When Mayor Ned Mitchell was sitting in church the other Sunday, he heard two Burlington Northern trains carrying coal from the West pull through town in the hour-long service.
”It made me sick,” said Mitchell, whose coal miner father kept his son out of the mines because he believed the trade was dying. ”I thought, `How many jobs is that?` ”
Last week, Mitchell got even angrier when he met with Burlington officials. They are increasing the number of trains through Sesser to 32 from 8 a day, and the city must pay $7,500 for its share of a new rail crossing signal required by the heavier traffic.
What alarms and upsets people in Illinois coal country is the prospect that Western coal is increasingly going to be substituted for Illinois coal to help electric utilities meet the pollution goals of the new Clean Air Act, signed 10 days ago by President Bush.
That legislation, experts say, gives Illinois coal users a difficult choice: to quit using high-sulfur Illinois coal or build multimillion-dollar scrubbers to clean the resulting emissions.
Illinois, the No. 5 state in coal production, is blessed with the nation`s No. 1 soft coal reserves-about 181 billion tons. If only 30 billion tons were recoverable, a conservative estimate, that would last for 500 years at current production rates of 60 million tons a year. But Illinois coal has a high sulfur content, 3 to 5 percent. Coal from the West contains less sulfur, less than 1 percent, and can be burned without installing scrubbers.
The Illinois coal industry fears that many users will switch, costing thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue.
”It`s a farce,” Mitchell said. ”We`re the ones going to be losing all the jobs. They didn`t make Texas and Arizona pay for the savings and loan crisis, that`s spread over everybody.”
The Clean Air Act indentifies sulfur emissions as a cause of acid rain and requires coal-burning utilities to reduce by about half, to 10 million tons, the amount emitted into the atmosphere by the end of the century.
The standards are to be phased in, with the first deadline in 1995. That means affected utilities have about 18 months to make up their minds what they will do, given the time needed to plan and build emission control units.
Southern Illinois depends on coal, a distant but vital second to agriculture in the Downstate economy. Mining accounts directly for about 12,500 jobs, down from 18,000 a decade ago, according to the Illinois Coal Association. In the worst-case scenario, Illinois could lose the market for half its annual production, according to experts here.
”It could have a devastating effect on the economy of southern Illinois,” said Taylor Pensoneau, vice president of the Illinois Coal Association.
”It`s going to be wild times out there,” said David G. Arey, an assistant director of the Coal Research Center at Southern Illinois University. ”The choice is switch or scrub.”
About half the coal burned in Illinois comes from out of state, but there have been problems. Due to different chemical composition, it can take twice the amount of Western coal to produce the same heat as Illinois coal, and transport costs are far higher.
”The Illinois coal industry isn`t going to disappear,” Arey said. But if all power plants currently without scrubbers switch to Western coal, it will cost Illinois half its production. More likely, Arey said, is a loss of 10 to 20 percent.
The coal industry fought especially hard against provisions of the Clean Air Act that require what it considers too-early decisions on how to cut sulfur emissions. Starting in the Carter administration, there has been an on- again, off-again national push to develop clean coal technologies, methods of processing and burning coal that promise over time to make coal nearly as clean a fuel as natural gas.
For several reasons, virtually none of those new technologies will be used to meet the 1995 standards. The best, involving gasification of coal, are costly and require building new plants, a step not contemplated soon by the conservative utility industry, answerable to rate commissions, shareholders and rate payers.
The most promising quick fix, capturing sulfur before burning by mixing coal with a special lime, is still in development.
”High-surface hydrated lime is the closest clean coal technology to commercial use,” said John M. Lytle, head of the minerals engineering section of the Illinois State Geological Survey, a pioneer ogranization in clean coal technologies. ”Right now we`re trying to interest a lime company in manufacturing 400 tons for a demonstration project. But it would require modification of the lime.”
Lytle has not found takers.
Long range, these technologies will result in startling breakthroughs in reducing worldwide sulfur emissions. Scientists at the Coal Research Center at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale are working on a broad spectrum of problems, from how to break out sulfur organically locked in coal, to finding more uses for coal and its byproducts.
At SIU`s Coal Development Park in nearby Carterville, scientists work to break down the surprisingly complex coal compound into its parts. Supplied with standard samples from the Illinois State Geological Survey, which operates a nationally available sample bank, the scientists have been able to identify such distinct basic building blocks as wax from leaves, sap from trees and spores of swamp plants that died hundreds of millions of years ago in the first step of coal formation.
Each part, called a maceral, behaves in a particular way, raising a host of practical possibilities just beginning to be explored.
Other scientists study the ways sulfur is linked to coal, in visible pyrite form, the common fool`s gold, or in little understood organic bonds.
”My students and I are conducting research that aims to enable scientists to selectively break the carbon-sulfur bonds present in coal, thus loosening the organic sulfur from the backbone of coal,” said Mark J. Bausch, assistant professor of chemistry at SIU. Results are years away, he said.
”Utility companies are going to choose technologies they have seen in operation,” said John S. Mead, director of the Coal Research Center. ”And that means advanced scrubbing.”
Scrubber technology, the cleansing of flue gas in a giant chemical factory built onto a power unit, has been around for a long time.
”The scrubbers of the 1970s cleaned air, but at great cost,” said Mead. ”They can be the largest user of electricity in the whole system.”
Advanced scrubbers, such as one at the University of Illinois campus in Champaign, have many bugs worked out of them and are more efficient. They work at lower temperatures, resulting in less damage to equipment, and produce gypsum as a byproduct, which can be used to make wallboard, instead of sludge. But they still cost a lot-$6.3 million for the small Abbott plant at the university, and up to $250 million at a major plant-and result in higher maintenance costs. Six operators and three mechanics were added at Abbott, bringing the work force to 49, as a result of switching to coal and scrubbing. ”As a supervisor, I certainly would prefer to use natural gas as a primary fuel,” said Donald E. Fortik, who runs the plant. ”It`s cleaner, and I don`t have the environmental problems.”
The Abbott plant has attracted international attention as a state-of-the- art demonstration, and likely will be copied by some utilities on a larger scale. More than 100 people and 20 groups from the U.S., Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, most representing utilities, have visited the plant since it went into operation in 1988.
The Environmental Protection Agency has identified about 107 coal-fired power plants likely to be affected by the Clean Air Act, whose extensive provisions are just now being printed and made available to the energy community. Nine of the plants are in Illinois. An additional 11 are out-of-state plants using Illinois coal.
Those in Illinois are the Edwards plant, Central Illinois Light Co.; the Joppa plant, Electric Energy; the Kincaid plant, Commonwealth Edison; the Meredosia, Grand Tower and Coffeen plants, Central Illinois Public Service Co.; and the Baldwin, Hennepin and Vermilion plants, Illinois Power Co.
Out of state, Illinois sells coal to utilities in several Midwestern states and Georgia, Florida and Tennessee. The Clean Air Act allows trading of pollution credits, so not all plants will have to take action.
Illinois coal`s No. 1 customer in the state is Illinois Power, which says it keeps about 1,500 miners working. The company has said it can reach compliance by modifying its giant plant at Baldwin in the heart of coal country. Currently, a long spume of tannish-red smoke trails from the facility`s giant stacks, none of which have scrubbers.
The company, which uses about 10 percent of Illinois` total coal production, or about 6 million tons a year, drew up six compliance plans ranging from using only Western coal to using only machinery, with choices in between involving blended coals and less extensive machinery.
”It`s a coin toss if you`re thinking only price,” said Frank D. Beaman, supervisor of media relations.
Illinois Power has said it hopes to go ahead with an option to add scrubbers to two of the three boilers at Baldwin and use a blended coal, 70 percent from Illinois and 30 percent low-sulfur, at the third boiler. There isn`t room at the facility to construct a third scrubber, which often is bigger than the boiler it serves. The company is negotiating with the coal companies to assure a long-term price.
It also is seeking federal assistance for capital costs, estimated at $250 million to $500 million, state and federal tax credits, issuance of state and federal pollution control bonds and a change in state law so it can recover building costs before the project is completed.
”If all or most of those drop into place, there will be minimal impact on the state economy,” Beaman said.
Illinois utilities are under considerable pressure to continue to use Illinois coal. For one thing, in southern Illinois, coal mining is one of the biggest customers for electricity. Electrical bills for a big coal mine can exceed $1 million a year. And too, the state has been a leader in developing clean-coal technology and actively promotes it in any utility under governmental authority.
”We are part of a governmental body, and it would be very hard for us to go outside the community for our fuel,” said Tom R. Bee, superintendent of City Water, Light & Power Co. in Springfield.
The Springfield facility, which has had a scrubber since 1980, has become a laboratory for clean coal technology. In the next several years, the utility plans to build an advanced, $270 million system employing coal as a gas. A joint project with the state and U.S. Department of Energy, the integrated coal gasification combined cycle system is expected to eliminate 99 percent of sulfur dioxide from coal burning.
In another look at the future, Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the giant food company, has built a power generating unit at its Decatur corn processing plant, a small city unto itself. The boiler turns limestone and coal into a fluid at high temperatures and recirculates the mix. The burning method is so thorough it can be fired with tires, wood, municipal garbage or other odd fuels. Emissions meet strict Clean Air Act standards for new plants.
”If we want to economically burn coal, we need to burn local high-sulfur coal,” said Kendall Reed, supervisor of the power unit. ”These boilers like dirty fuel. With solids and lots of ash you get a good heat transfer.”
Projects like that hold hope for the thousands of people who work Illinois` approximately 40 surface and shaft mines.
”You still have to burn coal somewhere, and we mine it cheaper than anybody else,” said Mark Baue, a 31-year-old mine foreman standing 225 feet below ground in the vast catacombs of the Spartan mine, an operation of Zeigler Coal Co. and considered a model of efficiency. Baue, a grandson of a coal miner, became a miner 13 years ago and hopes to retire a miner many years from now.
When he first went underground, Baue recalls, he found the mine far cleaner and roomier than imagined, a common first reaction. The walls of the mine are dusted daily with white, powdered limestone to keep down coal dust, which can explode. It`s bright as long as a helmet light burns, except at the face, where digging occurs.
The method of mining, leaving pillars of coal to support the roof and digging a series of interconnected rooms, results in long, windy passageways where the temperature stays around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. After a walk down a long slope into the mine, it`s a mile and a half ride in a golf cart to the mine face.
A machine like a giant roto tiller, called a continuous miner, works to dig out a room. The miner pushes 10-ton loads onto buggies that haul the coal to a conveyor belt, which whisks it to the top.
”I used to have nightmares that my light went off,” said Baue, a compact, sturdy man. ”It`s like your eyes were poked out.”
To demonstrate, he walked into a side room away from the light and sound of work. It was a seldom-visited part of the mine guarded by a ”danger” sign warning of falling chunks of roof. With the helmet lights doused, a dark silence descended. Some of the old-timers talk about feeling solemn when they enter a mine, like entering a cathedral.
Later, with the lights on, Baue confided: ”Most of the guys here really like it. But I`ll tell you something, there are a lot of them scared about the Clean Air Act.”
