Group Offers $7 Million to Improve Coal Plants
Posted on: Wednesday, 21 September 2005, 21:00 CDT
The Joyce Foundation has seven million reasons the coal industry should embrace the cleanest, most modern technology.
The state is on the verge of a coal-plant building boom, and the environmentally minded Chicago foundation's leader said Tuesday the time is now to push clean coal. So it's offering up to $7 million in grants to advocacy groups who want to jump on board.
"We're at a tipping point," President Ellen Alberding said. The vast majority of coal-fired electric plants currently on the drawing board in the Midwest aren't planning to use the cleanest methods. But Alberding won't concede we're doomed to decades of dirty air and water as a result.
"Yes, there are plants on the verge of being permitted that are older technology, but there are many plans that can still be changed," she said.
Her comments Tuesday followed Monday's release of a draft federal study suggesting Lake Michigan gets the most mercury pollution of any Great Lake. And, according to the document by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, coal plants are more to blame than any other source.
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, a North Shore Republican, released the NOAA report and is using it to call for stricter emission controls on coal plants at both the state and federal levels.
"I'm siding, I guess, against the (Bush) administration for much faster restrictions on mercury reduction," Kirk said Tuesday. "I think most people assume that there are pollution controls on many of these old smokestacks, but there aren't if they're coal plants. ...And (the Chicago area) gets the most mercury of anyone in the country."
From Illinois to Maine, mercury falling from smokestacks and accumulating in every body of water has led to health advisories that, for example, discourage women who are nursing from eating local fish.
Many clean air advocates say the solution to coal pollution lies in a combination of cleaning up older coal plant emissions and ensuring new plants produce as few emissions as economically feasible.
The Joyce money will be awarded over three years to nonprofits advocating clean-coal techniques. Some of those methods have been in pilot-program stasis for more than 10 years, to the chagrin of a range of clean-air advocates, from environmental groups to the America Lung Association.
Of the nine coal plants currently proposed in Illinois, all but two will use essentially the same method of burning coal that the industry has used since the Eisenhower Administration. And Illinois is ahead of many other states in supporting one of the cleaner techniques, in which coal is cooked into a gas, which burns much cleaner and spews less mercury into the air. The technology still isn't proven, and it's more expensive, say plant developers who are choosing to build traditional coal-burning plants.
But Alberding says she's optimistic because backers of the cleaner methods now include some power industry executives among their ranks.
Source: Daily Herald; Arlington Heights, Ill.
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