Developers Claim a Plant in Wiscasset Would Produce Clean Energy, but Critics Have Serious Doubts

Oct 15 - Portland Press Herald

Scott Houldin stands beneath a row of huge electricity transmission towers near what was once home to Maine's only nuclear power plant.

This is the ideal place, Houldin believes, to build a new- generation coal-gasification plant that will generate clean energy, jobs and tax revenue.

It's a pitch that's been made before, although never in Maine, and environmentalists are skeptical. Coal gasification plants may someday be part of the solution to global warming, critics say, but not yet and not here.

Sorting out the dueling environmental claims is complicated because there are no existing plants quite like this one.

For now, the plan to build a $1.5 billion gasification plant in this midcoast community has thrust Maine into a growing debate about the future of coal, the nation's most abundant, and historically its dirtiest, fossil fuel.

A state review of the plan is perhaps a year or more down the road, but Wiscasset voters are already being asked to show their support at the polls Nov. 6. The developer needs approval of a key zoning change to allow a 230-foot-tall building at the plant site.

If the town signals its support, the developers of Twin River Energy Center say they'll move forward with studies and designs, with the goal of breaking ground in 2009.

Houldin, who manages the project for the Connecticut-based developer, is promising a cutting-edge 700-megawatt facility that's nothing like the traditional coal-fired plants that spew pollutants into the air and give coal its bad name.

"We don't burn coal. ... We create gas from the coal and then that gas is cleaned," Houldin said. "Environmentally speaking, we're actually going to lower the air emissions in the state of Maine."

Steve Hinchman, staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation in Brunswick, simply does not buy those claims.

While some pollutants would be removed, Hinchman said he's worried about the 5 million tons of carbon dioxide - a global warming gas - that could be released by the plant each year. Maine's six largest existing power plants, which burn natural gas, wood and oil, now pump about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere.

"They would roll back all the good work Maine has done over the past five years to fight climate change," he said. "There's no such thing as clean coal. Coal is not clean."

The plant is the first venture of its kind by the Connecticut- based National RE/sources, a firm that initially came to town to build the mixed-use Point East Maritime Village a couple of miles away.

Houldin said the company came up with the coal plan to take advantage of the power lines and railroads that served the Maine Yankee nuclear power station, and to replace the industrial tax base that was lost when Maine Yankee shut down in 1996.

Coal is clearly a surprise fuel of choice for coastal Maine.

Coal supplies about half of the electricity used nationwide and about 11 percent of the power in the New England grid.

But coal is loaded with pollutants such as mercury, and it accounts for more emissions of carbon dioxide than any other fuel.

That is a costly factor in Maine, where a new regional cap on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants means the developers would need to buy allowances for every ton of carbon they release.

And, of course, there are no coal mines anywhere near Wiscasset. While coal can be shipped up the East Coast by barge - as Twin River plans to do - most coal plants are located in the Midwest or South.

The developers of Twin River say their technology would take care of those problems.

The coal would be pulverized and superheated under high pressure to create a synthetic gas - a cleaner, more efficient fuel than the coal it came from. Biomass or wood would also be fed into the gasifier as a supplemental fuel.

While a number of gasification plants are in operation or under development around the country, the most unusual thing about the Twin River plant is that it would make two products with the gas. Most of the gas would be burned to make electricity, while some would be turned into a clean diesel fuel. The developers said the combination would make the plant superefficient, although no other plant in the United States appears to be doing it.

The gasification process removes 99.9 percent of the sulfur and particulate matter and most of the mercury and other pollutants from the coal.

Although the plant would still become one of the largest sources of mercury pollution in the state - with emissions of about 22 pounds a year - it would comply with Maine's mercury limits, Houldin said. The state is reducing its mercury limit from 35 pounds a year now to 25 pounds per year starting in 2010.

The biggest potential advantage of gasification technology, however, is that carbon dioxide can be removed from the gas and kept out of the atmosphere more easily than it can be captured at a traditional coal plant or even at a modern natural gas plant.

"We're going to be the first plant (in New England) that can capture carbon dioxide," Houldin said.

That capacity won't do any good, at least for a while. The plant will simply release the carbon dioxide anyway because there is no way to store it or sequester it.

The ability to store or sequester captured carbon, such as by pumping it into abandoned oil wells or bedrock formations, would be a major breakthrough in the fight against global warming; but large- scale storage is still years away and the prospects for doing it in Maine are uncertain.

"There may be sequestration sites here in the area, but they're not proven today," said Sarah Forbes, a Maine-based energy and climate change consultant with Potomac-Hudson Engineering. "The geology in this area has not been looked at in this way."

Even coal's critics concede gasification has environmental advantages over conventional plants. The fact that it is more expensive - plants generally cost $2 billion to $3 billion - has so far limited the number of the plants being built around the country.

How aggressively to move forward with the gasification technology is hotly debated among scientists and policymakers around the country.

Presidential candidates from both parties have been staking out positions about whether to promote or mandate gasification plants or ban all new coal plants until the technology to capture and store the carbon is ready.

Some who believe gasification is a step forward still don't believe Twin River makes sense, however.

"It may be an extremely good tool for places like China and India or even in the Midwest of the United States, where there's a lot of coal supply," said Michael Stoddard of Environment Northeast, an advocacy group that focuses on energy issues. "But that assumes that you sequester the carbon, and there's no proposal to do that in Wiscasset; nor is there any reasonable likelihood that they would do it any time soon.

"We want to be supportive of the technology, but we don't think this site makes any sense," he said.

Without carbon storage, energy experts say, a gasification plant contributes as much to global warming as an old-fashioned coal- burning power plant.

"If it's not capturing the carbon, it is certainly not in any way helping," said Ernest Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of a national report titled "The Future of Coal."

Experts also said making diesel fuel from coal instead of from oil is more harmful to the climate.

"If you don't do carbon capture, you put about twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as you do with petroleum," said Eric Larsen, a research engineer at the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Houldin insists the plant will prove the experts wrong.

The unusual combination of electricity and fuel production will make the plant so efficient that its overall global warming effect will compare well to an oil or gas plant designed to generate the same amount of energy, he said.

Twin River is paying for a study that will compare the plant's potential global warming effect with other fuels. It's scheduled to be presented Oct. 24 during a scientific forum on carbon storage at the Chewonki Foundation.

Forbes, the climate change and energy consultant, is conducting the research.

While the results are not ready, she said, it is clear that the unusual combination of electricity and diesel production makes Twin River different from other gasification plants.

"The plant is modeled after a facility in the Netherlands, but it isn't exactly like anything else that is out there," she said. "There are efficiencies in combining the processes - it's an interesting case."

Potential environmental impacts of the plant are clearly on the minds of residents in the Wiscasset area.

More than 25 lobster boats paraded up the Sheepscot River on Thursday to protest the coal plant and the arrival of coal-carrying barges that could damage equipment and disrupt fishing. Area residents are also worried about noise, odor, dust, rail traffic and the use of massive amounts of water to process the coal.

Some, too, are worried about the global warming implications of the plant.

Willy Ritch, founder of the Back River Alliance, a regional group opposing the plant, said residents never expected they would become part of the debate about the future of coal power.

"We really are part of this response to the whole clean coal idea," he said. "People are starting to push back and say this isn't what was promised."

Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:

jrichardson@pressherald.com

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