BALDWIN, Ill. ——
Nowhere is coal's effect more visible than here at Illinois' largest coal-fired power plant, where the train cars are flipped upside down, tracks and all, to feed boilers the size of skyscrapers.
Once reviled as one of the dirtiest coal plants in the U.S., today the Baldwin plant is a different kind of poster child.
Last month, Houston-based Dynegy Inc. completed $1 billion in environmental upgrades at Baldwin and its three sister Illinois plants, a calculated bet that it will emerge as one of the coal plant operators left standing as rivals are clobbered by a depressed electricity market that leaves little money to add federally mandated pollution controls.
Dynegy's move, together with the closures of several coal-fired plants in and around Chicago, should add up to cleaner air for Cook County, which has consistently failed to meet federal health standards for air quality.
The pollution spewing from three massive smokestacks at Baldwin, about a five-hour drive southwest of Chicago, had plagued the city and other downwind communities for decades, contributing to the smog and soot that trigger asthma and other ailments.
"Hundreds of people in the state have died in recent years and thousands have been sickened simply because they had no choice but to breathe the pollution being pumped out by huge coal power plants. What we are starting to see now are the real health benefits of legal enforcement actions taken years ago," said Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs for the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago.
The closures of the coal-burning Crawford and Fisk power plants in Chicago and the State Line plant just across the border in Indiana mirror a story playing out across the country. The abundance of natural gas, a cheaper fuel than coal, has cut into profits of coal plant operators just as states and the federal government have pressed for expensive pollution upgrades.
The Brattle Group, a financial consulting firm, predicts that one-fourth of the nation's coal-fired electricity will be wiped off the map by 2016; more than 100 coal-fired generating units have been mothballed since 2009. The state's other two major coal plant owners — Ameren Corp.'s generating arm and Edison International's Midwest Generation — largely have been cast off by their parent companies because of poor financial performance. And they have pleaded with regulators for more time to meet pollution standards.
As a result of upgrades, it is more costly to operate Baldwin and Dynegy's other Illinois coal plants in Wood River, Havana and Hennepin than those of competitors. But Dynegy doesn't expect that to be a burden long term. Fewer players making electricity means surviving power plant operators will receive higher payments from grid operators that pay reservation fees for power.
"There's short-term pain until you flush the noncompliers out of the game," said Robert Flexon, Dynegy's president and chief executive.
Longer term, if coal-fired plants keep closing as Dynegy anticipates, it expects to earn $100 million more per year beginning in 2016 in so-called capacity payments from grid operators.
Cleaning up
Dynegy's decision to upgrade its plants was not altogether altruistic. The improvements stem from a 2005 settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice that set deadlines for the company to clean up its plants or close them.
The Baldwin plant, an hour's drive from St. Louis, is massive; its white smokestack plumes can be seen for miles in this flat farming area. Its fuel comes in by rail.
The cars, brimming with 120 tons of coal every 2 1/2 minutes, are flipped over, rails and all, only to return full in an eight-day loop that begins in Wyoming. The amount of coal burned every two months is enough to fill Willis Tower.
It is just the start of a laborious process that strips the coal of toxic pollutants. Truckloads of lime are shipped to the plant each day to supply the sulfur dioxide scrubbers. After the coal is burned, the resulting coal gas is piped to the building-size scrubbers, each containing 20 nozzles that spray a mixture of limestone and ash to chemically remove the sulfur dioxide.
The pollutants bind to the slurry mixture, drop to the bottom and are recycled, while the coal gas pushes through to two smaller buildings called "bag houses," essentially giant filters that catch tiny particles that would otherwise enter the air.
To avoid nitrogen oxide emissions, the coal is burned at a lower temperature.
All told, improvements since 1998 have reduced 93 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 85 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions and 88 percent of particulate matter emissions, according to Dynegy.
"All that's really coming out that stack now is carbon dioxide and water vapor," Dave Glosecki, Baldwin's maintenance director, told a group during a recent plant tour.
