Pollution puzzle: Intense scrutiny of Dominion’s power plant technology is warranted

To Read the Study:
http://web.mit.edu/coal/

Virginia regulators pushed the pause button Jan. 25 on Dominion Virginia Power’s request for an air pollution permit for its proposed Wise County plant.

While the delay won’t make Dominion or its supporters happy, it provides additional time to answer important questions.

Virginia Air Pollution Control Board members remain concerned about emissions from the 585-megawatt coal-fired power plant. They want to know if pollution from it can be further reduced by using a different technological process to burn the coal or by using a different type of coal. Certainly, these are appropriate areas of inquiry.

If the plant is to be built (we do not concede that it should be), Dominion has an obligation to use the best possible technology to curb both traditional pollutants, like mercury and particulate matter, and carbon dioxide – a contributor to global warming that was declared a pollutant by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

Dominion officials argue that their proposed plant, which would burn coal through a process known as circulating fluidized bed technology, is the best solution to protect the environment and the health of the region’s residents. The company rejects two other modern coal combustion technologies – coal gasification and supercritical or ultra supercritical pulverized coal combustion (which is a modification of the technology in use in most of the nation’s coal-fired plants today).

The Air Pollution Control Board wants Dominion to take another look at coal gasification, which some scientists and engineers believe is the superior technology for the future capture and storage of greenhouse gases. A recent report on coal’s future by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes this point, although it notes that additional technological improvements could change the analysis. The MIT report is lengthy, but worth study.

Dominion already has filed a report addressing these technological issues with the Air Pollution Control Board. Predictably, the company finds that its solution is the best one. Dominion says its technology will control traditional pollutants as well as coal gasification and that no commercially viable way to control carbon dioxide exists.

The real advantage, according to Dominion, is that its proposed power plant would be able to burn waste coal, wood and biomass – fuel sources that cannot be used in the coal-gasification process. That’s a business advantage for Dominion, but it isn’t clear whether that course is the best one for people’s health or the environment.

The Air Pollution Control Board wants to sort these matters out before giving a green light to the power station. The board wants to hear from outside experts, state scientists and the public – not just Dominion – before deciding this critical issue. We welcome this inquiry; to do anything less would be an abdication of the board’s duties to state residents.

Dominion and its supporters want desperately for this matter to be settled quickly and without debate. They want to push the power plant through in an expedited manner – perhaps to avoid stricter federal controls on greenhouse gas emissions that even other electric utilities concede could come as early as 2009.

Virginia residents deserve more than a rubber stamp on Dominion’s permit request. The Air Pollution Control Board is giving them something more – due process instead of a rush to judgment in favor of the power industry.