CARBO — Here on the banks of the Clinch River, a hulking, soot-stained structure churns out two things: electricity that powers Southwest Virginia, and emissions that pollute its air.
The common denominator is coal.
About 500,000 tons of coal a year are burned at the Clinch River plant, an aging Appalachian Power Co. facility that has been producing electricity since Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House.
The fate of this 53-year-old power plant, and others like it across the country, could soon be determined by new regulations proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
By forcing the plants to curb emissions such as mercury, arsenic and acid gases, the EPA says it can prevent as many as 17,000 premature deaths a year caused by breathing air laced with coal-fueled pollution.
“I know they are poisoning the air,” said Nora Walbourn, who owns land near the Clinch River plant.
Walbourn is so worried by what comes out of the plant’s two giant smokestacks that she doesn’t like for her 5-month-old grandson to spend much time on the land where she and her husband hope to someday build a retirement home.
But in far Southwest Virginia, where coal dust is part of the lifestyle, not everyone embraces the proposed regulations.
“There is a feeling, in a large part of my district, that the EPA has declared war on coal,” said U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, whose 9th District includes the coalfields region.
American Electric Power Co., the parent company of Appalachian, says the rules would force it to shut one unit at the Clinch River plant and convert the remaining two to burn natural gas instead of coal.
The second coal-burning facility that Appalachian runs in Southwest Virginia, the Glen Lyn plant in Giles County, would be shut down completely by 2014.
The closures and conversions could mean a 10 percent to 15 percent increase in electricity rates, Appalachian has said — adding another twist to the conflict between coal and clean air.
Sick people
Three years ago, Nora and Barry Walbourn bought 200 acres of forest and pasture in Russell County. They planned to move from Asheboro, N.C., and retire to a place of natural beauty and clean mountain air.
One day, after clearing brush from a hillside, they made a disturbing discovery – in the distance, two smokestacks jutted from behind the rolling mountain landscape.
“I said, ‘Oh, my,'” Nora Walbourn recalled. “We were horrified that they were sitting there.”
As she began to research the plant’s emissions, Walbourn noticed something else: It seemed that an awful lot of people in the area were sick.
“Everywhere you looked, the lady on the mountain was sick, and so was her son down the way,” she said.
The Cumberland Plateau Health District, which consists of Russell, Buchanan, Dickenson and Tazewell counties, has the state’s highest rates for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to Virginia Department of Health data.
Seventy-nine out of 10,000 residents in the district were hospitalized with pulmonary disease in 2010, compared with a statewide rate of 18. And the percentage of adults with asthma was 14 percent, almost double the state average of 8.6 percent.
Health Department data also show high rates of cardiovascular disease in the district.
A spokeswoman for AEP cautioned against making a direct correlation between the power plant and the health of the surrounding community.
“There have been a lot of scientific studies that provide conflicting conclusions about the potential health impacts of air emissions overall, and also specifically those from power plants,” spokeswoman Melissa McHenry wrote in an email.
“It is a quite a stretch to try to tie emissions from a specific power plant to a specific number of health effects, particularly when there can be many contributing factors that cause heart disease and asthma.”
Twenty-five percent of Cumberland Plateau adults smoke, compared with a statewide rate of 18 percent, according to the Health Department. And 67 percent were overweight or obese.
Robert Parker, spokesman for the Health Department’s western district, said there is no evidence of a direct link between the power plant and the area’s health conditions.
Others do make a connection.
According to the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based nonprofit organization, the Clinch River plant was responsible in 2009 for 69 premature deaths, 1,100 asthma attacks and 100 heart attacks.
The projections are based on EPA data, said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director for the task force.
While nearby residents are at the greatest risk, he said, “pollution from a power plant can measurably increase the risk of death and disease to populations well over 100 miles downwind.”
What’s in the air?
The Clinch River plant opened with a bang.
“Perhaps the largest group of industrial leaders and political dignitaries ever assembled in the Mountain Empire” was on hand for the opening ceremony, The Roanoke Times reported at the time.
The newspaper called the coal plant “the greatest single industrial development in Southwest Virginia’s history – up until now.”
That was in 1958.
The EPA didn’t exist at the time, and it would be years before the plant’s emissions came under close scrutiny.
As more was learned about the risks of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, two major emissions from coal-burning power plants, the government moved to require greater controls on their release.
However, plants built before the 1977 Clean Air Act did not have to upgrade their environmental compliance unless they did a major overhaul that increased their electricity output, Schneider said.
In 1999, the EPA, joined by eight Northeast states and 13 environmental groups, filed a lawsuit against AEP. The lawsuit accused the company of violating the Clean Air Act by upgrading 16 of its plants, including Clinch River, without installing the required pollution controls.
AEP denied wrongdoing, saying it had done only “prudent maintenance” that should not have required heightened environmental compliance. But in 2007, the company agreed to pay $75 million – $15 million in civil penalties and another $60 million to clean up the damage it caused – in what was called the nation’s largest settlement of its kind.
The company also agreed to spend hundreds of millions more to reduce emissions at its plants.
At the Clinch River Plant, the settlement required Appalachian to cut sulfur dioxide releases, more than 31,000 tons in 1997, nearly in half by 2015.
The plant has already done better than that, releasing 6,595 tons of sulfur dioxide last year. The reductions were achieved by importing low-sulfur coal from Colorado, installing pollution control devices and running the plant at a reduced capacity.
Still, Clinch River ranks eighth in the state on a list of top polluters compiled by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
In 2009, the most recent year for which complete data were available, the plant put out 1.6million tons of carbon dioxide, one of the key gases blamed for global warming.
Other releases included 7,004 tons of sulfur dioxide, 1,804 tons of nitrogen oxide, 11,479 pounds of arsenic compounds, 9,165 pounds of lead compounds and 110 pounds of mercury compounds, according to the EPA.
AEP’s fleet of power plants has reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide by 70 percent and nitrogen oxide by 80 percent since 1990, said McHenry, the company spokeswoman.
“The bottom line is that the air is cleaner than it has ever been, and emissions from coal-fired power plants have been reduced significantly over the last few decades,” she said.
‘Brought this on themselves’
Utility companies are now being asked to do more under the latest set of regulations, described by the EPA as the first national standards for mercury, arsenic, lead and other pollution from power plants.
Twenty years in the making, the new regulations would require existing plants to meet emission standards that are at least as stringent as the top 12 percent best-performing facilities in their category.
A little more than half of the country’s power plants already meet the standards, according to the EPA.
But AEP said in June that “unrealistic compliance timelines” for the latest regulations could force it to close, or convert to natural gas, 11 of its plants in seven states.
One of the plants to shut down is the Glen Lyn plant in Giles County, which at 92 years old had already been slated for closure in 2018. In recent years, Appalachian has been running the plant only during times of high energy demand.
At the Clinch River plant, Appalachian plans to close one unit and convert the other two to natural gas — at a cost that will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity bills.
“We support regulations that achieve long-term environmental benefits,” Michael Morris, the AEP chairman and chief executive officer, said in a June statement. But unless utilities are given more time, he said, higher electricity rates and lost tax dollars from the plants “will be significant at a time when people and states are still struggling.”
Should Appalachian customers end up paying for the latest environmental regulations, it will come on top of rates that have risen 66 percent in six years. The company currently has a package of four rate filings pending before the State Corporation Commission that could bring an increase of 9.6 percent in monthly bills starting next year.
After hearing public comment on the environmental regulations, the EPA is expected to make a decision in November.
Schneider, of the Clean Air Task Force, said some of the AEP closures being blamed on the new regulations involve plants the company identified for shutdown in 2007, as a result of the litigation.
“They were already on the hit list, so it seems a little late in the day for them to claim that EPA regulations are going to be the demise of these plants,” he said.
“I can understand a company wanting to blame somebody else, and especially if they can blame the government for their problems.
“But they brought this on themselves.”
Man who runs the power plant
Inside the Clinch River plant, the din is never-ending from the huge machinery that makes electricity.
Ricky Chafin, the plant manager, inserts a pair of custom-made plastic plugs into his ears before leading a tour of the 10-story complex, where on a warm September day it feels like the thermostat is stuck on 80 degrees.
Coal that enters the building on conveyer belts is dumped into huge pulverizers (with the date “1958” stamped on the side) that crush it as fine as women’s loose powder makeup.
The black powder is then burned to heat water, drawn from the nearby Clinch River, in boilers. Steam from the superheated water is used to spin turbines, which generate electricity that is carried away on power lines.
Chafin knows this plant as well as anyone. He knows that burning natural gas will produce less pollution than coal. But in the end, he said, it will cost more.
“I’m also a customer,” said the man who runs a power plant.
Sometimes when he gets his electric bill in the mail, “I’m not exactly happy about it,” Chafin said. “But I have a different opinion on what is causing it. I think it’s a lot of these EPA regulations that are driving the costs up.”
Yet the power company is not opposed to the regulations, he added. “The only thing we’re trying to do is slow the implementation process down.”
Jobs vs. deaths
Nearly 400 miles away, on Capitol Hill, talk about excessive government regulation is running almost as hot as the boilers at Clinch River.
“I think that in many cases the EPA is not paying attention to what impact their new regulations are having on jobs,” said Griffith, the region’s congressman. “The EPA really is somewhat cavalier in their attitude toward job loss.”
Last month, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved legislation that would put the EPA regulations on hold. The bill, which Griffith supported, would create a special commission to study the rules’ effect on U.S. economic competitiveness, energy prices and jobs. The measure faces tough sledding in the Senate.
About 80 power plant jobs would be lost to the regulations in the 9th District. But Griffith said spinoff jobs and other economic benefits from the two plants are also at stake – not to mention the financial hardships that higher bills will bring.
Griffith said he has seen little evidence from the EPA to back its assertions about public health benefits from the proposed regulations.
When it announced the rules in March, the EPA said they would prevent as many as 17,000 premature deaths, 11,000 heart attacks and 12,000 emergency room visits a year.
A separate set of EPA regulations, aimed at slashing smokestack emissions that can travel for hundreds of miles into neighboring states, is expected to prevent up to 34,000 untimely deaths and 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks.
“The core mission of the EPA is the protection of public health and the environment,” the agency’s director, Lisa Jackson, told a House subcommittee last month.
“That mission was established in recognition of a fundamental fact of American life – regulations can and do improve the lives of people,” Jackson said.
“We need these rules to hold polluters accountable and keep us safe.”
News researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.