Power County Advanced Energy Center
Air and Water Quality Information for the Community
Southeast Idaho Energy (SIE) LLC proposes to build the Power County Advanced Energy Center two miles southwest of American Falls and immediately south of Lamb Weston on 450 acres zoned for heavy industry. Using advanced clean-coal gasification technology, the Center will produce nitrogen based fertilizers. It will also generate some of the electricity it needs.
The Center will be built over a 4 year period. At a cost of $1.5 billion, construction will support 750 to 1,000 workers, and operations will create 150 well-paying jobs. We expect the facility to pay a substantial amount in local taxes.
We understand that our neighbors will want information about our facility before fully welcoming it. If you have questions that we don’t answer here, please contact us.
The Center will operate well within stringent air quality standards.
The health and safety of our employees and neighbors is very important to us. Consequently, we have designed the Center to operate well below limits set by government agencies to protect human health and the environment. Extensive details on emissions are contained in the Final Air Permit issued by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (IDEQ).
DEQ and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established air quality standards to protect individuals and the environment near the plant and farther away. Along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, IDEQ and EPA will provide strict oversight of our operations. These agencies have spent decades studying health, safety and environmental issues. The knowledge from these studies is the basis for their standards and regulations.
Emissions from the Center will be below EPA "Levels of Significance".
EPA uses the concentration of each emission in the air to determine whether it reaches “Significance.” Computer models mandated by EPA and run by SIE show that concentrations will be well below Levels of Significance. DEQ will review and verify SIE’s work. The low concentrations mean that the Center will not exceed National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), and it won’t contribute to exceeding them. These standards protect air, crops and the quality of the environment.
For sulfur oxides, for example, NAAQS allows an average annual concentration of 80 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The facility will demonstrate average annual concentrations of less than one microgram per cubic meter, or less than 2% of the NAAQS permit limit.
Concentrations resulting from emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates, the other emissions for which the EPA has developed NAAQS, are similarly low. They range from zero to five percent of the NAAQS limits. Because of these very low concentrations, the air in Power County, which meets air quality standards now, will continue to do so once Center operations begin.
Beyond two to three miles from the Center, concentrations will be even lower. In fact, the highest concentrations – five percent or less of the NAAQS limits – are almost all at the boundary of the Center. Concentrations are very low when the emissions come out of the plant. Then these compounds quickly mix with large volumes of air, which significantly diminish the concentrations even further. In American Falls or the Riverbend subdivision, for example, concentrations of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, particulates and carbon monoxide reach a maximum of one to two percent of the NAAQS limits.
Advanced gasification technology allows the U.S. to use coal cleanly and efficiently.
Coal reserves in the U.S. can produce about as much energy as the petroleum reserves in the Middle East. Advances in gasification technology make it possible to produce industrial and consumer products, as well as energy, more cleanly than ever before from coal. The Advanced Energy Center will be 80 percent cleaner than pulverized coal plants that recently received air permits.
It will also be clean compared with gas-fired electric generating plants, which generally are regarded and accepted as “clean.” Annual emissions from the Center will be about the same as the emissions from a base-load 150-megawatt gas combined-cycle plant.
Technological advances and BACT ensure low emissions.
Modern plants that use coal and produce a variety of products are far different – and much cleaner – than plants built even 10 or 20 years ago. Just as improvements such as the catalytic converter have made cars more environmentally friendly, so have a host of advances made industrial operations cleaner. To ensure new facilities implement these technological improvements, EPA has a Best Available Control Technology requirement, otherwise know as BACT. Under this requirement, SIE is required to identify and assess the best technologies to keep emissions very low. For example, based on the BACT assessment, SIE is installing a $2.5 million “thermal oxidation” system to reduce carbon monoxide emissions.
Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) is a proven technology to keep emissions low.
It is another important example of BACT. It involves the use of a catalyst to greatly reduce nitrogen oxides. A catalyst is a material that helps a chemical reaction to occur, but does not become involved in the reaction itself. In SCR, the catalyst -- which operates similar to your car’s catalytic converter – encourages a chemical reaction between nitrogen oxide and ammonia so that only two harmless byproducts are created -- water and atmospheric nitrogen. SCR will be used to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from the Center’s electricity-generating equipment and from the operations that produce nitric acid.
SIE will go beyond what is required to provide a clean facility.
We will do better than BACT, and we will do more than the regulations require. For example, to reduce particulates, we will spend an extra $50 million to keep our coal handling operations completely enclosed. We recognize that in the past, particulates have been a problem in the area. We want to be certain that they do not contribute to future problems.
SIE will use carbon dioxide from the Center in a positive way.
We recognize that many people are concerned with the potential environmental effects of CO2. For SIE, it is a potential resource. The Center will be built to capture the 2 million tons per year of CO2 that it produces. We are exploring possibilities for putting the CO2 to productive use.
Mercury emissions from the Center will be extremely low.
In a gasifier, mercury is also turned into a gas, which can be easily captured and removed by a filter system that uses activated carbon. These systems are at least 90 percent efficient, and they typically operate at efficiencies of 99 percent and higher. A separate system that cleans the gas produced from coal removes additional mercury. For the very small amount that is not captured – between one pound and 10 pounds per year, there is no easy pathway to the outside air. Most of this mercury will be found in trace, barely measurable quantities deposited in process equipment such as heat exchangers and catalyst beds. The filters containing mercury will be disposed of according to DEQ regulations.
The Center will be designed for zero wastewater discharge.
SIE has obtained senior industrial water rights to meet the requirements of about two million gallons of water per day. Approximately the same volume is used now to irrigate the 450 acres where SIE will build the Advanced Energy Center. No wastewater will be discharged.
We are committed to environmental quality.
In fact, one of our company’s guiding principles is Environmental Stewardship. When we develop a facility, we take special care to limit emissions and environmental impacts. That is why we specialize in high-efficiency, clean plants that used advanced coal gasification technology.
We will work with the community.
If you have ideas that will help to make the Advanced Energy Center a positive addition to the area, we want to hear from you. We recognize that some individuals may want more detailed information than we can present in a single fact sheet. Please contact John Burk with your requests, ideas or questions.