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Plant spewing acid clouds Pollution controls at AEP facility are causing new problem Friday, August 3, 2001 Michael Hawthorne Dispatch Environment Reporter At one of the largest coal-burning power plants in North America, new pollution controls are belching acidic blue clouds that hover in the summer sun over a Ohio River village next door.

The clouds of sulfuric acid are an inadvertent byproduct of a $200 million system that American Electric Power installed in May at the Gen. James M. Gavin plant to reduce emissions of another pollutant, nitrogen oxide, one of the main ingredients in smog.

The Columbus company blames the problem in part on the high-sulfur coal from a company- owned mine 10 miles from the plant. Switching to low-sulfur coal is an option, but reducing the company's reliance on high-sulfur Ohio coal could be politically nettlesome.

Other utilities are closely watching the company's attempts to solve the acid problem. Pollution controls similar to the ones at the Gavin plant are rapidly being installed around the country to comply with stricter federal smog standards.

"We've got a lot of people looking at us right now,'' said Paul Chodak III, manager of environmental optimization at AEP. "We're trying to be as proactive as we can to clean up our plants, but it's going to take us some time to solve this problem.''

Public-health experts say the controls will help protect Americans suffering from asthma and other respiratory illnesses. But some of the 200 residents of Cheshire in Gallia County have reported burning eyes, headaches, sore throats and white-colored burns on the lips, tongue and inside of the mouth after the acidic byproduct descended upon their homes.

The blue acid clouds fell on Cheshire more than a dozen times in June and July, usually on hot, humid days when weather conditions pushed exhaust from the power plant down into the village instead of dispersing it into the atmosphere.

Most of the clouds have been short-lived, Chodak said.

Sulfuric acid can cause a variety of medical problems, but short-term exposure is not considered life-threatening, according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

The Ohio and U.S. Environmental Protection Agencies are working with the company to determine how the clouds form and how they can be stopped. In an attempt to measure the pollution more closely, the agencies have installed new air monitors in Cheshire and across the Ohio River in Point Pleasant, W.Va.

"We're taking the citizens' complaints very seriously,'' said Dean Ponchak, an environmental specialist with the Ohio EPA.

While Ohio doesn't set limits on the amount of sulfuric acid in the air, levels measured in clouds spewing out of the Gavin plant's twin, 830- foot stacks have exceeded standards established by other states.

Like other utilities that rely on coal-fired power, AEP is installing new controls to cut emissions of nitrogen oxides by a May 2003 deadline imposed by the federal government.

The new system, known as selective catalytic reduction, relies on a chemical reaction to break down nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and water. The technology has been tested elsewhere, but none of the plants is as big as Gavin, Chodak said.

During summer months when smog is a problem, exhaust from the burning of coal goes through the new controls before passing through scrubbers designed to reduce sulfur dioxide, another pollutant that creates acid rain.

While emissions of nitrogen oxides are down, the new controls have created other sulfur compounds that aren't stripped out by the scrubbers, Chodak said. The gas turns into sulfuric acid when it comes into contact with water from the scrubbers.

"We are having our growing pains in the operation of this technology, which is not uncommon when you retrofit an advanced technology . . . on a plant with this type of coal,'' Dale Heydlauff, AEP's senior vice president for environmental affairs, told a congressional committee last week.

The company has called in experts from around the country and Europe, where the technology already is used widely. The Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded laboratory, also is involved in trying to solve the acid problem.

In Cheshire, Mayor Tom Reese is tight-lipped about the latest problem. He previously led a vocal and successful effort to persuade AEP to abandon the use of liquid ammonia in the selective-catalytic-reduction system.

Reese and other residents were concerned they'd be unable to evacuate the village if huge tanks of liquid ammonia were to leak. In response, AEP switched to urea, a dry fertilizer that is converted to ammonia just before it is injected into the plant's exhaust.

"This is a completely different problem,'' Reese said of the blue acid clouds. "But it's causing some concerns in the village.''

-- Tess (webwoman@iamit.com), August 03, 2001

Answers

Christ! When I read the title I thought, another polluting factory in China. I thought we've outgrown the heavily polluting smokestack industry in this country!

-- Guy Daley (guydaley1@netzero.net), August 04, 2001.