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.