Waste Coal

Burning Waste Coal is Much More Polluting than Burning Coal

[Print­able PDF fact­sheet on waste coal]

See our Pow­er­point on waste coal and waste coal burn­ing pow­er plants.

What is waste coal?

Waste coals are the low-ener­gy-val­ue dis­cards of the coal min­ing indus­try. Waste coal is called “culm” in the east­ern Penn­syl­va­nia anthracite coal region and “gob” or “boney” in the bitimi­nous coal min­ing regions (west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, West Vir­ginia and elsewhere).

Waste coal piles accu­mu­lat­ed most­ly between 1900 and 1970. The piles look like hills or small moun­tains that are dark and bar­ren. Hun­dreds of mil­lions of tons of waste coal and rock lit­ter the land­scape in min­ing states.

Why is it a problem?

Waste coal piles leach iron, man­ganese and alu­minum pol­lu­tion into water­ways and cause acid drainage that kills neigh­bor­ing streams. These piles some­times even catch fire, releas­ing tox­ic pol­lu­tion into the air.

Where is waste coal being burned?

There are cur­rent­ly 18 waste coal burn­ing pow­er plants, and 13 more that use it as a sec­ondary fuel, with bitu­mi­nous coal as their pri­ma­ry fuel. Four­teen of the 18 waste coal plants are in Penn­syl­va­nia. Over a dozen more are pro­posed, most­ly in PA, WV and KY. There are also now pro­pos­als for coal-to-oil refiner­ies, some of which would use waste coal to pro­duce liq­uid fuels.

Low energy value

Nation­al­ly, waste coal has an aver­age of 60% of the BTU val­ue (British Ther­mal Units, a unit of ener­gy) of nor­mal coals. It can take up to twice as much waste coal to pro­duce the same amount of elec­tric­i­ty. This means that — in most places — waste coal burn­ers can only be eco­nom­i­cal­ly built where huge vol­umes of waste coal exist. It would cost too much to truck far-away low-BTU fuel to a cen­tral­ized burn­er. Con­se­quent­ly, even if waste coal burn­ing were a clean solu­tion, it would­n’t deal with the prob­lem of more iso­lat­ed waste coal piles.

Waste Coal has More Mercury

Waste coal has high­er con­cen­tra­tion of mer­cury than nor­mal coals. In West Vir­ginia and nation­al­ly, gob has 4 times more mer­cury than bitu­mi­nous coal. In Penn­syl­va­nia, gob has 3.5 times more mer­cury than bitu­mi­nous coal. Culm has 19% more mer­cury than anthracite coal.

Bitu­mi­nous waste coal also has high­er lev­els of sul­fur (see chart below).

[This is based on thou­sands of sam­ples col­lect­ed in 1999 by the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency. Click here for more details on mer­cury con­tent in coals and waste coals.]

Data on oth­er met­als in waste coal is sparse, but evi­dence from sin­gle met­als tests on Penn­syl­va­nia culm and gob show both to have about 4 times as much chromi­um and 3 times as much lead.

More Mercury Per Megawatt

Since more waste coal must be burned to pro­duce the same amount of elec­tric­i­ty as nor­mal coal would, this means that — in the states most affect­ed by waste coal burn­ing — over 6 times as much mer­cury must be fed into a waste coal burn­er to pro­duce the same amount of ener­gy as a tra­di­tion­al coal pow­er plant. For culm vs. anthracite coal, it takes near­ly twice as much mercury.

Where Does the Mercury Go?

Old­er coal pow­er plants could not han­dle waste coal. In the late 1980’s “cir­cu­lat­ing flu­idized bed” (CFB) style pow­er plants were built which could burn the low-ener­gy waste coal. Because they were built after the 1970 Clean Air Act, these CFB pow­er plants have pol­lu­tion con­trol equip­ment that the old ones don’t have. This makes it easy for the waste coal indus­try to make the claim that their air emis­sions are clean­er than 1950s-era coal pow­er plants.

Com­par­ing apples to apples, it is more accu­rate to com­pare air emis­sions from waste coal burn­ers to the new coal pow­er plants being pro­posed. The cur­rent­ly pro­posed Longview bitu­mi­nous coal pow­er plant in Fort Mar­tin (near Mor­gan­town, WV) would have low­er emis­sions than the cur­rent­ly pro­posed gob burn­er in near­by Nema­col­in (Greene Coun­ty, PA).

Other Air Emissions

Com­bus­tion cre­ates prob­lems that sim­ply don’t exist if the waste coal is left unburned. Any­time you burn coal or waste coal, poly­cyclic aro­mat­ic hydro­car­bons (PAHs) are cre­at­ed that were not present in the unburned waste coal. Poly­cyclic aro­mat­ic hydro­car­bons have a range of tox­i­c­i­ty. Any time you burn any­thing with less than com­plete com­bus­tion, you also cre­ate nitro­gen oxides (NOx) and prod­ucts of incom­plete com­bus­tion (PICs). Since the num­ber of pos­si­ble PICs is unlim­it­ed, the poten­tial tox­i­c­i­ty of the PICs is uncertain.

[See stud­ies on how flu­idized bed waste coal burn­ers release more can­cer-caus­ing PAH’s as well as 15% more glob­al warm­ing pol­lu­tion and increased car­bon monox­ide than con­ven­tion­al burners.]

Toxic Ash

Burn­ing waste coal does­n’t make the waste go away. If 100 tons of waste coal are burned, 85 tons will remain as waste coal ash.

Since far more mer­cury and oth­er tox­ic con­t­a­m­i­nants enter a waste coal burn­er to pro­duce a giv­en amount of elec­tric­i­ty, these high lev­els of tox­ic con­t­a­m­i­nants have to come out some­where. Tox­ic met­als can­not be destroyed by burn­ing them. To the extent that they are cap­tured in pol­lu­tion con­trols (pro­tect­ing the air), they are then con­cen­trat­ed in the high­ly tox­ic ash that ulti­mate­ly threat­ens the ground­wa­ter wher­ev­er this ash is dumped. Waste coal burn­ers have clean­er air emis­sions than anti­quat­ed coal plants due to their bet­ter pol­lu­tion con­trols, but this only means that the ash is far more tox­ic, since the high­ly tox­ic par­tic­u­lates cap­tured in pol­lu­tion con­trol equip­ment end up in the ash. The indus­try claims that 99.8% of the mer­cury in the fuel is cap­tured and ends up in their ash.

Waste coal ash is dumped in com­mu­ni­ties not far from the waste coal burn­ers, threat­en­ing the ground­wa­ter with leach­ing lead, mer­cury and oth­er poi­sons. Pow­er plant waste is allowed to be dumped with­out the basic pro­tec­tions (land­fill lin­ers) that are required for dump­ing house­hold trash. When burn­ing any sol­id fuel, the result­ing ash has a high­er sur­face area than the raw, unburned mate­r­i­al. The dan­gers of tox­ic leach­ing from ash can be expect­ed to be greater than from the unburned waste coal. Just like with cof­fee, run­ning water over cof­fee grounds leach­es far more cof­fee out than if you ran water over whole cof­fee beans.

The indus­try claims that by inject­ing lime­stone into the ash, the ash becomes imper­vi­ous to leach­ing. How­ev­er, this has not been proven and it seems like­ly that the alka­line affects of the lime would afford only tem­po­rary pro­tec­tion, espe­cial­ly since the region where most of the waste coal burn­ers are (Penn­syl­va­nia, West Vir­ginia) suf­fers from the nation’s worst acid rain.

The waste coal burn­ing indus­try’s own data shows that waste coal ash does in fact leach met­als into ground­wa­ter, despite their pub­lic asser­tions. Ash at 2 of 12 facil­i­ties stud­ied in Penn­syl­va­nia were shown to con­tain lev­els of arsenic high­er than the max­i­mum allow­able con­cen­tra­tion set forth for land appli­ca­tion of sewage sludge. Of 221 sam­ples of leachate from waste coal ash at the ash dumps, lead con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in 23 sam­ples (10.4%) exceed­ed a lev­el 10 times high­er than EPA’s max­i­mum con­t­a­m­i­nant lev­el (MCL) for drink­ing water. Six sam­ples exceed­ed this “10 times the drink­ing water stan­dard” lev­el for cad­mi­um, as did sin­gle sam­ples for chromi­um and selenium.

Click here for a list of waste coal ash dumps in the U.S.

Beach Grass: the Safe and Affordable Alternative to Burning Waste Coal

Researchers at the Nat­ur­al Resources Con­ser­va­tion Ser­vice found a very cheap and viable alter­na­tive to the con­ven­tion­al waste coal pile reme­di­a­tion method of grad­ing, top­soil­ing, seed­ing and mulching. They found that beach grass, native to sandy beach­es, thrives in waste coal piles and can estab­lish enough plant cov­er to enable native plants to take root. This method has been shown to bring life back to long-dead waste coal piles for only 6–10% of the cost of con­ven­tion­al meth­ods. With­in a few years, beach grass enabled native plants to take over, allow­ing organ­ic mat­ter to accu­mu­late around plants, form­ing a plant lay­er that stopped ero­sion, held water, cooled the sur­face, and looked better.

For more details, read:

• Beach Grass: Bring­ing the Seashore to the Moun­tains (Ero­sion Con­trol Fea­ture Arti­cle, July/August 2000).
• Suc­ces­sion on a Coal Mine Gob Pile Sta­bi­lized With ‘Cape’ Amer­i­can Beachgrass

The waste coal indus­try is push­ing aggres­sive­ly to include their pro­posed facil­i­ties in the Penn­syl­va­nia Renew­able Port­fo­lio Stan­dard, despite the fact that waste coal is not renew­able ener­gy and that waste coal pow­er plants are dirt­i­er than coal pow­er plants.

The waste coal indus­try argues that the best solu­tion to waste coal piles is burn­ing them, while oth­er clean­er and safer alter­na­tives exist.

Rather than lib­er­ate the tox­ic con­t­a­m­i­nants by burn­ing them, it is prefer­able to reme­di­ate the waste coal piles in a way that reduces the prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with the piles with­out cre­at­ing new problems.

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