Public Meeting Set for Air Permit for Proposed Santee Cooper Plant

By Jamie Durant, Florence Morning News, S.C.

Jul. 9–The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control announced Wednesday plans to hold a new public meeting regarding Santee Cooper’s Pee Dee Energy Campus.

The meeting, which will focus on the application for a Case-by-Case Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT), also called a “112(g)” air permit by Santee Cooper, will be held 6 p.m. July 22 at Hannah-Pamplico High School in Pamplico.

DHEC spokesman Thom Berry said the public meeting is going to be run in an open, question and answer format.

“This is a different permit application than the one for the facility,” he said. “Until a new rule is put into place, each new plant has to put into place limits to control hazardous air pollutants, including mercury.”

Berry said that’s why DHEC would like to hold the meeting, to explain how the process works.

The U.S. Court of Appeals eliminated the federal Clean Air Mercury Rule for power plants last year, so until a new mercury regulation is issued by the U.S. government, Berry said, this will be the standard process for power plants.

At the meeting, information on the 112(g) application and DHEC’s air permitting process will be provided.

Santee Cooper submitted the application to the DHEC Bureau of Air Quality on July 1.

Mollie Gore, a spokeswoman for Santee Cooper, said the public meeting will take place because the MACT analysis contains information that is somewhat different from the information contained in the original proposal submitted to DHEC.

“We were never told we had to do a MACT analysis, but when the Court of Appeals eliminated the Clean Air Mercury Rule that voided some of the work we had done in the original permitting process, we looked at our options and decided the MACT was the most responsible way to go about that,” Gore said.

Gore said the upside to the additional work created by the MACT is that the company found a way to further reduce mercury emissions, using a method called a bag house, which is a common name for a type of environmental control technology that uses engineered fabric filter material. The bag house will be an addition to the environmental control measures already in place.

“The good news is we went through this process and decided we could reduce mercury emissions to a maximum of 57 pounds per year,” she said.

The Pee Dee Energy Campus, a 600-megawatt coal-fired generation facility, is proposed to be located on a 2,709-acre tract along the Great Pee Dee River at a cost of about $1.25 billion to build.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has yet to issue its environmental impact statement regarding the plant.

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