Photo: Brian Larson

Group making strides to protect environment

Release Date:  Friday, October 03, 2008

Details:

This has certainly been a busy — and productive — year. Kaskaskia Group members partnered with American Bottom Conservancy and others on a number of projects to improve the quality of our air.

With the help of the Washington University Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, we achieved a settlement on the air permit for a new Sun Coke coke plant proposed for the U.S. Steel Granite City Works. The new coke plant will provide energy and coke for the steel mill and will allow the shutdown of ten old boilers.

The USS settlement resulted in stringent, better than 99.99 percent control of fine particulates for the new coke plant that will set a standard throughout the country. It also provides $5 million for energy efficiency and air pollution reduction projects for the city and local school, library and park districts. The settlement helps assure the future of the Granite City steel mill and jobs for our partners in the Blue-Green Alliance, the United Steelworkers of America. We will continue to press for closure of the old coke plant, which is in large part responsible for the region not meeting federal standards for fine particles (soot).

We also reached a settlement on our appeal of Illinois EPA's air permit for ConocoPhillips to expand its Wood River refinery in order to use dirty tar sands from Canada. Our appeal of the permit to EPA's Environmental Appeals was successful, but the decision was narrowly limited to carbon monoxide.

Our settlement will require ConocoPhillips to reduce flaring and pollutants, to perform an energy audit and inventory and reduce greenhouse gases, and to install a cutting-edge monitoring system not used by other refineries in the country that will monitor leaking valves, storage tanks, drains and vents.

In addition, the company must provide $3.4 million for local school energy efficiency projects, for school bus emission control retrofits, and for refinery communities to inventory and implement greenhouse gas reductions. ConocoPhillips will also be required to purchase new monitors to be placed in the adjacent community to measure pollutants responsible for causing cancer and heart and lung disease. One million dollars will go for the acquisition of wetlands that store vast amounts of carbon as well as help to control flooding from stormwater and snowmelt.

The club continues to vigorously oppose the extraction, refining and use of tar sands, which destroy land, poison water and produce three to five times more global-warming greenhouse gases than sweet conventional crude oil. Studies also show that tar sands-derived fuel will emit considerably more pollution from tailpipes.

If you would like to help with these and other issues, please call Amy Funk at 789-0841 or E-mail at her amymkfunk@yahoo.com.