This Emissions Cleanup Company Wants To Make Solving The Coal Ash Crisis Profitable

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After reinstating toxic waste restrictions for coal-fired power plants last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially began enforcing the regulations this year. 

The renewal of these Obama-era restrictions are likely just a first step from a reinvigorated EPA that wants to crack down on pollution more aggressively than ever before.

Coal Ash Ponds Are A Problem Decades in the Making

Before the Clean Air Act of 1970, coal-fired power plants were pumping coal ash directly into the air, forcing locals living near the plants to breathe in ash that contains 25 heavy metals including mercury, lead, arsenic and other toxic materials.

After the Clean Air Act, plants began storing that ash instead in landfills and ash ponds. As of January, there were 240 coal-fired power plants operating across the United States, responsible for maintaining over 1,100 coal-ash ponds and landfills.  The EPA cites that at least 500 of these coal ash ponds are unlined — at least 100 of which are sitting directly on top of groundwater that ultimately gets pumped into millions of Americans’ homes. 

Despite the name “pond”, some can be exceedingly large. One coal-ash pond in southern Alabama is roughly 597 acres — almost the size of the National Mall. 

Rather than fixing the problem, these coal-ash ponds just turned air pollution into water pollution. For people living next to these ponds, chronic arsenic exposure makes them 900% more likely to get cancer than someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. Aside from the increased cancer risk, coal ash causes lung and heart problems, stomach illnesses and developmental issues in children growing up nearby. 

The Threat Of Spills Compounds The Health And Safety Risks Of Coal Ash Ponds

When pipes break or dams fail, massive spills flood the surrounding areas, damaging homes, killing wildlife and clogging roads and rivers with toxic sludge.

After a dam failed in 2008, 500 million gallons of coal ash sludge were unleashed on Kingston, Tennessee, killing thousands of fish and blanketing nearly 400 acres of fields and neighborhoods with toxic sludge. The cleanup cost Tennessee Valley Authority TVC, the company responsible, $1.2 billion and took seven years to complete. 

In 2014, 39,000 tons of coal ash sludge and 27 million gallons of contaminated wastewater from Duke Energy Corp.’s DUK plants poured into the Dan River in North Carolina, wiping out turtles and fish in the river and sending toxic waste as far as 70 miles downstream. 

The cleanup from that spill cost Duke $5.6 billion and a lawsuit filed later against the company forced Duke to spend over $4 billion more to excavate another 80 million tons of ash stored in ponds across the state. 

Duke Energy’s cleanup is reportedly the largest and most expensive cleanup effort to date, but dozens of other spills have occurred before and since then, each taking decades of cleanup and monitoring and each costing millions or billions of dollars to deal with.

The Technology Making Clean Closure Possible And Affordable

In total, over 3 billion tons of coal ash, spread across over 1,400 sites across the country, need to be cleaned up - and hopefully not at consumers’ expense. To help tackle that massive and costly task, ME2C Environmental MEEC (ME2C), a company that develops eco-friendly sorbents (substances that can absorb or collect other materials around it) for the energy sector, is working on a new technology that would clean up toxic coal ash waste and capture rare earth elements (REEs), thus providing a significant revenue stream for the utilities to offset a large amount of the cleanup costs.  

Some of the 25 heavy metals in coal ash are toxins like lead, mercury, and arsenic, which make this crisis so urgent. But others are rare earth elements, valuable metals used for building things like rechargeable batteries, wind turbines, fiber optics cables and dozens of other important technologies.

While the United States used to dominate the global REE market, about 80% of the REEs in the market today come from China, the new global leader. That’s because capturing the valuable resource is typically labor intensive and environmentally hazardous. The Biden Administration is looking to shift that balance, as seen in the $30 million earmarked for bolstering the domestic supply of REE in the recent infrastructure bill. 

By capturing REEs, ME2C’s sorbent technology looks to offset the high cost of cleanup and incentivize plants to clean ash ponds, rather than capping the ponds in place, a cheaper but less effective approach. 

After engaging Pennsylvania State University’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences to continue testing the technology, which ME2C began developing in 2019, ME2C has announced positive results from the initial round of validation testing completed by Penn State in September of last year, showing REE extraction rates as high as 90%. The company has stated that they are in a final testing phase currently and plan to begin pilot projects and in-field testing of the tech prior to seeking license agreements with commercial business partners later this year. 

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