News Coverage
Future Dims for 'Clear Skies' Initiative
Published June 28, 2003
One of President Bush's premier environmental initiatives -- to cut mercury emissions by nearly half within seven years -- is suddenly in deep trouble, the victim of administration infighting and resistance from industry leaders fearing huge costs. The proposal, part of the president's "Clear Skies" legislation awaiting congressional action, would for the first time regulate mercury emissions from their largest source, coal-fired power plants. Mercury pollution is linked to several public health problems, and the Clinton administration ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations on power plants beginning in 2007.
When Bush took office, he extended the deadline, calling for power plants to reduce mercury emissions by 46 percent as of 2010, and 70 percent by 2018. But with administration officials divided over whether it is economically or technologically feasible for power plants to achieve those goals, some GOP lawmakers representing Midwestern utility interests have vowed to rewrite the Clear Skies legislation to effectively postpone any new mercury standards until 2018 at the earliest.
Some environmentalists say the administration, by design or mishap, has virtually invited Republican lawmakers to weaken what they considered a weak bill to begin with. "They touted it as a big initiative, and now they are quietly tiptoeing away from it," said Frank O'Donnell of the Clean Air Trust.
Administration officials said in interviews last week that lawmakers may change the interim mercury provision, but said it was more important that Congress approve the president's longer-term goal.
"First and most importantly, we are delighted that there appears to be a strong consensus in favor of a 70 percent cut in mercury on the timeline [by 2018] the president called for," said James L. Connaugton, chairman of the president's Council on Environmental Quality. "We crossed a major divide getting consensus around that." The National Research Council has warned that mercury spread through air and water can cause birth defects, neurological damage to fetuses and young children, and other debilitating conditions to people of any age.
Bush introduced Clear Skies as a response to critics who said he was trying to undermine enforcement of Clean Air Act regulations for aging coal-fired power plants. The bill would use mandatory caps and a pollution credit-trading program to reduce overall plant pollutant emissions -- including mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide -- by 70 percent over the next 15 years.
But the bill's interim provision to reduce annual mercury emissions from 48 tons to 26 tons by 2010 has fallen prey to an internal squabble between the EPA, which favors the tough new standard, and the business-friendly Department of Energy, which is more critical.
Bush based the plan on an EPA analysis showing that by installing equipment to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, power plants could also achieve the 46 percent reduction in mercury emissions by 2010 as a "co-benefit." The Energy Department recently challenged this estimate, saying its research concluded that only minimum mercury reductions -- 4 percent -- could be obtained in this manner, and plants would have to spend $ 700 million on new technology to meet the interim target.
Officials at Southern Co., one of the nation's largest utilities, and other large plant operators say no available technology would enable the industry to meet administration targets. Energy Department officials and others also say that the interim mercury standard could force many utilities to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, which could create gas shortages and drive up the price of home heating fuel and other consumer goods.
The dispute spilled out this month during testimony before a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. Republican allies of Midwestern utilities now demand that the bill be rewritten to lower the interim mercury target substantially. At the hearing, Randall Kroszner, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, disclosed the Energy Department analysis and hinted that the administration would be understanding if lawmakers chose to weaken the interim mercury provision. "Occasionally, Congress does change things the president proposes, and that could be a possibility," Kroszner said.
Subcommittee Chairman George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) immediately said he planned to rewrite the section. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the full committee, said: "I am concerned that the cap is too stringent and creates too much uncertainty." The consequences of mercury poisoning have been described for decades. Last week, the EPA's "Draft Report on the Environment" identified health effects ranging from lung damage to fatigue, weight loss, gastrointestinal problems, and behavioral and personality changes.
"Children may be more highly exposed to mercury and may be more vulnerable to its toxic effects," the report said. "The health effects of mercury are diverse and can include developmental and neurological effects in children."
Pathologist Robert A. Goyer, who headed a study on mercury poisoning by the National Research Council in 2000, said people can ingest mercury in its elemental state or as methylmercury, a "particularly hazardous" toxic compound that readily breaches cell membranes or the placental wall. Humans typically are poisoned by eating mercury-contaminated fish.
The EPA report said the primary source of environmental mercury contamination -- 33 percent -- is coal-fired power plants.
The Clear Skies plan originally envisioned that mercury could be dramatically reduced using equipment designed to control other emissions. The EPA found in 1999 that these techniques were capturing one-third of the vaporized mercury coming from plant furnaces. For some coals, installation of equipment to control sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide "might get you all or most of the way toward" Clear Skies mercury requirements, said emissions expert George Offen, of the Electric Power Research Institute, the utility industry's nonprofit research arm.
Recently, however, researchers are finding a "lot of site-to-site variability," said Michael D. Durham, president of ADA Environmental Solutions, an environmental technology company that sometimes consults for the utility industry. "You can't depend on high levels of mercury removal at every site. It goes anywhere from 5 percent to 95 percent."
This concern has led to an alternative strategy in which carbon dust is sprayed into the stack exhaust, capturing vaporized mercury in particles that can be gathered as part of the "fly ash" trapped by existing emission controls. To achieve the reductions envisioned in Clear Skies, however, experts suggest that plants may have to add an expensive fabric-filtering system known as a "bag house," which works much like a huge vacuum cleaner. Offen and Durham said these technologies cannot be guaranteed to achieve the desired results.
"Our position from the beginning was that the cap was unrealistic," said Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, which represents utilities that produce about 70 percent of the nation's power. "We weren't quibbling over the second phase [the 2018 targets], but if we have to install additional controls to meet the 26-ton cap, we will have a very difficult time."
Durham said, "It is a pretty categorical statement" to say that technology does not exist to achieve Clear Skies targets. "We're developing the technology at the same time we're developing the regulation," he said, but "nobody would be putting money into the technology unless there was a regulation coming."