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CEO: Plant ‘to stop burning coal’
YOUNGSTOWN
Sulphur-dioxide emis-sions from Youngstown Thermal’s North Avenue steam plant have increased in recent years because it recently has been burning higher-sulphur coal, according to Carl Avers, the company’s chief executive officer.
The plant is burning higher-sulphur coal because its coal supply is being mined from higher-sulphur veins than were previously mined, Avers said.
Although Youngstown Thermal has received several air-pollution warnings and citations from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in the last decade, including a 2010 citation for excessive sulphur-dioxide emissions, all were resolved without fines or penalties, according to Mike Settles, a state EPA spokesman.
However, the company was fined $1,000 and ordered to take corrective measures in a 2005 settlement agreement with the U.S. EPA concerning a citation for excessive ash and soot emissions.
The 20,000 tons of coal burned annually in the plant comes entirely from Ohio and costs the company about $75 a ton, Avers said.
To haul in lower-sulphur out-of-state coal, Avers said: “We’d have to get it out of Kentucky at about twice the price” or from the western United States at prohibitive prices.
Despite the doubling of coal prices in the past decade as demand increased due to China’s purchases of American coal, the North Avenue plant is still heavily coal-dependent because coal is still much cheaper than oil and natural gas, Avers said.
However, Avers said his plant this year will begin burning waste wood, which is plentiful at sawmills, cheaper and causes less air pollution than coal.
“There’s too much pollution from the coal” burning, and waste wood burns “only a little cleaner than coal,” observed George Peya of Youngstown, chairman of the local Salt Springs Group of the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club is a San Francisco-based national environmental quality advocacy organization now engaged in a “Beyond Coal Campaign” designed to promote the replacement of coal burning with cleaner energy sources.
Peya said he prefers natural gas, which he said is much cleaner burning than coal or wood. Coal is the fuel for three Youngstown Thermal boilers and natural gas fuels the company’s backup boiler.
“When you harvest a tree, about 50 percent of it becomes waste” and the waste wood can be acquired for the cost of transporting it, Avers said. Besides sawmills, Avers said he hopes to acquire waste wood from storm-related municipal tree-cuttings. He also said trees killed by the ash borer will add significantly to the waste-wood supply.
Avers acknowledged that the U.S. and Ohio environmental protection agencies will soon lower smokestack- emissions limits to the point where coal-burning plants can’t meet them. “We’re going to stop burning coal,” he said.
To meet the new emissions limits, Avers said he plans to buy and install coal and wood gasification equipment, with the plant burning the gas produced in the process and keeping the sulphur within the plant in the ash, which can easily be removed and disposed of properly.
“From an environmental standpoint, it’ll be as clean as natural gas,” Avers said of the gasification process.
“I could see a practical use of that for something like demolition wood from homes, rather than burying it in a landfill,” Peya said of gasification technology.
“My strategy is to go to wood first and eventually put in these gasifiers,” Avers said. “My job is to manage the fuel to the lowest cost for my customers,” Avers added.
“Many people visit our plant, and they can’t believe that we burn coal there,” Avers said, noting that smoke from its smokestack’s isn’t visible most of the year.
That’s because the North Avenue plant uses an advanced technology known as flue gas re-circulation, which keeps soot within the plant, where it is burned up, he explained.