Public has no reason to trust plans for Island cogen plants

FROM VICTORIA, Paul Willcocks
Pictorial, Duncan, Sunday, October, 22, 2000

If it's bad to have a power plant spewing out pollution in Vancouver or Abbotsford, what makes it OK for Vancouver Island?

And if greenhouse gases are such a huge issue for the B.C. government, how come a new power plant in Campbell River will start operating without readily available, pollution control equipment?

A new gas-fired power plant starts up near Campbell River within the next few months. It's a co-generation plant, which means the plant will generate electricity for BC Hydro as well as provide steam to operate the nearby Elk Falls pulp mill.

It should be state of the art. But it's not. The plant will produce up to 20 times the pollution of BC Hydro's Burrard thermal plant, which was in the news this week after Premier Ujjal Dosanjh announced a review as part of a plan to reduce B.C.'s total greenhouse gas emissions.

The Campbell River plant will also be far more polluting than the Sumas 2 power plant, a U.S. project that the B.C. government has opposed again citing the impact on air quality.

The irony is that compared with the Campbell River plant, both Burrard and Sumas 2 are ideal neighbours. Just ask the Environment Ministry its own report on the Sumas project sets out the facts.

The Campbell River plant will produce up to 912 tonnes of carbon monoxide emissions a year. That's 18 times greater than the 49 tonnes from BC Hydro's Burrard plant. And it's almost 10 times the pollution from Sumas 2.

The Campbell River plant will add 612 tonnes of nitrogen oxides to the environment, almost five times Burrard's 126 tonnes, and roughly triple the 214 tonnes that will be produced by Sumas 2.

"NOx (nitrogen oxide) is a critical pollutant to control due to its direct impacts as well as its involvement in the formation of ground level ozone, acid deposits, inhalable particles and visibility degradation," notes the ministry's report.

The Campbell River plant's performance is even worse if it's assessed on the basis of pollution produced per each unit of electricity.

It's not like the high pollution levels couldn't have been avoided. The parties involved decided to go ahead without selective catalytic scrubbers or other advanced pollution control equipment. That equipment is to be included on Sumas; it's been added to Burrard over the last six years as complaints about pollution have mounted.

But the equipment was left off the Campbell River plant. None of the partners in the project - BC Hydro, which will buy the power, Westcoast Plower, which owns the plant; [SqWALK! note: TransCanada Energy, a division of Trans Canada Pipelines purchased Island Cogeneration in September 2000 from Westcoast] or the government - thought pollution control was needed.

The parties justify the decision on several grounds. The controls cost money. The new $220-million plant will replace polluting boilers at the Elk Falls pulp mill, so it will help improve air quality. And Campbell River air quality isn't too bad now, which apparently makes it less bad to dump all that avoidable pollution into the town.

But many people in Campbell River don't buy that. "It's outrageous," says Delores Broten, executive director of a local pulp industry watchdog group. "There are already problems with things like asthma in Campbell River."

Surely it's wrong to accept the idea that just because a community has breathable air, we can choose to add more pollution there regardless of whether there are available control measures that could be taken.

And even leaving aside the local issues, the project undermines the B.C. government's commitment to reducing greenhouse gases. It's hard to take the $13-million greenhouse gas plan Dosanjh announced this week seriously in face of the evidence on Vancouver Island.

BC Hydro is proud of the agreement that produced the Campbell River plant and wants to build another one in Port Alberni. The corporation is using both to lobby for a new natural gas pipeline across the Georgia Strait. But based on the Campbell River example, neither BC Hydro nor the government has earned the right to the public's trust.

Paul Willcocks reports from the legislature. He can be reached at willcocks@ultranet.ca

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