Give DTE Energy props, but Great Lakes pollution control is agonizingly slow

Commentary

By Tom Henry

Coal is America’s most plentiful fossil fuel. Burning it, though, is one of the dirtiest ways of generating electricity.

So how can society best resolve this dilemma, especially with the need for energy rising while pressures mount over climate change? Besides spewing pollutants that cause smog and acid rain, coal-fired power plants are the No. 1 source of greenhouse gases warming the Earth’s climate.

For many utilities, it’s been a shell game. They’ve wooed the public with campaigns attacking environmental regulations as too costly, put their money behind presidential candidates sympathetic to them, lobbied influential committee chairmen in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, and had their legal teams fight off overdue pollution-control mandates in federal court.

All for buying time and getting the most out of their aging, antiquated power plants.

Detroit-based DTE Energy is hardly immune from those tactics.

Yet it deserves credit for modernizing its mammoth coal-fired power plant east of Monroe, Mich., one of the nation’s largest. That plant also happens to sit on the western Lake Erie shoreline, one of the most ecologically fragile parts of the Great Lakes.

Give ’em their props.

What’s happened there has been a long, drawn-out process — but the fact of the matter is DTE is doing something positive by following through on its commitment to modernize that plant, whereas a lot of other utilities aren’t.

Air gets a breather

Earlier this month, DTE announced it is back on track with its $1 billion upgrade of the plant.

The project is one of the largest involving any type of construction in Michigan’s history, and is to be completed in 2014.

The cornerstone of it is the installation of two important pollution controls.

Flue gas desulfurization systems, commonly known as scrubbers, will be installed in both smokestacks.

Selective catalytic reduction devices, or SCRs, will be installed in all four of the plant’s operating units.

Scrubbers are 1970s-era technology that remove sulfur dioxide, the sooty pollutant that becomes acid rain. Acid rain destroys rivers, lakes, streams, and forests as it falls from the sky.

Each scrubber is believed to be capable of removing about 95 percent of the sulfur dioxide that otherwise would be vented to the atmosphere.

SCRs remove most major pollutants. They work on the same concept as catalytic converters on automobiles, with ammonia breaking down 90 percent of a unit’s smog-forming nitrogen oxide into harmless water vapor and oxygen. A highly regarded environmental activist in Ohio once described them to me as the “Cadillac of pollution controls.”

When operating in tandem, scrubbers and selective catalytic reduction units are believed to reduce mercury emissions by about 80 percent.

DTE began retrofitting the Monroe plant with those two devices in 2001.

It originally planned to spend $600 million and be done with the work in 2004.

But the project got put on hold after former President George W. Bush stopped there in 2003 to promote a controversial initiative that his opponents saw as a rollback of the Clean Air Act.

Skeptics feared DTE was cashing in on a shift in the nation’s political winds, joining other utilities in stall tactics after reaping the public relations benefit of Bush’s visit.

To its credit, DTE came back to the project.

It now has one more SCR unit to install.

It has put up one new smokestack to scrub emissions from two of the plant’s operating units, and soon expects to put up the second to scrub emissions from the other two.

Pollution controls are costly and slow

This project is a reminder that, first, pollution controls are incredibly expensive.

Many industries have learned the hard way it’s far more cost-effective to simply modernize and prevent pollution.

But it also shows how agonizingly long it takes to do the kind of upgrades necessary for improving and protecting Great Lakes ecological health.

The upgrade of DTE’s coal-fired power plant in Monroe reminds me of long overdue improvements underway to much of the Great Lakes region’s sewage infrastructure.

In Toledo, where I live, raw sewage spilled into local waterways for 24 or more consecutive hours on eight dates between March 5 and April 26, according to the city-owned Toledo Waterways Initiative Web site.

On March 6, that happened from four locations.

Toledo’s most notorious outfall, in South Toledo near Orchard Street, Maumee Avenue, and Lotus Avenue, just east of Danny Thomas Park, had a sewage spill of at least 72 consecutive hours from March 5 through March 7 and one of at least 48 consecutive hours between April 23 and April 24, plus another 24-hour spill on April 26.

During that latter event, that same outfall had sewage spills of more than 13 and 17 hours on April 22 and April 25, respectively.

In other words, there was so much rain that outfall nearly spilled raw sewage into the Maumee around the clock for five consecutive days, except for a break of a few hours on two of those days.

Sewer improvements see similar costly challenges

Records also show Toledo has had sewage spills lasting at least 10 consecutive hours on 23 different days since Jan. 1. That happened at 10 locations on April 25, at eight locations on March 6 and April 23, and at seven locations on March 7, according to the data.

Think about it.

This is 2011. Millions of gallons of human fecal waste is still fouling the rivers and streams that flow into the Great Lakes without first being treated.

And tons of sulfur dioxide destroys our region’s forests and lakes despite technology invented more than four decades ago to stop it.

We’re just now taking a bite out of greenhouse gases that cause climate change, even as scientists warn we may be approaching or beyond a tipping point.

The technology to do better is within our reach.

But it’s expensive and takes a long time. Even with low-interest government loans, sewage upgrades overwhelm many communities.

I have visited both the Monroe coal-fired power plant and Toledo’s sewage plant and, believe me, the kind of construction occurring is not something that goes up overnight.

Toledo is spending $521 million to fix its sewers so overflows will be, for all practical purposes, a thing of the past (a little leeway is built into the engineering so basements don’t flood if there’s a monsoon-like storm). It is not unique; many other cities are doing similar upgrades.

But in Toledo’s case, the engineering is based on a 1998 consent decree a U.S. District Court judge issued after 12 years of litigation between the city and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The sewers were supposed to be expanded and fixed by 2016. The city has obtained a four-year extension to 2020, citing the impact of higher sewer rates as a hardship for a city in which one of every four residents are now living below the poverty line. In other words, the feds have agreed to soften the blow by letting the city phase in the rate hikes a little more gradually.

Still, that means 34 years — the time between when the U.S. EPA initiated legal action in 1986 until the project’s completion date in 2020.

And, of course, the lakes were suffering long before the feds got to the point of initiating legal action.