The NYT reports on how efforts to reduce air pollution have sometimes led to an increase in water pollution.
Even as a growing number of coal-burning power plants around the nation have moved to reduce their air emissions, many of them are creating another problem: water pollution. Power plants are the nation’s biggest producer of toxic waste, surpassing industries like plastic and paint manufacturing and chemical plants, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
Much power plant waste once went into the sky, but because of toughened air pollution laws, it now often goes into lakes and rivers, or into landfills that have leaked into nearby groundwater, say regulators and environmentalists.
Officials at the plant here in southwest Pennsylvania — named Hatfield’s Ferry — say it does not pose any health or environmental risks because they have installed equipment to limit the toxins the facility releases into the Monongahela River and elsewhere.
But as the number of scrubbers around the nation increases, environmentalists — including those in Pennsylvania — have become worried. The Environmental Protection Agency projects that by next year, roughly 50 percent of coal-generated electricity in the United States will come from plants that use scrubbers or similar technologies, creating vast new sources of wastewater.
Yet no federal regulations specifically govern the disposal of power plant discharges into waterways or landfills. Some regulators have used laws like the Clean Water Act to combat such pollution. But those laws can prove inadequate, say regulators, because they do not mandate limits on the most dangerous chemicals in power plant waste, like arsenic and lead.
One problem is the focus on scrubbers as a means of pollution control when, in some instances, fuel switching or other measures may to the trick. (Of course, for years federal regulations discouraged use of low-sulfur coal as a means of emission control, even though it could have produced greater emission reductions. See Ackerman & Hassler, Clean Coal, Dirty Air (1981).)
This is not the only example of environmental regulations controlling pollution in one media while increasing it in another. The federal oxygenate mandate for reformulated gas in the 1990 Clean Air Act resultedin widespread use of MTBE in gasoline, which has led to widespread groundwater contamination in many parts of the country. Part of the kicker with MTBE, however, is that it did very little to reduce automotive emissions. Indeed, the original mandate was less about pollution control than increasing markets for another oxygenate: ethanol. [For those interested, I told the story behind the mandate in "Clean Fuels, Dirty Air," a chapter in Environmental Politics: Public Costs, Private Rewards (Greve & Smith eds. 1992) that was somewhat inspired by the Ackerman & Hassler work. A shorter version is available in The Public Interest archives here.]
kdackson says:
What you fail to recognize is that along with the conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and conservation of momentum, there is a little known conservation law:
The Conservation of Filth.
Or, that for something to get clean, something else has to get dirty.
October 13, 2009, 8:43 amkdackson says:
With scrubbers, as with any technology, there is a smart way and a dumb way to implement. Dumb way is to just use water. Smarter way is to use something to neutralize the acids (i.e., lime) in the scrubber water.
Smartest way is to add the lime to the combustion chamber to reduce corrosion and pre-clean the stream before a scrubber removes the particulates.
However, the regulators have made retrofits to implement the smartest way highly impractical, due to the potential for repermitting and significantly added costs.
October 13, 2009, 8:55 amluagha says:
Another kicker for MTBE is that MTBE was/is a poisonous waste product of many industrial processes. Normally, companies have to pay to have the MTBE taken away and dealt with. By lobbying for the law that mandated its use, they made it a commodity that they could sell.
October 13, 2009, 10:38 amtamerlane says:
The NYT and its readership are once again shocked by the Law of Unintended Consequences. It reminds me of a story I heard on NPR within the past week: Environmentalists in the southwest USA are just becoming aware that their deserts are the best place to site real attempts at harnessing solar energy. They’re as upset as the late Ted Kennedy was when serious efforts were made to harness wind power within a day’s sail of his shore front properties. Your true “environmentalist” will only be happy when all us peons are shivering around a very small fireplace.
October 13, 2009, 11:20 amSarcastro says:
The lesson of the Law of Unintended Consequences: never try anything I don’t like.
October 13, 2009, 12:15 pmLN says:
OMG liberals fall prey again to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Whereas if we did everything my way, everything would work out exactly as I intended!
October 13, 2009, 12:26 pmkdackson says:
Not a liberal or conservative thing. To wit:
Human-created law says: “Thou shalt clean smokestack exhaust”.
Natural law of the Conservation of Filth says: “For something to get clean, something else has to get dirty”.
Law of unintended consequence comes to bite humans who created the law in the ass, because they forgot that the natural law does not bend to the whims of humans.
Result: humans who created the smokestack-cleaning law are shocked, shocked! to find something else has gotten dirty. So they pass another law while forgetting (or ignoring) the natural law.
Happens all the time.
October 13, 2009, 1:10 pmSarcastro says:
kdackson makes a great point. Just like Conservation of Energy means force is for losers, Conservation of Filth means cleaning stuff is a bad idea.
October 13, 2009, 1:24 pmkdackson says:
Never said it was a bad thing. Just have to figure out what to do with the stuff you used when you cleaned. Most people just forget that part.
October 13, 2009, 1:36 pmLarryA says:
Anyone ever see an environmentalist that wasn’t worried?
October 13, 2009, 2:38 pmDuracomm says:
Lets not forget that the mandate for scrubbers allowed the eastern coal mines to survive.
Without the requirement for scrubbers those mines would have likely been out of business and in that case there would have been no coal mining via mountain top removal.
Yet another example of environmental micro-regulation of one problem creating another.
October 13, 2009, 2:53 pmkdackson says:
Isn’t that the definition of the Law of Unintended Consequences?
October 13, 2009, 3:47 pmSplunge says:
This is an asinine and brain-dead article, as I guess you’d expect from the English and journalism majors mistaking their fin de siecle (for Old Media) fat salaries at the New York Times for signs of their competence to opine on anything whatsoever.
The main purpose of scrubbers in stacks is to remove sulfates, not because they’re actually dangerous, or ever have been, but because they make acid rain, which tends to kill New England and New York lakes. If they inject the sulfates straight into the river, it might make the water taste bad — although that’s doubtful, they’re mostly quite insoluble — but it isn’t particularly dangerous.
And the fluff about heavy metals is even more foolish. Just where would you rather have your heavy metals: injected into the river, or sprayed into the air? The answer is obvious, if you compare, say, the epidemiological consequences to children of lead in old paint and lead in the breathing air from decades of leaded gasoline.
I don’t even want to talk to morons who go on to ask: But why can’t we have none at all, anywhere? Because life is about choices, of course, and I personally would favor withholding the franchise from anyone who hasn’t grasped that fact by the age of majority.
October 13, 2009, 7:13 pmAnonymous says:
Splunge is absolutely correct.
Also, NOx systems oxidize most of the heavy metals allowing them to be collected in the ESP. And it’s far from certain that bituminous (high sulfur) coal with a proper NOx and SOx system is cleaner than PRB (high ash) coal with the same.
October 13, 2009, 8:48 pmEmily Wilkes says:
kdackson’s Conservation of Filth comment makes a lot of sense. Nobody wants it in their backyard or in their water, but it has to go somewhere.
October 13, 2009, 9:41 pmAnonymous says:
Emily,
The scrubbers combine SOx with lime to form gypsum, a useful product (wallboards). The alternative is to let it into the air where SOx forms acid rain and then ends up in the water supply anyways. There is no “conservation of filth” here. These are simple compounds that can easily synthesize useful or inert compounds.
Kdackson also has some errors in his second comment. 1) I’ve never heard of a “just water” scrubber on a power plant. 3)His “smartest way” is unattached to reality. If you inject sorbents into the furnace, the efficiency is much lower and the products will be caught in the ash system (baghouse of ESP). This is still a perfectly good solution for low-sulfur coals. If you collected them with just water you’d get all the ash also and have a much bigger problem than sulfury (word? prob not) water.
October 14, 2009, 12:02 amkdackson says:
Yeah Anonymous, introducing lime into furnaces is so unattached to reality that many fluidized coal burners are designed to actually do this. In reality, practice has been reduced to either lime in the combustion bed or in a secondary fluidization chamber where the lime is fluidized by the exhaust gasses.
“Just water” scrubbers were used to eliminate particulates only; these have been largely replaced by electrostatic units. However, you still have the SOx gas. Most modern scrubbers for power plants use a neutralizer in the water to remove SOx.
Not to mention that you add a slight excess of the stoichiometric requirement to completely adsorb the sulfur in the coal. According to my reference, high sulfur coal is only 3.8% sulfur by mass (Speight: Perry’s Standard Tables and Formulas for Chemical Engineers, 2002), so it does not take a whole lot of lime to combine with the sulfur.
October 14, 2009, 8:03 amDuracomm says:
Splunge, Anonymous, and kdackson,
Prior to the 1977 clean air act revisions power plants met the emissions standards using low sulfur coal from the western US.
The 1977 clean air act mandated the use of scrubbers, no matter how clean the exhaust stream was without scrubbers.
Absent that regulatory requirement the clean air standards could have been met by using low sulfur western coal. No scrubbers required and none of the associated water pollution from scrubbers.
Mountaintop removal mining is a current high profile issue in the environmental community. The irony is that mountain top removal mining exists mostly as a result of unintended consequences from environmental regulation.
Time and time again environmental regulations are captured by rent seeking interests. The resulting regulations end up causing far more harm than doing nothing would have.
Oxygenate requirements and biofuel mandates are a current example of this nonsense.
Environmental regs need to set an emissions standard at the exhaust stream but leave the engineering techniques used to meet the standard up to the operators.
Rent Seeking Behind the GreenCurtain
October 14, 2009, 9:34 amAnonymous says:
kdnackson,
I’m quite aware that sorbents of all types (including lime) are injected into furnaces. You might could discern that when I said, “This is still a perfectly good solution for low-sulfur coals.” Fluidized bed units are indeed designed to do that, even though it’s done in all types of furnaces, but that isn’t a practical retrofit. It’s only been a few years that those were practical for even small utility-sized units.
Also, your 3.3% figure is low. I’ve seen as high as 7.5%. 4.5% is normal for “high sulfur” coals (coking coals can be much higher I believe). Multiply that times a couple million pounds per hour (large utility plant), and yes, that is quite a bit of lime.
What I don’t think you’re understanding here is this: 1) SO2 scrubbers are always a post-particulate process. They have to be to separate the gypsum slurry from the flyash (and the temps wouldn’t work). 2) Injecting lime into regular furnaces absorbs a lot of the SOx, but not nearly as much as a seperate scrubbing unit. These products necessarily have to be removed with the flyash.
And I’ve never heard of a water scrubber in the flyash region of a coal unit. I’ve seen wet ESP’s and wet scrubbers (lime slurry), but never just water. It seems like 100% humidity wouldn’t do much other than form more acids before the stack. Eh, maybe I’m just not old school enough.
October 14, 2009, 1:22 pmAnonymous says:
Duracomm,
That’s interesting. I’ve always wondered why I see so many giant flagship plants built in the 80′s that burn PRB (western) with no scrubber. I guess they felt the heat and had them commissioned just before ’77.
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