Could San Juan pollution top L.A.?

Coal-burning power plants make San Juan County the sixth-greatest contributor of carbon dioxide in the nation, ranking the Four Corners region just below Detroit, a recent study from Purdue University shows.

But it appears San Juan County could eventually top the national list if another major coal-burning power plant on the Navajo Nation is built as proposed. The Desert Rock Energy Project alone would more than double the region's output of CO2— a major component of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming — when it goes online in 2012.

The Farmington Daily Times reported Sunday on the work of Purdue University professor Kevin Gurney, whose team compiled a list of the U.S. counties with the highest CO2 emissions. Based on EPA and other federal agency reports from 2002, the findings put Houston and Los Angeles at the top of the heap, each emitting more than 18 million tons per year. San Juan County was sixth overall, at 8.2 million tons.

The report's conclusions are no surprise, PNM spokeswoman Susan Sponar told the Daily Times. PNM's San Juan Generating Station and the Four Corners Power Plant operated by Arizona Public Service are two of the nation's largest coal-fired transmission plants, she said. She also noted, however, that PNM is spending $320 million to upgrade its coal-burning plants and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In the meantime, the Navajo Nation and its partner in the Desert Rock project, Sithe Global Energy, are in U.S. District Court in Houston asking that the EPA make a decision on an air permit that will allow planning to continue on the $3 billion, 1,500-megawatt plant. The Navajo Nation leadership has said the plant will create jobs and bring tax revenue to the area, which is one of the poorest in the country. It also says the plant will be one of the cleanest coal-fired plants in the world, using new technology to reduce emissions.

Even with those additional safeguards, Desert Rock would emit more than 12 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, according to the draft environmental impact statement. That, combined with the 2002-level emissions, would put San Juan County at more than 20 million tons a year.

One potential hurdle to the Desert Rock project is a bill introduced in Congress in March calling for a moratorium on new coal-burning power plants unless they trap and sequester CO2 emissions.

“This bill puts investors and power companies on notice that if they invest in new sources of global warming pollution now, taxpayers won’t pay for the costs of cleaning up those sources later,” said Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, who co-sponsored the measure with Democratic Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts.

There is widespread opposition to the Desert Rock plant in the Four Corners region. They could see some reinforcements after a story appeared last week in the Christian Science Monitor calling attention to air quality in regions like the Four Corners.

"From Virginia to Utah, the air quality of at least 10 national parks, including many with crystalline views, is threatened by plans to build at least two dozen new coal-fired power plants, parks advocates and air-quality experts say," the Monitor wrote.

The EPA is moving ahead — over the objections of some of its own scientists — to ease restrictions on air quality around national parks, the newspaper reported. Among the threatened parks identified in the story are Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado and Capitol Reef in Utah. Not mentioned is Chaco Culture National Historic Park, which is downwind of the Four Corners plants.

Among the EPA proposals is to base air quality reports on plants' year-round average releases as opposed to their peak releases, which can occur over several hours a day. In an internal agency email, one critic said that's like "allowing a person to average all the variations in his driving speed over [an] entire year to see whether he is complying with the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit," the paper reported.

The agency did not respond to the Monitor's request for comments, although Waxman is cited in the story as having challenged upper-level EPA officials on the plan.

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