Thanks to the government's long push to control air pollution, a Massachusetts company is building a facility at PPL Electric's Brunner Island power plant in York County to process fly ash for the concrete industry.

The fly ash separation business was created because of the need to reduce air pollution from power plants.

Burning coal less completely results in lower emissions, but also results in fly ash with too much carbon for use in making concrete, according to Chandra Vaughan, a spokeswoman for Separation Technologies LLC of Needham, Mass.

Separation Technologies, a subsidiary of Titan Cement Co. in Athens, Greece, will separate the carbon for PPL to reburn and sell the fly ash that remains to concrete suppliers.

"This extends cement supplies and produces stronger and more reliable concrete," Vaughan said.

Brunner Island is a 1,485-megawatt, coal-burning power plant near York Haven in East Manchester Twp. Vaughan said it produces about 300,000 tons of fly ash each year, and 80 percent is marketable initially. As the carbon is processed out of the ash and burned, the percentage of marketable ash rises.

The separation facility is expected to operate 24 hours a day after it goes online in November and will employ seven to 10 people. It will be the third such facility Separation Technologies has built, and the first in Pennsylvania.

Fly ash is a fine, powdery material that has been around as long as coal has been burned to generate electricity. It began accumulating in larger volumes in the 1960s after power plants began greater use of electro-static precipitators to remove fly ash from flue gases before they left the smokestack.

Some utilities dumped fly ash in landfills, a practice that continues, and some found other uses for it. Fly ash has long been used in concrete for roads and other big construction projects, including the Hoover Dam in 1929.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines used fly ash to build underground barriers to control mine fires, such as the one in Centralia. That project ultimately failed, and the fire moved under the town.

There was little need for a company such as Separation Technologies until Congress toughened federal air-pollution regulations in the early 1990s, requiring greater effort by utilities to control sulfur dioxide and other emissions. Vaughan said ash users began complaining that the fly ash they were getting had too much carbon mixed in.

She said Separation Technologies first tested its process in 1989 and began using it commercially in 1995.

The process is known in the industry as "beneficiation," according to Melissa Burke of the American Coal Ash Association in Aurora, Colo. She said U.S. power plants produced 71 million tons of fly ash in 2004.

After processing, fly ash from Brunner Island will be sold and shipped by Separation Technologies to concrete companies throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Prices generally range from $20 to $45 a ton for concrete-ready fly ash, according to the Ash Association Web site.

Separation Technologies will initially truck the ash to customers, but also is looking to ship by rail, according to Vaughan. DAVID DeKOK: 255-8173 or ddekok@patriot-news.com