I wouldn’t drink ground water from Colstrip, Montana. And apparently, Colstrip residents wouldn’t either. The reason: coal ash.
Coal ash, a byproduct from the town’s coal-fired power plant, which contains mercury, selenium, arsenic, sulfates, and other hazardous material, is contaminating Colstrip, Montana’s drinking water. Washington residents may not have a need for Colstrip’s water. But we do depend a great deal on its coal power plant.
Puget Sound Energy holds the largest ownership share in the Colstrip power plant. The generating facility is made up of four units. According to PSE it owns “50 percent of Units 1 and 2 and 25 percent of Units 3 and 4.”
The plant is currently the second largest coal-fired generating facility west of the Mississippi and it uses an entire railroad car’s worth of coal every five minutes. And coal accounts for 36 percent of PSE’s total fuel source; the Colstrip power plant provided 16.7 percent of PSE customers’ total power supply in 2012.
For many environmental advocates, PSE’s dependence on the Colstrip power plant, and PSE’s reliance on coal generally, is gravely misplaced. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. power plants emit the majority of pollutants causing climate change. And the Colstrip power plant is a dominant contributor to that statistic: in 2010, the Colstrip power plant placed eighth on a list of the largest greenhouse gas emitting power plants in the country, according to the EPA.
The reason coal-fired generating facilities also threaten local waterways is widely known. Coal power plants, including the Colstrip plant, mix coal ash with water and store the concoction in adjacent holding ponds. This storage method creates the likelihood that the coal ash byproduct will poison local waterways.
That water supplies will be contaminated from coal ash storage ponds is more than a theoretical possibility. In December 2008 the earthen dam retaining a holding pond at the coal-fired Kingston Fossil Plant in eastern Tennessee broke and sent 5.4 million cubic yards of hazardous coal ash teeming across the local landscape. That amount of byproduct is enough to cover more than 3,000 acres of land at one foot deep.
Later water samples from the area taken by the Tennessee Valley Authority revealed high concentrations of arsenic, as well as lead and thallium, which are all known to cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders, among other illnesses.
The chance that incidents such as this one will reoccur (and are reoccurring now on smaller scales) is improved given that, according to the EPA, a little less than one half of U.S. coal ash storage ponds are unlined and cannot adequately prevent against leakage.
For the Colstrip area specifically, not all contamination is from holding ponds: local waterways pick up minerals that leach from the naturally occurring coal seams. According to PSE, miles away from the Colstrip generating facility, far from its holding ponds, groundwater has been adversely impacted by the coal.
In an effort to avoid the adverse environmental impact PSE’s reliance on the Colstrip power plant is causing, the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, is calling on PSE’s Chairman, William Ayer, to kick PSE’s coal habit.
The organization, through its Beyond Coal campaign, is urging PSE to supply Washington residents with energy generated not from coal, but from clean, renewable energy sources. The Sierra Club’s endeavor is timely: on March 25, 2013, Governor Inslee signed into law Washington’s Climate Action Bill, which brings together the Governor and legislative leaders to create policies that will ensure our state meets certain climate pollution limits by 2020.
The Sierra Club is taking more aggressive action against PSE as well: the group, together with the Montana Environmental Information Center, filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year against the Colstrip generating facility for what it calls egregious violations of the federal Clean Air Act.
The Sierra Club’s attack on PSE and the Colstrip plant is not one without countervailing interests. University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research released a study that designated Colstrip’s plant as the largest employer and taxpayer in Rosebud, County – the plant creates 3,700 jobs in Montana, including 380 at the power plant and nearly 400 at the adjacent mine, which supplies the plant with its coal. Colstrip’s local economy would likely be crushed were the generating facility to close entirely.
That all things in nature are interconnected is a concept we can appreciate but not fully understand. Residents of Western Washington, when thinking about the power lines that connect us to Colstrip, Montana might do well to remember what John Muir, the Sierra Club’s founder, wrote about nature’s reciprocity: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
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Trent Latta can be reached at TrentLatta@gmail.com.