PPL Montana shutting down coal-fired power plant

BILLINGS (AP) – It isn’t on its dying breath, but the J.E. Corette coal-fired power plant, for 40 years Billings’ worst air polluter, could be weeks away from its last gasp.

In 73 days, the final chunks of Wyoming coal will drop into Corette’s furnace, and when those final embers fade, the 46-year-old power plant will stop pulsing its 154 megawatts onto the Western power grid. For perhaps the only time since Corette first fired up in 1968, there will not be a coal pile on Billings’ South Side, or railcars of coal parked on the power plant’s spur waiting to feed the beast.

Corette’s 35 workers will leave the PPL Montana parking lot April 15, lock the gate and, with exception of one or two men kept on for maintenance, not return.

Corette lacks the pollution controls needed to meet federal Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which require power plants to eliminate most of their mercury pollution. The rules have been in the works for a few years, but don’t kick in until mid-April. PPL Montana has concluded installing the equipment wouldn’t be worthwhile. The bill to bring Corette up to compliance would be $38 million, according to PPL. The plant isn’t profitable enough to cover the upgrade.

“Profitability depends on market conditions and mandated investments in emission control equipment,” said David Hoffman, PPL Montana spokesman. “Many other coal-fired power plants across the country have closed, or announced plans to close because of governmental regulatory compliance requirements, amounting to some 54,000 megawatts of electricity production.”

Corette isn’t officially closing for good. It is, in the parlance of PPL’s quarterly reports, going into “long term reserve,” or mothballs. If the electricity market improves, then emissions controls for Corette might make sense, Hoffman said.

The community, at least elements of it, is torn about Corette’s fate. On one hand, Corette’s union workers, as well as the Billings Chamber of Commerce, argue Corette is being shut down by excessive regulations. They have insisted since the mothballing was announced in 2012 that the nation’s clean air laws need to change.

On the other hand, Billings residents concerned about the air they breathe say pollution-capturing technology should have been attached to Corette years ago, which would have kept the plant running beyond April. Corette doesn’t have a pollution scrubber. The plant has been able to remain operational by challenging clean air laws and switching to cleaner burning coal when necessary to stay beneath pollution caps.

The debate will continue, but it’s not likely to change Corette’s outcome. If the plant fires up again, the pollution control equipment will have to be installed. And there’s a limited opportunity for bringing the plant back because its air permit expires in five years. If Corette doesn’t come back online in five years, it will be treated as a new facility in need of a new permit, making the road back even more difficult.

Corette’s oldest employees don’t see the coal plant reopening

“I don’t think so, I really don’t,” said Bob Bratton. “I think they have hopes someone will buy it, come in and take over.”

Bratton has been clocking in at Corette for 41 years. He was 23 when he hired on with Montana Power in 1974. At a time when some of his peers were earning less than $2 an hour, Bratton was making $4.71 at Corette. Coal power was a cutting-edge industry in Montana. Corette was Montana Power’s first significant investment in coal power, a launch pad for the major coal power plants planned for Colstrip. There was even a small-scale wet scrubber at Corette to train Colstrip bound workers with pollution technology they might see after leaving Billings.

But Corette never received a permanent air scrubber. The battle over its pollution was in full pitch after only a few years.

In the 1980s, air pollution in Billings was so bad the community violated the state’s clean air laws. Montana’s Constitution also guaranteed the public’s right to a clean and healthful environment. Billings residents began demanding state law be enforced.

Montana Power Co. balked at the state’s clean air laws. It suggested the pollution controls, at $20 to $50 million, cost more than Corette’s $17 million construction price. MPC threatened to close the power plant named for its former company chairman, J.E. Corette.

Instead, Montana Power persuaded state legislators from Billings to carve out a special pollution district where Corette and the area’s oil refineries wouldn’t have to comply with state clean air laws. The polluters would comply with more forgiving federal laws.

The big issue was sulfur dioxide, or SO2. The chemical compound can increase asthma symptoms and is a particular threat to the vulnerable lungs of the elderly and children, who can develop long-term breathing complications, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The SO2 emitted by Billings industries between 1983 and 1993 was 36,000 tons a year, with Corette being a major contributor. The level of pollution was comparable to major metropolitan areas, said Billings resident Vince Larson.

Larson lives short of a mile downwind from Corette and Phillps 66 refinery. From his country home in the hills southwest of the stacks, Larson said it was difficult to see Billings at times.

Doing some research, Larson learned that air pollution in Billings wasn’t much better than air pollution in the San Francisco Bay area, despite the bay having 45 different sources of sulfur dioxide and 4 million motorists.

Larson and concerned residents like Eileen Morris formed the Yellowstone Valley Citizens Council to take on industries over clean air. They didn’t fare well. Morris’ across-the-alley neighbor in Billings Heights, Nettie Lees, fared worst of all.

“When we first formed, the sulfur dioxide emissions were more than 36,000 tons a year, which is a ton a day,” Morris said. If someone was going over Billings in a high plane and dumping a ton of hay every day, 365 days a year, people in town would be in an uproar, but you don’t see sulfur dioxide, you don’t smell sulfur dioxide. All you do is breathe it. Actually, Nettie was a canary in the mine.”

Nettie Lees was a mother in her early 50s with two kids off to college and two at home. She had severe asthma, which is why she got involved in the clean air issue. One night as Morris and Lees drove back to the Heights from First Congregational Church, they passed through a haze of pollution that was particularly bad.

Lees immediately began struggling to breathe within three blocks of the church.

“We rolled up our windows immediately,” Morris recalled. “Nettie had the kind of asthma that is triggered by immediate contact. By the time we got to the fairgrounds, she couldn’t talk any longer.”

Lees got home and put her face in a respiratory medicine nebulizer, but she was worse the next morning. It was July 3, 1985. Lees was dead within 24 hours of her exposure to the pollution.

Morris is aware Corette goes into mothball in April. It’s the same month she and Nettie’s family meet for an annual dinner. Billings’ air pollution didn’t start to improve until 1994, in part because the community’s three oil refineries reduced their emissions.

In 1997, Corette switched from Montana coal to a lower-sulfur coal from Wyoming, which brought the plant into clean air compliance without adding pollution controls.

Changing regulations vs. pollution controls

The choice to use lower-sulfur coal hurt Corette in the long run, said Jim Hughes, who oversaw Billings air pollution for the state Department of Environmental Quality during the city’s dirtiest years.

Hughes, now retired, said Montana Power as a regulated utility, had the opportunity to work the cost of Corette pollution controls into its customer rates to be paid off over several years. The MATS that start in mid-April wouldn’t be an issue for the power plant if it had, Hughes said. National Ambient Air Quality Standards, which also pose challenges for Corette, also wouldn’t be a deal breaker.

“The Corette plant, for $17.5 million, could have put a lime spray drier and a bag house on the plant, and they’d meet the MATS standards today and they’d be in compliance with the NAAQS today. It’s a shame the plant chose to shut down because it didn’t have to.”

PPL’s Hoffman said passing the cost of pollution controls onto ratepayers isn’t an option for PPL because it is not a regulated utility like Montana Power was.

Plant veteran Bratton said it would take two years to install the necessary equipment. That means that after being mothballed, Corette would have to begin upgrades by 2017 to meet its permit expiration date.

But plant advocates don’t talk about installing expensive equipment. They talk about tweaking regulations, just as Montana Power did 28 years ago.

The Montana Legislature is in session, and coal power, coal mining and unions representing coal jobs, are well represented in the hallways where lobbyists gather. Two weeks ago, the lobbyists played host to Colstrip day, where lawmakers and industry insiders mingle.

The talk about Corette, according to one union official at the get together, was that the plant might get a second life in June if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the federal MATS. The court has agreed to hear industry arguments that meeting the mercury regulations is too expensive.

Hoffman said a favorable Supreme Court ruling might not revive Corette.

The challenges facing coal power are bigger than MATS, say Corette workers like Doug Newmiller.

“The trouble is we’re working against about four different things,” Newmiller said. “We’re working against the environmental laws, then we got all this wind power they put in. We’re working against that because they got subsidies backing them, plus the power price has kind of been crappy. Plus hydropower.”

Corette has to dial down power production to accommodate energy from wind farms and dams. Subsidies for wind help keep the energy prices cheap.

This is Newmiller’s 40th year at Corette. He and childhood friend Dave Ratliff from Conrad hired on at Corette in the same year. When the plant shuts down April 15, both men will retire, frustrated by the challenges coal power faces.

Montana is sitting on a wealth of unmined coal, Ratliff said. Not burning it to generate cheap electricity makes no sense to a guy who started at Corette in the coal yard knocking open trap doors on rail cars by hand.

“We’re looking at a hell of an industry there, whether we ship it overseas, it’s going to be a hell of an industry,” Ratliff said. The jobs lost when Corette closes will number 35, but the businesses supporting Corette will be affected too, the men said. PPL has been working for more than two years to find jobs for workers too young to retire. Most will be relocated to Colstrip, some to hydropower dams in Montana. On April 15, they’ll sigh heavily as they turn out the lights.