Southern Owns Top 3 US Emitters of CO2 - Report
Date: 31-Jul-06
Country: US
Author: Timothy Gardner
The country's top three power plant emitters of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, were located in Georgia and Alabama, according to the report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit that campaigns for stronger pollution laws.
No. 1 was Southern's Scherer coal plant in Georgia, which emitted nearly 26,041,000 tons of CO2 last year, said the report, "The 50 Dirtiest Power Plants," released on Thursday.
The other top three carbon emitters were Southern's James H. Miller Jr. plant in Alabama and its Bowen plant in Georgia, which are also coal-fired.
"The Southeast has a dominant portion of the highest emitters of carbon dioxide of all the US utilities," said Dr. Steven Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit group.
Power companies, which produce about 40 percent of the country's carbon dioxide, are keeping an eye on any possible US regulation on greenhouse gases that could form a market to trade credits for the right to emit greenhouse gases, particularly as emissions of the gases keep rising. US CO2 emissions rose about 2.5 percent last year.
President George W. Bush dropped out of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming early in his first term, but the call to reduce heat-trapping emissions from the world's largest producer of them is growing.
States in the US East and West are forming regional groups to limit CO2 emissions from power plants, and the number of bills in US Congress calling for limits on the gases is growing.
Southern shares Bush's position that greenhouse gas regulations should not be mandatory. Rather, voluntary cuts and technology advancements can fight the problem, they say.
That has led some environmentalists to criticize Southern. "We've got some of the strongest resistance to moving forward in this country on doing something on carbon emissions coming from Southern," said Smith.
Southern spokeswoman Lynn Wallace disagreed. "If we weren't working on technological development to reduce emissions that would be one thing, but we are," she said.
Wallace said that while Southern is not reducing CO2 emissions from the top three plants, the company has reduced CO2 emissions from its entire power fleet over the last 10 years by 115 million metric tonnes.
Southern is researching the capture and burial of CO2 emissions from power plants and is planning to build a clean- burning 285 megawatt coal gasification plant in Florida. The commercial-sized prototype plant is expected to open in mid-2010. Southern is also looking at the possibility of building new nuclear power plants.
Some fellow power companies with high carbon emissions are preparing to trade credits for greenhouse gases or are urging the government to regulate emissions. American Electric Power, which also has coal-burning plants in the South, is a member of voluntary greenhouse market the Chicago Climate Exchange. Progress Energy and Cinergy Corp. are urging the federal government to regulate carbon emissions.
The report said US power plants are making some progress on sulfur dioxide emissions, which can be harmful to human health. The United States has a federally mandated SO2 credit trading system which has been credited with reducing emissions of the pollutant that causes acid rain and smog. The report can be viewed at [www.dirtykilowatts.org].
