Reports clash on amount of mercury released by plants

A national environmental group aiming to encourage stricter controls on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants - and choosing to rank plants as a way to dramatize the issue - may have generated more combustion than it intended.

Its report drew cries of outrage from industry, which said data had been skewed.

The point of the report, produced by a national nonprofit, Environment America, was to encourage air-pollution controls on plants.

But the findings, based on Environmental Protection Agency emissions data, included not only mercury that was released via a plant's air stacks, but also the mercury that was captured by the kind of pollution controls the group is advocating.

One Pennsylvania plant the report identified as the nation's eighth-worst releaser of mercury, Cambria CoGen Co. in Cambria County, is actually one of the cleanest-burning, the company said.

Of the 1,644 pounds of mercury Environment America said the plant produced in 2009, the year on which the report is based, only 3.9 pounds were sent out the air stacks.

Antipollution equipment removed 99.8 percent of mercury - or 1,640 pounds - from its emissions, according to the company and an analysis of federal data.

"We're considered by the EPA as an ultra-low mercury emitter," plant manager Rob Simmerman said.

Sorting the nation's 456 electric-power generating plants by air-stack emissions alone, the plant drops to 402d on the national list.

Although the group stood behind the report and another environmental group defended its validity, industry criticized it as nonsensical.

Douglas Biden, president of the Electric Power Generation Association, a regional trade group of electric generators, called the report "disingenuous in the extreme."

"So we can put pollution-control equipment on every plant, including [maximum available control technology], which they want us to do, and the numbers would not change," he said.

"The public is not exposed" to mercury that is captured because it is "chemically contained" in coal ash or material that goes to a landfill.

Otherwise, he said, "what would be the purpose of the air regulation, to just move the mercury around?"

Mercury emitted into the air eventually falls into lakes and rivers and accumulates in the food chain. It is a neurotoxin that causes impaired development in fetuses and children. Many states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, issue fish-consumption advisories for waterways, suggesting limits on the fish eaten from them.

The report comes weeks before the EPA is expected to propose new mercury rules for power plants.

It is one of several measures on the horizon that would be more restrictive and could cause older, less efficient plants to switch to natural gas or shut down.

Both Pennsylvania and the EPA under George W. Bush had passed regulations that would have required mercury reductions, but courts struck down both measures.

In ranking the plants, the national group and its state arm, PennEnvironment, concluded that Pennsylvania ranked second in the nation in terms of mercury "emitted."

The plant the report identified as No. 2 nationwide, GenOn's Keystone plant in Armstrong County, emits into the air about one-third of the amount the report cited. Some 795 pounds of mercury went up the stack, and 1,369 pounds went to a landfill.

The plant was owned by RRI Energy, which recently merged to form GenOn.

GenOn's Conemaugh plant in Indiana County was ranked fourth in the nation. Its Shawville Station in Clearfield County was 24th.

But a review of the data shows that Conemaugh captured about three-quarters of its mercury pollution from its air stacks, and Shawville captured about half.

Looking just at air-stack emissions, the Keystone plant drops to 15th nationally and Conemaugh is 22d.

GenOn officials said they were still analyzing the data and could not comment.

PennEnvironment field director Adam Garber defended the report, saying it was legitimate to include mercury captured by pollution-control equipment because there was no way to know, from the data available, whether it was handled properly.

"The bottom line is that mercury is still mercury, and is still dangerous," he said.

Jan Jarrett, president and CEO of PennFuture, a state environmental nonprofit, also supported the study.

She conceded that such large dumps of federal data don't always show the whole story, and "that's a limitation." But overall, she said, the report had "validity. The coal they burned produced that much mercury."

"The main point is that burning coal to produce electricity is a dirty business," she said, "and we should be moving away from that as much as possible."