet all standards
under the U.S. Clean Air Act and state regulations,” the Prairie
State spokesman says. “Prairie State has prevailed throughout the
process in the courts wherever it was challenged,” he adds. On Feb. 27, 2008, Prairie State issued a press
release celebrating the expiration of the time limit for the Sierra Club to
appeal an appellate court ruling upholding Prairie State’s permits.
“Prairie State’s environmental profile has continued to prevail
in the courts of law and public opinion,” says Rick A. Bowen, Peabody
senior vice president of Btu conversion and strategic planning. “Each
environmental review has brought stronger affirmation of Prairie
State’s advanced environmental controls.”
Clayborn, however, says the Sierra Club still has
some weapons to use it can use in this fight. She points to a U.S. Supreme
Court decision last year that ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from smokestacks as a
pollutant, and to a federal appeals court ruling in February that said that
power-generating plants have to use the “best available
technology” to remove mercury from their smokestack emissions.
TAYLORVILLE ENERGY CENTER Ten months ago, Blagojevich hailed the decision to
grant Christian County Generation LLC an air construction permit to build
the $2.5 billion Taylorville Energy Center. “The Taylorville Energy Center, using
cutting-edge clean-coal gasification technology, is a great example of how
we can grow our economy and create good-paying jobs while protecting our
environment,” he said. Love says the project is central to the
governor’s energy goals. The Taylorville Energy Center is planned as a
630-megawatt integrated gas combined cycle (IGCC) power plant. The owner,
Christian County Generation, is a joint venture of Nebraska-based Tenaska
Corp. and Kentucky-based MDL Holdings.
Bart Ford, the Taylorville Energy Center project
manager, says it is a mistake to think of the plant as a coal-burning power
plant. “It uses coal, but it does not burn coal,” he says. As
Ford describes it, the Taylorville Energy Center should be seen as two
plants next door to each other: a chemical plant that manufacturers
synthetic gas from coal with negligible emissions and a typical gas-burning
combined-cycle power-generating plant, which in this case, happens to burn
synthetic gas instead of natural gas. “Burning gas is a whole lot cleaner than
burning coal in terms of sulfur, nitrous oxides, and particulate matter,
producing only 10 to 20 percent of what a coal plant would emit,”
Ford says. The process of making the gas includes both a clean-up process
to remove toxins such as mercury, and a process for removing excess carbon
to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, he says. “Our emissions will be dramatically better than
Prairie State’s,” says Ford, and in terms of removing carbon
dioxide, “our technology is commercially available and already in use
on chemical plants,” whereas the technology for coal-burning plants
“is still in the development stage and is not yet commercially
available.”
The Taylorville Energy Center proposal has the
backing of the Citizens’ Utility Board, the American Lung
Association, and the Illinois Clean Air Task Force, but it hasn’t won
over the Sierra Club and some other environmental groups.
IT’S THE CO2 , STUPID “The Taylorville plant does not address CO2 emissions at
all,” Clayborn says, belittling Ford’s claims of removing
carbon from synthetic gas. “One of our main concerns about adding
coal plants without shutting down old ones is that you are just adding to
CO2 emissions. If a [proposed] plant does not have a mechanism to deal with the
CO2 problem,
it should not go forward,” she adds. According to the Sierra Club,
perhaps 37 percent of native plants and animals could be extinct within 43
years unless there is significant immediate action is taken to reduce
global warming. That’s a concern shared by the National
Resources Defense Council. According to Shannon Fisk, staff attorney with
the NRDC’s Midwest Office, in Chicago, “The construction of new
coal-fired power plants is not good for the environment. We should be
facing the future by going to alternatives and improving our energy
efficiency. If we are building new coal plants, we must have binding
commitments to capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions, the best control of other pollutants, and
a serious look at the mining practices of coal.”
The NRDC claims that a recent federal-appeals court
ruling in February requiring each new coal-fired power plant in the U.S. to
adopt stricter measures to control toxic air pollution to meet the most
rigorous standards under the Clean Air Act, coupled with an April 2007 U.S.
Supreme Court decision that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must
regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, shakes up
the outlook for the EnviroPower, Prairie State, and Taylorville Energy
projects by requiring “a new and additional evaluation of pollution
limits and control technologies.”
“Climate change is not a joke, and the
regulation of emissions from power plants should not be a joke,” says
Josh Mogerman, a Midwest spokesman for the NRDC. The Prairie State spokesman dismisses those claims
like an athlete dismissing his opponent’s trash talk. “Prairie
State has prevailed throughout the process in the courts wherever
challenged,” he says. “We will comply with the Clean Air Act,
whatever changes are made in it, and with whatever state regulations are in
effect.”
On April 2, 2008, the Illinois Attorney General Lisa
Madigan and the attorneys general of 16 other states filed a lawsuit to
force the EPA to comply with the Supreme Court ruling on regulating carbon
dioxide as a pollutant. The Taylorville Energy Center, meanwhile, faces a
problem much more daunting than a possible change in EPA regulations.
IT’S THE MONEY “Taylorville can’t be built without
financial incentives from the state,” Clayborn says. Comparing the
Taylorville plant with the experimental FutureGen plant that the U.S.
Department of Energy pulled the plug on earlier this year, Clayborn says,
“If FutureGen could not be built with the government paying most of
the cost, it is hard to see how a private developer can build one.”
Ford says Clayborn is wrong on both counts. The
Taylorville Energy Center is not like FutureGen, he says. The former is a
mid-sized commercial baseload power-generating plant; the latter is a small experimental
plant designed to test techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and
sequestering it — injecting it deep into the ground so it does not
pollute the atmosphere. Nor, he says, does Taylorville Energy need any
subsidy from the state. What it does need is a change in the way Illinois
regulates utilities.
Love, by the way, says the governor believes that the
next president of the United States will move forward with the FutureGen
project. Industry sources say that the electric-utility
deregulation that swept through several states in the 1990s, including
Illinois, discourages the development of baseload power-generating plants.
Baseload plants operate continuously — 24 hours a day — as
distinct from peak power plants that can be turned on and off to supply power only
when demand for it is high. Deregulation divorced utilities from power-generating
plants, forcing utilities to pay market rates for electricity from
competing power plants and imposing regulations that barred utilities from
entering into long-term contracts (more than 36 months) with a power
generators (electric cooperatives, however, can still have long-term
contracts with the suppliers of their electricity). As long as there was
more supply than demand, this worked fine. But what happens when demand is
more than supply? That’s what states are beginning to find out. Some
states are expecting brownouts and blackouts. In Illinois, where the U.S.
EPA predicts that the demand for electricity will climb by 50 percent over
the next 20 years, analysts are expecting that consumers will pay sharply
higher rates for electricity unless more baseload-generating capacity is
built. Ford says that baseload plants are more expensive to
build than peak power plants, although they are cheaper to operate. Unless
someone is committed to buy the power that is produced 24 hours a day in a
baseload plant, then it is too risky financially to build one. The few
efforts that have been made to build baseload plants without long-term
sales contracts, he says, have gone bust. What Taylorville Energy wants, he says, is a change
in Illinois law to let utilities enter into long-term contracts with power
generators — akin to the law that lets a natural-gas utility enter
into a 20-year contract with a company that makes synthetic gas from coal
— so that Taylorville can get the private financing to build the
project. Just such a change, called the “Clean Coal Program
Law,” passed the Illinois Senate unanimously with the support of
Blagojevich, but it has been bottled up in the House. Taylorville Energy’s chief worry, according to
industry sources, has to be that anti-coal environmentalists will team up
with Enron-style energy speculators to defeat a law that will let utilities
stabilize the supply and price of electricity. Ironically, a defeat of the Clean Coal Program Law
might inadvertently boost a different kind of coal-gasification technology.
Many utilities and energy producers have turned to natural gas to fuel
their power plants because of the strenuous opposition to coal-based plants
of any sort, and because it is much easier to meet the demands of the Clean
Air Act with natural gas, and that increased demand has pushed up the price
of gas and raised concerns about future shortages. Even if a company is effectively blocked from making
gas from coal and then burning the gas itself to make electricity, it could
still make gas from coal and then sell it to gas companies. Two companies
plan to do just that. Secure Energy is moving forward with plans to spend
$100 million to build a plant to make substitute gas from coal, which it
will pipe directly into the natural gas pipeline system. That plant will be
built on a site behind the Caterpillar facility in Decatur. Robert Gilpin,
chief executive officer of Power Holdings LLC, says his company is within a
year of starting construction on a $1 billion plant near Mount Vernon to
make pipeline-quality substitute gas from coal.
THE CLUB’S ALTERNATIVE So far, the Sierra Club has found only one coal-based
energy project in Illinois that it can support, and that is the
200-megawatt generating unit that City Water, Light & Power is building
in Springfield. Clayborn says the Sierra Club supports that project because
“CWLP agreed to other things to reduce its CO2 footprint. They agreed
to close two older plants when they start up the new one; they agreed to
purchase wind power, to educate customers about reducing energy use, and
they agreed to clean up three other boilers to reduce their emissions to
the lowest rates of other existing boilers.”
With the threat of global warming growing every day,
the Sierra Club believes the first plank in Illinois’ energy policy
should be conservation. “We believe energy efficiency can reduce the
need for electricity by more than 40 percent,” Clayborn says.
“In general, we waste a lot of energy. An Illinois residential survey
found that the No. 1 cause of wasted electricity is the second refrigerator
in the garage.”
Lawrence Chapman, a partner in Clayco Inc., a
national commercial real-estate development and construction company with
offices in Chicago and St. Louis, says that buildings use 65 percent of all
electricity produced in the United States, and that in doing so they
account for 30 percent of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. He
predicts that regulations to cut buildings’ energy use will be part
of the standard building code used in cities across the country within 10
years. Douglas Farr, president of Farr Associates, a
Chicago-based architecture and urban-planning firm, says a 40 percent
reduction in building energy use is feasible. “Over the last 10 years, Farr Associates has
designed 12 buildings we call high-performance that reduce their energy
consumption by 40 percent or more compared to what the code
requires,” he says. “We do this with off-the-shelf
technologies,” he adds. “All new buildings and major
renovations in Illinois could be designed to achieve this same level of
performance and avoid the need for additional coal plants.”
Peter Downs is a St. Louis editor and a
freelance writer .
This article appears in Apr 10-16, 2008.
