If you think the public fixation with coal ash has run its course and you find that thought refreshing, uh-oh.

More than 300 engineers, scientists, academics, solid-waste executives and utility officials crammed into a meeting hall at the Hilton Charlotte Center City for two days last week to hear exactly the opposite message.

Coal ash's 15 minutes of fame have yet to expire. Quite the contrary, things are just getting revved up at the national level, and they seem to grow more complicated by the month.

Researchers are pursuing impressive possibilities and their breakthroughs could lead to more ash from coal-fired power plants being recycled in construction and other industries.

Scientists already know how to bury the ash safely in lined landfills, along with the "municipal" waste stream that coal ash most closely resembles. But costs are daunting and the search for better alternatives could be undercut by laws that impose tight deadlines for eliminating industrial ponds and other problematic storage sites, speakers at the Coal Ash Management Forum suggested.

Meanwhile, federal coal ash reforms unveiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 18 months ago might be on a collision course with state regulations in North Carolina and other parts of the country.

"It's going to make life very interesting, at least, for the utility industry," said
Jim Roewer of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, an industry trade association.

Roewer told his audience at the forum that across the nation, utilities as well as their customers and contractors could be in for a rocky ride in the next several years as the coal ash conundrum sorts itself out.

The professionals that gathered Thursday and Friday in Charlotte will be the ones who actually do the work that, someday, consigns to the ash heap of history the routine storage of "coal combustion residuals" in leaky ponds.

Take note: Many of these engineers and scientists are not pleased with the popular image of coal ash as one of America's foremost environmental threats.

Want to really irk one of these guys? Refer to coal ash as a "toxic" substance.

"It just isn't. It contains things that can be toxic," said
Jeff Marshall, an environmental engineer from Reston, Va. "So does the soil in your yard and my yard and probably at the day care center where our kids play."

"You probably have more arsenic in your deck than you're going to find in coal ash," said his colleague
Mike McLaughlin, noting that small amounts of arsenic are found in many wood preservatives.

But industry technicians recognize that to the extent they were in a public relations battle with environmentalists who sometimes make sweeping generalizations not always rooted in objective science, they might as well surrender.

"We've lost the public's confidence," one speaker said. "It's swung now and hit us with these big regulations."

Scientific research discussed from the podium warmed the heart of every ash geek in the room, but -- even buttressed by PowerPoint illustrations -- it wasn't always accessible to the layman:

-- "Immobilization of Heavy Metals by Solidification/Stabilization of Co-disposed Flue Gas

-- Desulfurization

-- Brine and Coal Fly Ash," by
Ching-Hua Huang of Georgia Tech.

-- "Impact of Coal Combustion Product Leachates on Compacted Soil Liners and Geosynthetic Clay Liners," by
Craig Benson, the dean of the University of Virginia's School of Engineering.

-- "Geotechnical Characterization of Ponded Fly Ash and Impacts to Liquefaction and Flow Potential," by
Robert Bachus of Geosyntec Consultants, an environmental engineering firm.

The least a non-scientist (even one who barely survived freshman chemistry) took away from these presentations was that if coal ash languished for decades in obscurity, the big guns are surely aiming at it nowadays.

The presenters and others at the forum hosted by the Raleigh-based Environmental Research & Education Foundation belong to a cottage industry that's developing behind a national effort to end coal ash as a threat to human and environmental health, whether or not the stuff is toxic in purely technical terms.

One company at the forum boasted the highly specific expertise of sucking polluted water out of coal ash that has been submerged for decades in a storage pond, after someone else has drained the pond but before another contractor digs up the ash or otherwise processes it.

Exhibitors outside the meeting room also included engineering firms specializing in various techniques necessary to extract, move or encase coal ash; manufacturers of "geomembrane" liners and other technology to prevent pollution; and operators of existing landfills who either can bury coal ash at one of their privately owned facilities or build a landfill for the utility at the power plant.

Duke Energy plans such an on-site landfill at the Dan River Steam Station near Eden, the retired plant that focused North Carolina's attention on the coal ash issue with a large-scale ash spill into the river in February 2014.

Across the nation, large amounts of newly produced coal ash from working plants already are being recycled in concrete and wallboard.

"Ash is an integral component in concrete to prevent alkali silica reaction," said
Ivan Diaz of Atlanta, whose company markets the ash from about 50 power plants. "Without it, your concrete will degrade in about 10 years."

But there are more than 500 unlined ash ponds nationwide, containing coal ash by the hundreds of millions of tons. It's an excess that nobody completely knows what to do with right now, other than to bury and keep it from interacting with groundwater, streams and lakes that it could pollute.

Researchers at N.C. A&T recently developed a new wrinkle that someday might make a dent in the backlog, a process that involves mixing ash with polyurethane to produce a new material suitable for use as a building material or for long-term storage and later reuse. Their work, only unveiled several weeks ago, was not part of the forum.

Scientists and engineers simply need more time to perfect promising new techniques than is allowed in new legislation that, like North Carolina's coal ash law, sets deadlines for when coal ash ponds must be eliminated, said
John Daniels, a researcher and the chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNC-Charlotte.

"I think it's fine to say to Duke Energy or any other utility, 'You must start now (cleaning it up),'" said Daniels, whose research focuses on making coal ash repel water so that it could be used more widely as structural fill in highway and other construction projects.

"To say you have to be done in a certain amount of time, I don't think that's a good idea," added Daniels, who also was one of the forum's speakers. "That's where you miss opportunities for beneficial reuse that promote both public health and the environment."

Environmental lawyer
Frank Holleman believes otherwise, asserting that digging up the coal ash as quickly as is safely possible and burying it in a lined landfill is the way to go.

Counterclaims that coal ash can be left in place and protected equally by technological fixes are simply bogus, said Holleman of the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill.

"People who go to these things often like to say things the utilities want to hear," as a way of ingratiating themselves with the wealthy corporations, Holleman suggested.

"It's Duke Energy's responsibility to dig its way out of the big problem it created in North Carolina," said Holleman, who attended parts of the two-day gathering.

He said that although some of what was discussed at the gathering was "an industry smokescreen," he was heartened to sense a totally new attitude toward coal ash that was seemingly devoid of the stubborn resistance to change that once clouded the minds of utility leaders.

"There's a distinct shift in the attitude, assumptions and thinking from what you heard five years ago," he said of the forum's atmosphere. "I heard tremendous interest linked to getting the coal ash out of these unlined pits. ... And now there's an entire industry ready to do just that."

Contact
Taft Wireback at (336) 373-7100, and follow @TaftWireback on Twitter.

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