A key question on the minds of residents of Wiscasset and the surrounding communities is "what emissions can we expect from the proposed coal plant, and will that added pollution be harmful to our family's health and the environment?" Very little data, and no direct answers, have been provided by the Twin Rivers Energy advocates on this vital question. We have been told that this is a "clean" coal plant, but no coal plant is clean.

Based on 7000 tons/day of coal consumption we can calculate the volume of some of the elements going into the syngas process based on elemental coal analysis.

• For lead at 5.1mg/g of coal, the daily input of lead would be 0.0357 tons or 12.755 tons/year.

• For arsenic at 13mg/g of coal, the daily input would be 0.091 tons or 33.2 tons/year.

• For chromium at 9.7 mg/gram of coal, the daily input would be 0.0679 tons or 24.8 tons/year

• Mercury at 0.2mg/g would give us 0.0014 tons/day or 0.51 tons/year. Some analyses indicate a mercury level of 10 times this however. The recovery process being used is with activated carbon. The mercury is absorbed on the carbon and the carbon is disposed of somewhere. We don't yet know where.

How much of these, and other chemicals, go directly into our air and how much will be collected and disposed of someplace in some other manner?

The amount of carbon in bituminous coal averages about 65%. From this we can compute the amount of carbon dioxide that could potentially be generated from the 7000 tons of coal consumed each day. The factor is 3.67 for a daily output of over 16,000 tons/day of carbon dioxide, or over 5 million tons per year .

Other chemical inputs to the process would be ammonia, acid and water treatment chemicals. It appears from the Twin River process flow sheet that acids are used to help recover some of the unwanted materials. The kind of acid, and the volume required, cannot be determined from the information given so far. Nor can it be determined how these chemicals will to be transported to, or safely stored at, the plant.

Ammonia is used to help neutralize the huge gas stream which is vented from the plant. Again there is no clue as to how much will be used but since the vented gas stream is huge, one would think the amount of ammonia used would likewise be huge.

There are several areas that water will have to be treated (wet scrubber, cooling towers and boiler). Here again the type of chemicals and volumes have not been divulged. How will all of these hazardous chemicals be transported and stored at the plant? How, and where, will they be disposed of? Lots of good questions, but no answers have been provided.

We can get an idea of what emissions and pollution will be going out of the plant and actually enter our air from the smoke stacks by looking at a similar coal gasification plant proposed for central Florida at the Stanton Energy Center outside of Orlando. An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was recently published showing the emissions from that planned 285 KW "demonstration" coal power plant. Since the coal plant proposed for Wiscasset is expected to be far larger - 700 KW vs. 285 KW, the Stanton plant emissions can be scaled-up to what we might expect if our plant operates in a similar manner. The table above will give you an idea of how much pollution may enter our air each year.

Although these values are based on the planned Stanton coal gasification demonstration plant, most of these figures are well above the values quoted for the far larger Wiscasset TRE plant. What will really end up being released into our air will ultimately depend on the design of the plant and the operator. Neither of these has been identified as yet. All we have to go on are the promises of the marketing team at TRE.

All of the emission chemicals noted above are pollutants that are hazardous to the health of our families and to our environment. In our next Commentary , we will explain more about how adding more of each of these chemicals into our air can affect our health and our environment.

The "siren song" of good jobs for our children and lower property taxes sound good until you look further. A true environmental impact analysis will need to be done by experts in DOE to truly measure the environmental and health impacts. Only then can the truth be separated from the marketing spin. Trading diverse clean jobs for dirty jobs, trading our hard-earned home equity for lower taxes and trading our historic "quality of place" for a gritty factory town don't sound so good after all.

For more information, visit www. backriveralliance.org.