Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Three months after Gov. Rick Perry fast-tracked permits for power generators to build a fleet of coal-burning plants, state regulators changed the rules in a way that would make it easier for the permits to be issued.

Perry’s office on Friday said the governor had nothing to do with the decision.

TXU, the state’s largest utility, plans to build 11 plants using pulverized coal technology. Other companies say they plan to build another six using the same method.

Opponents say the plants will leave the state with far more power than it needs while creating far more pollution than necessary.

On Feb. 1, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality dropped a requirement that TXU and other companies consider cleaner technologies before building the pulverized-coal plants they have on the drawing board.

TXU’s 11 proposed plants alone would add more carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas — to the atmosphere than all of Sweden did in 2001, the advocacy group Environmental Defense claims.

A slew of scientific studies — the most recent one by the British government — say that emissions of such gasses have to be cut quickly if temperatures and oceans are not to rise, swamping coastal areas such as Galveston County.

In addition, other compounds from the plants, such as nitrous oxide, mercury and sulfur dioxide, will only add to those coming from petrochemical plants, trucks and ships that already are prevalent in the county.

But city governments and groups such as Environmental Defense accuse Perry of allowing TXU to do what it wants in Texas.

“The plan that is on the table right now is very good for TXU,” said Colin Rowan, spokesman for Environmental Defense. “We need somebody deciding what is good for Texas, and nobody is doing that.”

TXU’s Kimberly Morgan said late Friday that the plants her company plans are just as clean as any that can be built. Besides, she said, the technology Environmental Defense and others are advocating won’t work with the kinds of coal that are widely available in Texas.

However, both claims are questionable in light of government, academic and industry data.

Headed To Court

Environmental Defense is suing the state.

It says regulators already hadn’t been enforcing a requirement that power-plant builders consider all clean-coal technologies when they apply for permits. And then, three months after Perry signed the fast-track order, the agency dropped the requirement altogether.

For its part, the commission on environmental quality isn’t talking. Media Relations Manager Terry Clawson refused last week to answer questions about its rules, claiming he couldn’t do so because a lawsuit had been filed over the change.

With their cities already under a blanket of smog — as well as a federal mandate to clean up the air — the mayors of Houston, Dallas and other elected officials have announced plans to sue the state in federal court.

They say the plants Perry wants to allow utilities to build are far from the cleanest coal-burning technology available.

Environmental Defense sued in October in Travis County District Court, saying state environmental officials are violating their own rules by not making TXU consider other technologies.

“They’re not required to consider gasification,” Rowan said last week. “Our argument is that they should be.”

New Technology

Rowan was referring to a process known as coal gasification.

Rather than pulverizing coal and then burning it, coal is converted to gasses, such as carbon dioxide and oxygen, through pressure and heat.

The process — known formally as “integrated gasification combined cycle” — results in “dramatically” reduced emissions, according to Coal 21, a group whose members include the government, coal producers and electricity utilities in Australia.

Coal 21 wrote that by 2000, it was used to produce about 4,000 megawatts in all industries worldwide.

However, only five such plants are now producing electricity, according to the Gasification Technologies Council, an industry group.

TXU, the company that plans to build the bulk of the pulverized coal plants, says that for Texas, gasification is worse than unproven.

“The technology does not work,” spokeswoman Kimberly Morgan said.

She explained that the two types of coal most widely available in Texas — lignite and that from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — were incompatible with gasification.

The use of gasification in the production of electricity is relatively untried, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported this year.

But Excel Corp. has plans to build a gasification plant using Powder River Basin coal in Colorado. Tondu Corp. of Houston plans to build one in Corpus Christi that will burn petroleum coke — a byproduct of oil refining — and Powder River Basin coal.

In addition, Siemens and Shell Gas and Power both have gasification designs that would burn lignite or Powder River Basin Coal.

What’s Cleanest?

TXU’s Morgan said that the “supercritical” pulverized coal plants her company plans to build would operate just as cleanly as coal gasification plants would.

She pointed to statistics indicating that the TXU plants actually would produce less carbon dioxide, mercury and nitrous oxide than gasification plants in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Tampa, Fla. But those plants were built in the early 1990s.

The EPA this year compared modern coal gasification and plants of the kind TXU wants to build and came to the opposite conclusion.

Gasification “technology can offer environmental advantages over the pulverized coal technologies in most emissions areas,” EPA wrote in its study. “In addition to the reduced air emissions from the (gasification) technology, the plants typically consume significantly less water and generate less solid waste…”

The federal study did say that it was still unknown whether gasification plants were as reliable as their pulverized coal counterparts.

Confronted with research indicating that gasification was the cleaner technology, Morgan wasn’t buying it.

“People can do all the studies they want,” she said. “We’re the leaders in the industry.”

Clearing The Air

Kathy Walt, Perry’s press secretary, said the governor was concerned about the quality of Texas air.

“The governor is well aware of the concerns environmental groups have,” she said. “His son has asthma. He’s dealt with those health issues.”

As Perry often has, Walt touted the governor’s initiatives to produce more energy using wind and other alternative sources.

But dwarfing those initiatives are the 17 coal-fired plants now proposed for Texas.

Pressed as to whether gasification deserved another look, Walt wouldn’t answer directly. She would say only that environmental regulators would consider harm to the air as they decide whether to permit the new plants.

She added that the governor had nothing to do with the decision not to require would-be generators to take a serious look at gasification.

“We did not direct TCEQ in any way to do anything about its rules,” Walt said.

But Thomas Weber, the Austin attorney who filed the suit on Environmental Defense’s behalf, is skeptical.

“I’m curious why TCEQ chose this time to change a rule that is pivotal to its process,” he said.