Summer is here and the mercury is rising. It's not just the heat. It's also the level of harmful pollutants and specifically mercury.

Mercury is an insidious villain, creating dangers for local ecosystems and any small children and pregnant women who might eat contaminated fish. Technologies will improve and utilities will respond. But the attention given to mercury emissions now has prompted many such companies to implement best available technologies at their power plants - tools that have the potential to cut such pollutants by 50-90 percent.

In February, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to make mercury reductions mandatory. Instead, the Bush administration had proposed a voluntary cap-and-trade system that it says would have reduced mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018.

Proponents of that approach have argued it is more sensible, noting that the technologies to make drastic curbs are not yet commercial. They go on to say that further in-fighting will only serve to delay meaningful reductions. Environmentalists take a contrarian view, exclaiming that cutting-edge public policy pushes forward utilities by giving the vendors who create the technologies the certainty they need to bring products to market.

To force utilities to adhere to stricter standards, the Sierra Club is now threatening to sue to halt the development of eight coal-fired facilities in six separate states. Its objective is to force those builders to go back to their respective state regulatory agencies to get new operating permits that meet would tougher emissions standards.

"There are affordable technologies widely available today that can substantially reduce mercury and other toxic pollution," says Pat Gallagher, environmental law director for the club. "In their rush to build new coal plants, developers have turned a blind eye to these technologies, and correspondingly the health of children everywhere."

While cap-and-trade is used to curb sulfur dioxide emissions and is under discussion with respect to carbon dioxide, environmental groups say that it won't work with mercury. That's because mercury has a greater potential to fall back to earth and places prospective "hot spot" communities at risks.

Coal plants are the biggest mercury contributors. Approximately 1,100 such units at more than 450 existing power plants emit 48 tons of mercury into the air each year, with 11 tons of that deposited on to U.S. soil and waters, says EPA. They also release arsenic, lead and other heavy metals, all of which are considered hazardous and are therefore subject to clean air laws that require those facilities to use modern pollution controls.

Promising Tools

The U.S. Department of Energy is working with private enterprise to develop the tools to make significant cuts in mercury from coal-fired power plants. Through its National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh, the agency has field-tested concepts that it says can achieve at least 50 percent reductions based on 1999 levels.

It has focused on something called activated carbon injection that places powered carbon into a plant's flue gas to ensnare the mercury. A control device is then used to remove not just mercury but also sulfur dioxide. The agency says that since April 2008, U.S. coal-fired power generators have ordered 100 full-scale carbon injection systems. Those purchases will be applied to both new and old plants, representing almost 10 percent of the total U.S. coal-based capacity.

The research arm of the Department of Energy emphasizes that the technology is getting both better and cheaper. While it uses 50 percent reductions as a safe-harbor, the agency says that the new tools could cut such emissions by 70 percent and in some cases, it could be 90 percent. At the same time, the cost of removing such pollutants was $60,000 per pound in 1999 but that figure is $10,000 per pound today.

Such advances have pushed 21 states to go beyond what the federal government has tried to do, requiring their utilities to make 90 percent reductions in mercury in accelerated time frames. Illinois, Minnesota and Pennsylvania have each enacted laws requiring such aggressive reductions and no later than 2015. Wisconsin is now considering the same, forcing some business groups there to complain that not only is the 90 percent figure out of reach but also that cost of energy could escalate for homes and businesses.

In 2006, Pennsylvania began requiring coal-based generators there to reduce their mercury emissions by 80 percent by 2010 and by 90 percent by 2015. Reliant Energy, which operates 19 power plants in the state, just said it would invest $50 million to reduce its mercury emissions to comply with the standards. It's all part of a broader pollution control program in which it is spending $435 million.

"We are committed to environmental stewardship and have developed a comprehensive program to reduce our environmental footprint," says Mark Jacobs, chief executive of Reliant, which is using the same technology as the one field tested by the National Energy Technology Laboratory and will complete the installation of those tools by year-end 2009. "The mercury removal plan will improve air quality for our neighbors and is an important element of our overall program."

Aggressive mercury reductions are coming. The question is whether to wait until the technologies to do so mature or whether to act decisively now by passing mandatory policies that would facilitate the production of new pollution controls. The federal government would prefer the more cautious approach whereas some states and their green backers say that any further delays will compound the problem.

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