Dunkirk coal plant: A power dinosaur that may be saved or doomed by 'fracking'Jul 15 - Jerry Zremski The Buffalo News, N.Y.The massive coal-fired power plant that towers over Dunkirk harbor looks every bit like the giant industrial dinosaur that it is. And if environmentalists get their way, it soon will be extinct. They've joined in a strange-bedfellows alliance with the Business Council of New York State to resist a $506 million plan by the plant's owner, NRG Energy Inc., to convert the electricity-generating facility to natural gas. The company says the move to gas is necessary for the plant to survive -- and that it would cut the facility's carbon emissions, and thus its contribution to global warming, in half. You might think environmentalists would like a plan that would end the plant's reliance on the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all, but you would be wrong. And it's all because natural gas is so intimately tied to the environmentalists' version of the F-word: "fracking," the controversial gas extraction technique that's spurred an energy boom as nearby as Pennsylvania but that remains off-limits while New York continues studying its safety. "If we continue to replace all the dinosaur plants with new and improved fossil fuel plants -- natural gas -- we are opening up New York State to fracking," said Lisa Dix, senior New York representative for the Sierra Club. "It's replacing one dirty fuel with another." On the other side of the argument, though, you'll find both NRG and much of the Chautauqua County political community. They note that NRG has said that if the Dunkirk plant is shuttered, power will have to be wired in from Pennsylvania or Ohio. And the power plants in Pennsylvania rely nearly five times as much as New York does on coal-fired power plants that are even dirtier than the one in Dunkirk. "The power is going to come from somewhere," said Rep. Tom Reed, a Corning Republican who's a strong proponent of retooling the Dunkirk plant to use natural gas. "And when you rely on those coal-fired plants, obviously they're going to have to burn more coal that is going to produce more emissions that are going to impact our environment." Both sides will make their case -- and the public will have a chance to weigh in on the issue -- at a public hearing at 6 p.m. Monday at the Williams Center, 280 Central Ave., on the Fredonia State College campus. The state Public Service Commission, which will decide the proposal's fate, will conduct the hearing. For many Chautauqua County residents, the issue at the hearing won't be so much about energy and the environment, but about economics. http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=29290804 |