Long reliant on coal as a major source of fuel for its electricity-generating plants, Texas is increasingly shifting to natural gas, wind and solar energy, prodded by the improving economics of these alternative sources and by tighter environmental regulation.
The change has brought a degree of progress in cleaning up the air. Two Texas coal-burning plants, targets of an Obama administration policy intended to curb harmful sulfur dioxide emissions, have closed this year. A third, which has supplied power to San Antonio since the 1970s, will be mothballed at the end of this month.
These Texas plants, and a fourth that closed this year, together produced 108,000 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2017, or 39 percent of the total state power plant emissions of the pollutant. That is an extraordinary decline in one year, and more than half of the 194,000-ton reduction called for in the Obama plan from late 2016.
But now, after years of policies that President Donald Trump and others have derisively described as a “war on coal,” the Trump administration has called a timeout on a costly mandate that would have ensured continued improvement in the region’s air quality.
The administration’s target has been an Obama-era rule that would have forced a group of coal-burning plants to install expensive scrubbers to cut sulfur dioxide discharges. For the owner of the W.A. Parish plant, NRG Energy, this would have meant either spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put in two of the huge devices, or shutting down the coal-burning operations there.
Before Scott Pruitt left his post as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the agency notified NRG, as well as the owners of eight other Texas power plants, that the agency was no longer demanding the air pollution retrofits.
Instead, the agency is working out an industry-backed alternative that will require no immediate reductions in air pollution by the Texas plants still in operation.
The result, according to some of the United States’ top air pollution experts, is measurable human and environmental costs.
Even with the recent shutdowns of coal-burning plants, Texas remains one of the top sources of sulfur dioxide emissions.
Every year that the W.A. Parish plant continues to operate as it has been, an estimated 180 people in Texas and surrounding states die prematurely, according to a recent study. Sulfur dioxide, colorless as it comes out of the smoke stacks, turns into tiny sulfate particles as it travels through the air — small enough to pass through the lungs and enter the bloodstream. These particles can cause aggravated asthma, heart and lung disease, and other serious health problems.
For Jennifer Cantu, who lives a few miles from W.A. Parish, the regulatory reversal is deeply personal. The plant pumped 37,649 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air last year, one of the highest levels among power plants in the United States.
“It is the kind of thing you don’t think about at all — until you notice that ugly smell every once in a while,” Cantu said. “And then you remember, ‘There is that plant down there and I wonder: Should my daughters be playing outside?'”
The effects are not limited to the immediate area. Haze created by the plant’s exhaust mars mountaintop views in national forests and wildlife areas, including Caney Creek hundreds of miles away in Arkansas.
No environmental issue has animated Trump more than coal. The president has often portrayed coal as the heart of a lost industrial glory he is determined to restore. And for political as well as economic reasons, he has sided regularly with the industry and users of coal, dismissing much existing environmental regulation as an unjustifiably expensive, job-killing intrusion on the U.S. economy.
The administration said emissions of many pollutants declined in Trump’s first year in office and that it expects the declines to continue. “Despite a misleading narrative, our air is getting cleaner,” said James Hewitt, a spokesman for the EPA.
After decades of political, scientific and economic clashes over the issue, the trade-offs highlighted by Trump’s policy shift in Texas raise a fundamental question: When it comes to the pace of environmental progress in the United States, when is enough enough?
Supporters of Trump’s deregulatory philosophy believe that much of his predecessor’s approach placed unjustifiable costs on companies and the economy. In Texas, the Obama administration relied on a rule governing haze in national parks to push through what critics said was an excessively expensive and unnecessary set of requirements to limit emissions from burning coal.
Texas officials and the power plant operators argue that Texas is much better off without the Obama-era mandate.
They dispute that the sulfur dioxide discharged from the W.A. Parish plant is a health threat, or a major cause of haze in national parks and wildlife areas, despite the conclusions of the Obama-era EPA and certain environmentalists.
And more important, they say, the fact that power plants across Texas are cutting the overall amount of sulfur dioxide in the air at an even faster rate than the Obama EPA had mandated — without being forced to make expensive upgrades — is proof that market forces are a better mechanism than the government for balancing the costs and benefits.
“All of this basically is a question of how quickly do you get the desired results,” said David Knox, a spokesman at NRG, as he gave a walking tour of the sprawling plant.
To discourage the use of coal and promote alternatives, the Obama administration was creative and aggressive in wielding the regulatory tools available to it. On the issue of power generation in Texas, in 2016 the administration employed what is known as the Regional Haze rule, which was intended to deal not with air quality or public health in the immediate vicinity of the power plants, but with the effects their emissions had on visibility in national parklands far downwind.
In this case, downwind included the Caney Creek Wilderness Area near Glenwood, Arkansas, 400 miles north of Houston.
At the OK Cafe in Glenwood on a recent Sunday, the hot topics included the slow start of the deer hunting season and an upcoming runoff election for local sheriff.
No one there had heard of the W.A. Parish plant. The Regional Haze rule was just as unfamiliar.
John Sorrells, a disabled saw mill operator, has seen traces of the haze in question while hunting in the area near Caney Creek. The haze moves in from the south and takes over the hillsides, hitting up against the mountains, which run east to west here.
“If the wind is blowing out of the south for five days or so, you will see it, especially in the summertime,” Sorrells said. “It just covers the hills. It has got to be coming from somewhere.”
The Regional Haze rule, which dates to the Clinton administration, has a goal of gradually cleaning up haze in 156 national parks and wildlife areas, including such landmarks as Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.
Caney Creek, a pristine, 14,290-acre federally protected wilderness area on the southern edge of Arkansas’ Ouachita National Forest, had its own visibility problems until that trend slowly started to turn around in the last decade. The improvement most likely accelerated this year, with the closing of several major coal-burning power plants in Texas. But the air clarity is still a long way from so-called natural conditions, when views can extend as far as 80 miles.
The W.A. Parish plant, a 2016 EPA assessment found, was noticeably causing haze at Caney Creek 22 days a year, and was a contributing factor in haze there on a total of 54 days.
NRG called the EPA calculations “fundamentally flawed,” disputing that W.A. Parish affects visibility at Caney Creek. But the agency’s findings gave the Obama administration legal justification to step in and propose mandating the installation of scrubbers on a power plant more than 400 miles away.
Hundreds of buttons, dials and gauges blink, buzz and slide in one of the control rooms at the W.A. Parish plant, the central nervous system of a 4,900-acre site that allows the crews to watch as coal is ignited by an enormous fireball inside the boiler.
The goal is to hit just the right temperature, about 3,000 degrees, as the steam generator turns turbines with so much power that the entire complex vibrates amid a deafening roar.
One of Parish’s four coal-burning boilers already has a scrubber, which douses the emerging exhaust with a mixture of water and limestone, extracting most of the sulfur dioxide. But the other three coal-burning units have no scrubber.
Parish’s control room monitors demonstrate in real time the difference a scrubber can make: The unit that has one was discharging 272 pounds of sulfur dioxide per hour from the 500-foot smokestacks. A separate unit with no scrubber was pumping out 3,250 pounds per hour.
Stephen Hedge, the Parish plant’s manager, said it had already invested a tremendous amount into cleaning up its air discharges.
“We have got a lot of environmental controls on these plants,” he said, detailing past efforts at Parish to significantly cut pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and mercury.
Most significant, NRG in 2016 completed a $1 billion project — the largest of its kind in the world — that curbs the impact the plant has on climate change. Equipment collects some of the carbon dioxide generated by one of the four coal-burning units so it can be reused by injecting it into the ground to increase oil and gas production at nearby well sites.
In the debate over how much more money should be spent to protect the environment, Texas residents have much at stake, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, and George D. Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University.
Cohan estimated in a study published in October that Parish causes 180 premature deaths a year, based on a detailed analysis of emissions from the plant in the summer of 2015. An estimated 120 of those premature deaths would be avoided if scrubbers were installed on the plant as the Obama administration proposed, Cohan said.
Thurston produced his own study that examined the health benefits of the Obama plan in greater detail.
Lowering emissions at nine Texas power plants targeted by the Obama-era EPA, including Parish, would mean 1,300 fewer cases a year of acute bronchitis, as well as about 100,000 fewer lost workdays from related illnesses and 125 fewer admissions a year to area hospitals for heart conditions, he concluded.
Hoping to drive home the point to Pruitt, the former EPA head, who is from Oklahoma, Thurston prepared a summary showing how the Obama policies would also benefit Oklahoma residents, given that air pollution from Texas often blows in that direction.
The bottom line: Hundreds fewer Oklahomans would die prematurely each year, according to a chart that Thurston passed to Pruitt during a June 2017 meeting, where Thurston and other public health experts urged Pruitt not to reverse the Obama administration’s proposed order demanding plant upgrades under the Regional Haze rule.
“People in your own state won’t get these health benefits from cleaner air if you don’t follow through on this,” Thurston said he told Pruitt.
Pruitt’s response, Thurston said, was blunt.
“This is a visibility rule,” Pruitt said. “Therefore the health impacts are irrelevant.”
The agency a few months later notified Texas that it was rejecting the Obama-era proposal. W.A. Parish and the eight other coal-burning plants in Texas would no longer face specific orders mandating air pollution upgrades.
Environmental groups sued late last year to try to block the rollback. But even while this lawsuit has been pending, coal-burning power plants in the state have been shutting down for reasons beyond the potential costs of complying with the Obama policy.
Allan Koenig, a vice president at Vistra Energy, which owns three of the coal-burning plants that have shut down in Texas this year, said his company was shifting to energy generated by renewable sources, such as a solar plant in West Texas that came online this year.
“This is what our customers want,” he said. “So a lot of this is taking place already.”
But the progress that has been made, while considerable, is still far short of what the Obama-era EPA sought.
And even after subtracting the emissions from the Texas coal-burning plants that closed this year, the state remains the top source of sulfur dioxide releases in the country. The 26 states with the lowest sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants — a list that includes California and New York — collectively produced 157,000 tons in 2016. That is less than Texas is still generating on its own, EPA data suggests.
Installing the scrubbers on the six remaining Texas power plants targeted by the Obama administration, including Parish, would mean 11,400 fewer cases a year of asthma attacks spread across 14 states, according to Thurston’s calculations. It would also mean 600 fewer cases of acute bronchitis, about 40 fewer nonfatal heart attacks and about 310 fewer premature deaths every year.
What these numbers suggest, Cohan said, is that now is not the time to stop.
“Just because the water is getting cleaner does not mean we should not stop the industry from dumping huge amounts of hazardous waste in our rivers and lakes,” he said. “Just because cars are getting cleaner does not mean we should not regulate the dirtiest cars and trucks on the road. It is the same thing with coal-burning plants like Parish. Sure, they are cleaner than they used to be. But they are still not clean enough.”
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A Regulation Undone: Sulfur Dioxide
THE REGULATION: The Environmental Protection Agency proposed in late 2016 that nine Texas coal-burning power plants upgrade pollution controls to reduce haze in nearby national parks and wilderness areas. The EPA estimated that the move would cut sulfur dioxide pollution by 194,000 tons per year. It would also reduce the risk of heart and respiratory conditions for Texans and for people in nearby states.
THE ROLLBACK: The Trump administration decided in October 2017 to reverse that plan and allow the state and its utilities to come up with their own plan to reduce the haze.
THE CONSEQUENCES: Even without enforcement of the Obama-era plan, three of the nine targeted coal-burning power plants are shutting down this year, resulting in more than half the reduction in sulfur dioxide the Obama administration wanted. It is unclear whether the rest of the reduction will happen, however, since the remaining plants are not required to install or upgrade scrubbers that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.
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BY THE NUMBERS
37,649 tons: The amount of sulfur dioxide pumped into the air last year by the W.A. Parish plant just south of Houston — one of the highest levels among power plants in the United States.
400 miles: The distance from Houston to the Caney Creek Wilderness Area near Glenwood, Arkansas, which had a noticeable decline in air clarity and visibility on 22 days a year because of the W.A. Parish plant, a 2016 EPA assessment found, although the company disputes the finding.
11,372: The expected decrease in yearly asthma attacks if emissions were to be cut at six Texas coal-burning plants targeted by the Obama EPA that are still operating without upgrades, according to an air pollution researcher, who also projected about 50,000 fewer lost workdays from related illnesses.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.