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State may allow TECO to burn suspect coal
By JOSH ZIMMER
© St. Petersburg Times, APOLLO BEACH -- When the coal dust from TECO's Big Bend power plant got too thick to ignore, Claudia Graney wrote a biting letter to the county about the nuisance. "Our patio is covered with it," she said. As it turned out, her complaint was one of many between 1998 and 2000 when the accumulation of black soot on nearby homes seemed to grow worse. The Hillsborough County Environmental Commission investigated and found TECO was burning and storing leftover coal from its Polk County coal-gasification plant, and was doing it without having obtained the required permit. TECO blamed it on a mix-up with the state Department of Environmental Protection and stopped burning the leftover coal after county tests showed the plant's emissions had a much higher-than-normal ash content. Since then, however, TECO has applied for a permit to burn the leftover coal. Last week, the DEP said it was ready to give the company the green light to burn it. The agency is drafting changes to the company's emissions permit that could allow hundreds of tons of leftover coal to be burned at the plant each day. The 1,825-megawatt facility is one of the state's largest polluters, and TECO is under a federal consent decree to sharply reduce the emissions from Big Bend, as well as its Gannon plant. The draft should be ready by the end of September, DEP spokeswoman Elsa Bishop said. "And the permit will specify so many tons per day," she said. "I don't know how many it is at this point." DEP essentially agreed with TECO that the leftover coal had the same characteristics as regular coal. The amount of leftover coal would amount to 2 to 3 percent of what TECO burns annually at Big Bend: 5-million to 6-million tons of coal. "Residual coal is still coal," Bishop said. "It doesn't make any difference." If approval is granted, Big Bend could become the state's only coal plant to burn leftover coal. The permit can be challenged, Bishop said. Initially, the DEP was prepared to let TECO burn the coal without changes to the permit. But after talking with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Bishop said, the DEP decided to require the modified permit. EPA officials could not be reached for comment. The permit is expected to be challenged by Save Our Bays and Canals (SOBAC), a local watchdog group. SOBAC members accuse TECO of spewing dangerous pollutants into the air and say the state has been too lenient. "We don't want it raining that stuff down on us," SOBAC president BJ Lower said. Hillsborough is expressing its own reservations. Although the county is not worried that allowing leftover coal would undercut the federally mandated reductions, officials want TECO to be required to track the emissions of dangerous metals, said Sterlin Woodard, assistant director of the county's air management division. "Our concern is a little bit toward the metals . . . mercury, vanadium, lead, other types of pollutants," he said. "They stay on the fly ash that goes into the air. There's an impact on the bay, there's an impact on the community. We just want to make sure it's properly documented." Our engineers "have some concerns about the project, but they haven't made up their mind whether we'd object," he said. TECO spokesman Ross Bannister said burning the leftover coal makes economic sense, not only because it still has energy value but also because the company could avoid paying high landfill fees. To company promises to contain the leftover coal deposits, he said. "The residual coal still has quite a bit of fuel value."
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