Curtis is our Energy & Environment Reporter, based in Charleston. He has spent more than 17 years as a reporter and copy editor for Gannett, Dow Jones and McClatchy. He has written extensively about travel, transportation and Congress for USA TODAY, The Bergen Record, The Lexington Herald-Leader, The Wichita Eagle, The Belleville News-Democrat and The Sacramento Bee. You can reach him at ctate@wvpublic.org.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin has been negotiating for weeks with congressional Democrats on a big social spending bill. But they appear to be at a stalemate.
Manchin told reporters at the Capitol Monday that the House of Representatives should vote on a bipartisan infrastructure bill the Senate approved in August.
That’s not, however, what progressive House Democrats want. They want to vote on both bills at the same time. And even though they’ve come down on the original price tag, Manchin is still not on board.
“For the sake of the country, I urge the House to vote and pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill,” he said. “Holding this bill hostage is not going to work in getting my support for the reconciliation bill.”
Manchin said he wants more time to evaluate the social spending bill’s impact on the deficit and the economy. Those numbers would come from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, but the process can take a while.
With the slimmest of margins in Congress, Democrats can neither afford to lose Manchin’s vote, nor a number of progressives in the House. Balancing their priorities has proved a difficult task.
The infrastructure bill has a big provision that would help West Virginia and Appalachia.
The more than 2,000-page bill includes $11.3 billion for the cleanup of abandoned mine lands and extends mine reclamation programs for 15 years.
Manchin, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, included both provisions in the bill.
It also includes billions of dollars to plug orphaned oil and gas wells.
Mine reclamation alone could create hundreds of jobs in West Virginia and generate billions of dollars in economic activity, a recent analysis found.
Union Carbide wants to voluntarily clean up an industrial site in South Charleston, but an attorney who’s suing the company says that’s not good enough.
Michael Callaghan, the Charleston attorney who’s filed multiple lawsuits against Union Carbide in U.S. District Court, says the company violated the federal Clean Water Act.
In a letter to the Department of Environmental Protection, he says the company shouldn’t be allowed to clean up the site without paying civil penalties.
Callaghan says Union Carbide can’t use the state agency’s Voluntary Remediation Program as long as it’s the subject of multiple federal lawsuits.
The site in South Charleston, which was an industrial landfill from the 1950s to the 1980s, has been contaminating Davis Creek, a tributary of the Kanawha River.
Expert testing of Davis Creek has revealed high levels of arsenic, chromium, cadmium, lead, selenium, mercury and other toxic substances.
State officials last October issued a violation against Union Carbide under the West Virginia Water Pollution Control Act. The company appealed.
In July, the Department of Environmental Protection proposed a settlement agreement in which Union Carbide would clean up the site, but not pay any civil penalties.
Earlier this month, Union Carbide submitted an application for the state’s Voluntary Remediation Program to clean up the site. The state agency accepted the application and is negotiating an agreement.
In his letter, Callaghan asked the state agency to revoke the application within 10 days. Otherwise, he said he’d seek a restraining order from U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver, who’s overseeing the case.
West Virginia has thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that need to be capped.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has identified more than 4,000, some of them more than a century old.
The wells contaminate soil and groundwater and release methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
According to federal estimates, the methane released from these wells annually is equivalent to burning as much oil as the nation produces in a day.
A bipartisan infrastructure bill the U.S. Senate approved over the summer would provide about $4.7 billion to cap these problem wells.
The House of Representatives has not yet voted on the legislation. It’s tied up because lawmakers are still negotiating the size and scope of President Joe Biden’s jobs plan.
Ted Boettner, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, says the bill would benefit West Virginia’s economy and environment.
“This infrastructure bill offers an enormous opportunity for the state of West Virginia and Appalachia as a whole to plug thousands of wells and put thousands of people to work,” he said, “and address climate change.”
“The real answer to that question is we don’t exactly know,” he said, “because we’ve never tried to go out and document all of them.”
Some wells are so old, there’s no documentation of their existence. The state has limited resources to track the ones it knows about, much less find others.
“In West Virginia, there could be hundreds of thousands of them,” Boettner said. “So it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.”
Orphaned wells can be costly to fix. Boettner says on average, it costs $55,000 to cap a well, usually with concrete. Depth is a major factor driving the cost.
Horizontally drilled wells, like those used to produce oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, could cost as much as $250,000 each.
While the state has a program to deal with abandoned wells, it’s small relative to the size of the problem.
In the long term, Boettner calls for the creation of a program for oil and gas wells similar to the Abandoned Mine Lands fund. The fund is supported by a tax on coal production.
A fee on oil and gas extraction could support a fund to cap oil and gas wells, he says.
For now, West Virginia will need to rely on the help that’s in the infrastructure bill.
The West Virginia Public Service Commission on Tuesday gave three coal-burning power plants an extended lease on life that will be paid for by the state’s electric power customers.
West Virginia ratepayers will be responsible for covering the $448 million cost of upgrading the plants to keep them in line with Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Kentucky and Virginia regulators declined to impose on their ratepayers any cost of keeping the plants open beyond 2028.
Supporters of extending the lives of the plants, particularly the West Virginia Coal Association, said the number of jobs they support and the tax base they provide to communities outweighed the increase in monthly power costs for consumers.
Consumer and environmental groups, as well as large industrial users of electricity, said power bills have gone up enough and make it harder to attract new residents and economic development.
With the rapid changes in the economics of electric power generation, as well as potentially stricter regulations on fossil fuels from the federal government in the coming years, there’s no guarantee any of the plants will operate until 2040. American Electric Power executives acknowledged this during recent testimony to the commission.
The company had sought a decision from the commission by Wednesday. That was the deadline for AEP affiliates Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power to declare that they would proceed with the upgrades at the three plants or announce their retirement in 2028.
In addition to the upgrades needed for EPA compliance, the commission’s order on Tuesday said West Virginia ratepayers would be responsible for covering any operating and maintenance costs for the plants beyond 2028.
In their testimony, AEP officials declined to provide an estimate of such costs.
“We are evaluating the order and working to determine what other actions need to be taken to move forward,” said Phil Moye, an Appalachian Power spokesman, in a statement Tuesday.
West Virginia electric power customers may be asked to pay more to keep three coal-burning power plants open longer, but not everyone is on board.
On Friday, the West Virginia Public Service Commission will consider whether customers of Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power will pay the full cost of upgrades to the John Amos, Mitchell and Mountaineer power plants.
The three plants need changes to their wastewater treatment systems. The changes would allow the plants to remain in operation through 2040. Without them, the plants would be required to close by the end of 2028.
Roughly 60% of the power the Amos and Mountaineer plants generate goes to customers in Virginia. The State Corporation Commission there rejected the upgrades for those plants as well.
That raises a difficult question. Is it fair for customers in those states to receive electricity from power plants upgraded entirely at the expense of West Virginians?
Emmett Pepper, policy director for Energy Efficient West Virginia, says no.
“It’s not fair for West Virginia ratepayers to have to pay for a power plant that other states are getting power from and getting the benefit from,” he said. “It’s not fair for West Virginians to pay for something that’s for Kentuckians and Virginians.”
Pepper’s group isn’t alone. The West Virginia Consumer Advocate Division opposes the plan. So do groups representing the state’s largest industrial customers of electricity.
Rebecca McPhail, president of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, urged the commission in a letter to reject the plan. She called the proposal “counterproductive” and wrote that higher electric power costs would make the state’s manufacturing base “less competitive.”
Pepper’s group calculated that a 3.3% rate increase to pay for the projects at the three plants would add $4.50 a month to the average residential customer’s bill.
It may not stop there. Changes in the ownership structure of the plants could add more costs. If Wheeling Power were to purchase Kentucky Power’s half ownership of the Mitchell Plant, that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, consumers would pay.
Pepper said he’s seen that happen before.
“In the past, that cost us a lot of money,” he said. “That cost us a lot of rate increases.”
Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power have said they need an answer from the Public Service Commission by Oct. 13. If the companies decide to pull the plug on the wastewater projects and shut the plants down in 2028, they have to let state officials know by then.
Friday’s hearing will give stakeholders, and the public, a chance to let the commissioners know what price they’re willing to pay to keep the electricity flowing from the three power plants. Even if the answer is not one penny more.
The first thing that strikes you about the Mountaineer power plant is its sheer size.
Its stacks rise more than 1,000 feet over the Ohio River floodplain, almost as tall as the Empire State Building. Its massive cooling tower can hold 8.5 million gallons of water.
A 20-story building houses its 1,330-megawatt generator. It produces enough electricity to power a city of a million people. Or more than half of West Virginia.
Mountaineer has been generating electric power since Jimmy Carter was president.
But due to changing environmental regulations and the competition from natural gas and renewable energy, time could be running out.
Virginia’s Corporation Commission, however, rejected it.
The regulatory snag shows the limits of what supporters of West Virginia’s coal plants can do to keep them from shutting down as the country moves away from fossil fuels.
‘Closing of a Culture’
Shutting down the plant would deliver an economic blow to Mason County. It employs more than 150 workers and supports other jobs in the community. Local schools depend on tax revenue from the plant.
Upstream, coal mines in northern West Virginia supply the plant with its fuel, which is delivered by barge. Those jobs are at stake, too.
“This is closing of a culture, this is closing of a community,” said Rick Altman of Wheeling, who’s been a coal miner for 44 years. “This is closing of a generational lifestyle that has really fueled this country.”
When Mountaineer opened, coal was the nation’s dominant source of electric power. Four decades later, natural gas dominates and renewables are catching up.
Coal plants like Mountaineer are becoming more expensive to operate. American Electric Power, the parent company of Appalachian Power, has two other coal-fired plants in West Virginia: the John Amos plant in Putnam County and the Mitchell plant in Marshall County. They face the same pressures.
The company has set a goal of becoming 80% carbon-free by 2030. Reaching that goal will require more coal plants to shut down.
President Joe Biden wants the nation’s power supply to become carbon-neutral in 2035. That’s five years before the West Virginia plants are scheduled to shut down if they are upgraded.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that drastic action is necessary to curb the most devastating impacts of global warming — which in the Ohio Valley would mean less predictable weather, more flooding, and second-hand impact from coastal displacement and global disruptions.
One path forward: Replacing the coal plants with carbon-free sources of energy.
Gypsum and Molasses
It isn’t only the jobs at the power plants, the coal mines or the barge companies on the line. The plant produces and consumes other materials that contribute to the local economy.
Fly ash is collected and hauled off by the truckload. It gets recycled in concrete and asphalt.
The exhaust is filtered through a huge drum that spins with powdered limestone and steel balls.
“We mix limestone and water inside of that drum that’s got them rotating balls in it,” said Brett Watt, the plant’s senior maintenance superintendent. “And it crushes this limestone up to where it’s a slurry. It’s actually finer than the coal is.”
That removes sulfur dioxide and produces gypsum, which is used to make the drywall.
Probably the strangest part of the process involves molasses. Yes, molasses.
It’s used to grow bacteria that eat mercury and selenium.
“We bring in tanker trucks of molasses to feed the bacteria,” said Brian Mabe, the plant manager. “There’s, you know, a living organism that removes that.”
The plant’s closure would be bad news for the drywall plant and the molasses maker.
Curtis Tate
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WVPB
The stacks at the Mountaineer power plant in Mason County, West Virginia
Fossil Fuel Allies
One thing the plant, and most like it, can’t remove from the exhaust stream is carbon dioxide.
West Virginia lawmakers have made an effort to bolster the state’s remaining coal-fired power plants. This past spring, they passed a bill that makes it harder for coal plants to shut down.
Gov. Jim Justice has also taken steps to save the state’s coal plants. He reactivated the dormant West Virginia Public Energy Authority and appointed fossil fuel allies to serve on it and find ways to keep the plants from closing.
“We know these plants won’t run forever,” Hamilton said. “You know, we’re looking for about a 20 year run. Maybe a couple of decades.”
Justice also appointed the former top coal lobbyist in West Virginia to the Public Service Commission, which regulates coal plants. Justice himself owns companies that mine coal.
The federal government is poised to spend billions of dollars to reclaim abandoned mines in Appalachia, and that could help communities that are losing jobs.
Altman started working in the mines when he was 19, and he said he’s heard the promises before. As more power plants and coal mines close, he said, the government needs to step up.
“Don’t just have a plan and say, ‘don’t you worry.’ I’m 63 years old. I got laid off the first time in 1979. You know what I was told by the government? ‘Don’t worry about this, we got you covered. We’re going to educate you, we’re gonna do this.’ I’m still waiting for that to happen. I’m truly waiting for that to happen.”
