Biomass Incinerator is Vermont’s Biggest Polluter

Fac­ing cli­mate change: Vermont’s biggest polluters

May 29, 2013. Source: Audrey Clark, VT Digger

Vermont’s rep­u­ta­tion as a green state was upheld this year when the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA) released an inter­ac­tive map of the biggest point sources of green­house gas­es in the coun­try. In spite of, or thanks to, these facil­i­ties, Ver­mont has the low­est emis­sions in the nation. 

Even so, Vermont’s six biggest pol­luters are not mov­ing fast enough to meet the state’s goal of reduc­ing emis­sions 75 per­cent below 1990 lev­els by 2050.

The EPA map shows facil­i­ties, most­ly indus­tri­al, that release more than 25,000 met­ric tons of green­house gas­es into the atmos­phere. Vermont’s biggest pol­luters total 849,068 met­ric tons of green­house gas­es, about 10 per­cent of Vermont’s total emissions.

In order of decreas­ing emis­sions, the facil­i­ties are the J.C. McNeil bio­mass gen­er­at­ing plant, IBM, More­town Land­fill, Coven­try Land­fill, Rock­Tenn paper­board recy­cling com­pa­ny, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vermont.

These six facil­i­ties have already tak­en mea­sures to low­er their emis­sions, and some have plans to do even more. Fed­er­al and state reg­u­la­tion of green­house gas­es Facil­i­ties that release more than 25,000 met­ric tons of green­house gas­es are required to report their emis­sions to the EPA. This accounts for near­ly all pow­er plants and refiner­ies, as well as oth­er large indus­tri­al facil­i­ties. The lat­est data are from 2011 and are not yet com­plete­ly ver­i­fied by the EPA. The gas­es report­ed to the EPA are con­vert­ed into a sin­gle num­ber called car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent, a mea­sure of the warm­ing effect of each gas expressed in units of car­bon dioxide.

Doug Elliott, the sec­tion chief of the air pol­lu­tion con­trol divi­sion at the Ver­mont Agency of Nat­ur­al Resources, said Ver­mont doesn’t do much to reg­u­late green­house gas emis­sions. The EPA del­e­gates Ver­mont to mon­i­tor and enforce emis­sions lev­els of any big pol­luter. Elliott said a facil­i­ty has to release 100,000 met­ric tons of CO2e before the state and fed­er­al gov­ern­ments start look­ing over its shoul­der, a thresh­old Elliott called “very high.”

Cur­rent­ly, keep­ing an eye on the big pol­luters isn’t tak­ing up much of the air pol­lu­tion con­trol division’s resources because there are so few facil­i­ties in Ver­mont that exceed the fed­er­al lim­its. But, said Elliott, “There is talk of reduc­ing that thresh­old and depend­ing on where they reduce that thresh­old to it could bring in an absurd num­ber of per­mits that we wouldn’t have resources for.” The air pol­lu­tion con­trol divi­sion spends the major­i­ty of its time reg­u­lat­ing per­mits for gas­es that make up a much small­er part of emis­sions — like sul­fur diox­ide and car­bon monox­ide — which have tra­di­tion­al­ly been con­sid­ered more tox­ic than car­bon dioxide.

Vermont’s big six Out of Vermont’s six big green­house gas pol­luters, the J.C. McNeil gen­er­at­ing plant in Burlington’s Inter­vale pol­lut­ed the most, account­ing for 42 per­cent of the state’s large-facil­i­ty emis­sions. Vermont’s largest bio­mass pow­er plant released 355,606 met­ric tons of CO2e in 2011. Nine­ty-sev­en per­cent of that came from wood bio­mass; the rest was nat­ur­al gas burned to meet elec­tric­i­ty demand.

John Irv­ing is the pow­er sup­ply man­ag­er for Burling­ton Elec­tric. He says wood ener­gy has net-zero emis­sions in the long run. “It’s pret­ty close to a closed cycle,” he said. Some, like Irv­ing, argue wood ener­gy is car­bon-neu­tral because trees grow back and reab­sorb car­bon dioxide.

Oth­er sci­en­tists chal­lenge that idea, argu­ing that wood is less effi­cient than most fos­sil fuels and that trees take a long time to grow back, longer than we have to reduce emissions.

Christo­pher Kil­ian of the Con­ser­va­tion Law Foun­da­tion says the jury’s still out on bio­mass’ impact on car­bon seques­tra­tion, but that “it isn’t fair to take a bio­mass plant and just lump it in with a bunch of coal plants or oth­er facil­i­ties that are emit­ting a bunch of methane from a bunch of rot­ting garbage or green­house gas­es from man­u­fac­tur­ing. It is a renew­able fuel and there is a car­bon cycle asso­ci­at­ed with that facility.”

Nonethe­less, Kil­ian would like to see McNeil become more effi­cient by, for exam­ple, reusing waste heat.

- See more at: http://vtdigger.org/2013/05/29/facing-climate-change-vermonts-biggest-polluters/#sthash.BKernnvl.dpuf