Two strikes against acid rain

The American Electric Power Co. in Columbus, OH, the largest U.S. operator of coal-fired generators, announced recently that it has hired General Electric Co. and Bechtel Corp. to design the first full-sized power plant to use coal gasification to control pollutants.

The 629-megawatt plant, scheduled to be built in Meigs County, Ohio, by 2010, would convert coal into gas while stripping out sulfur which contributes to acid rain and mercury, a poison we don’t need. The byproduct of coal gasification is a harmless slag that has been approved for use in highway construction.

The gasification technology gives coal the best of future roles – a clean fuel to feed the engine of the U.S. economy.

A second technological revolution took place a thousand miles northeast of Ohio, in the small province of Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast.

If the coal belt surrounding the Ohio Valley is the engine of the U.S. economy, then Nova Scotia is unfortunately its tailpipe. Here acid rain is contaminating rocks, soils and waters. Much of the acid rain that falls on Nova Scotia is produced in Ohio and carried to this province and the state of Maine on the prevailing winds.

In Nova Scotia, two conservation organizations, the Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF) and the Nova Scotia Salmon Association (NSSA), are using cutting-edge technology to counteract the impacts of acid rain on a test river. The technology was developed and used successfully in Norway. ASF and NSSA funded and installed a Norwegian-built “lime doser” that automatically adds the correct amount of lime to the river to reduce its acidity to a level where salmon, trout and other freshwater life can again flourish.

The lime doser, a tower 40 feet high and 8 feet across, is computer controlled to almost instantly balance acidity levels. In Norway this technology has allowed salmon and trout to rebound many-fold in just five years.

When the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1990 was passed, most of us thought the battle against acid rain had been won – and certainly overall levels of acid rain pollutants have decreased. However, the combination of grandfathering (allowing some existing coal-fired plants that emit high levels of pollution to continue spewing their contaminants into the air), combined with the sensitivity of some rivers, even far downwind of the source, in places like

Maine and Atlantic Canada, means that we must reduce acid rain impacts further.

Few of us need reminding that acid rain negatively affects human health in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and is a potent threat to both forests in New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains and rivers as far east as Atlantic Canada.

That is why we must support both these technologies. Coal gasification can help rebuild a greener U.S. energy sector, while lime dosing can save rivers that are part of our living system. Realistically, it will take decades to solve the acid rain problem, but the key is to realize that there are solutions.

We can save rivers and species that are suffering from the effects of acid rain, and we can put technology in place that could eventually eliminate the problem while it benefits both our citizens at large and the U.S. economy.

Using these new technologies represents a win-win proposition for all of us in the battle against acid rain.

Bill Taylor is president and CEO of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, an international, charitable conservation organization, headquartered in Canada, with offices in New York City and Brunswick, Maine.