Ethanol plants add to pollution

Industry tops in state for toxic emissions

12:50 AM, Dec. 18, 2011

The Poet ethanol plant is seen last week near Chancellor. Toxic pollution in South Dakota has declined in recent years, the growing ethanol industry now represents a larger share of the total. / Elisha Page / Argus Leader

Chronic pollution is less of a concern in a rural state such as South Dakota than in other states, but toxins emitted from the state’s expanding ethanol industry are becoming more significant, a federal environmental data shows.

For the past five years in South Dakota, ethanol plants have been the leading emitters of carcinogens — toxins thought or known to cause cancer — having surpassed plastics manufacturers. Last year, the state’s ethanol industry accounted for 40 percent of all reported carcinogens, down slightly from 44 percent in 2009, according to an Argus Leader analysis of 11 years of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory data.

The analysis found that, overall, the number of pounds of toxins released in South Dakota has fallen by one-third since 2000, but the amount of carcinogens emitted has grown by one-third in the same period.

The database was created 25 years ago to inform people about the toxins being released into the air, water and land in their neighborhood.

Firms self report the data, which officials say generally reflect toxin levels that fall with the limits specified by other permits.

Toxic Release Inventory data is not intended as a diagnostic tool to gauge health risks, because each chemical has a different level of toxicity, and exposure rates are highly dependent upon the circumstances under which the chemicals are introduced into the environment.

Still, it’s the only centralized, publicly available repository of local toxin data and the agency characterizes it as a good starting point for broad trend-spotting.

“It is a powerful tool,” said Barbara Conklin, who oversees the TRI program for the regional EPA office. “We do want people to look at the data so the public can make better decisions in planning their communities.“

The growth of ethanol plants as a more significant source of pollution is a corollary to the rapid growth of the industry during the past decade, said Ron Lamberty, senior vice president of the American Coalition for Ethanol.

“They wouldn’t allow them to put out stuff if it’s going to be any kind of health risk,” Lamberty said of the companies that own ethanol plants.

Much of the growth in the industry’s carcinogen releases came from emissions of acetaldehyde, a byproduct of alcohol distillation and “probable human carcinogen” that was reported by no other industry in the past decade.

Each gallon of ethanol produced at Glacial Lakes Energy yields 0.0008 pounds of acetaldehyde, which is an indicator of yield loss, CEP Jim Seurer said. Acetaldehyde, an irritant that’s present in ambient air, is much less potent than other carcinogens such as benzene and toluene, releases of which dropped sharply at ethanol plants from 2009 to 2010.

“Not all emissions are created equal,“ Seurer said. “Acetaldehyde is far less dangerous than emissions from other indsutries.”

Tom Slattery, environmental health and safety manager at Sioux Falls-based Poet, attributed the drop in benzene and toluene levels to over-reporting in the past, and said the existence of these chemicals in the first place is partly because of federal laws requiring the industry to add a denaturant, such as gasoline, to the ethanol to make it unfit for human consumption before shipping.

Policies favoring the development of cleaner fuels, from federal production targets to tax credits for fuel blenders, have spurred a decade-long expansion of the ethanol industry, which has come to represent a larger share not only of South Dakota’s economy but its pollution load.

South Dakota distilled slightly more than 1 billion gallons of ethanol last year — fifth-most in the country. That was up from 170 million gallons in 2002, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.Last year, South Dakota had 95 Toxic Relaease Inventory facilities, mostly in urban centers, that generated threshold quantities of the 49 toxic chemicals on the Toxic Release Inventory list. Fourteen ethanol plants reported toxic releases, up from one in 2000. For all chemicals, ethanol distillation was fifth by volume in the state behind animal slaughter, gold mining, coal-fired power generation and soybean processing.

The analysis excludes releases through 2009 from the Advanced Bioenergy ethanol plants in Huron and Aberdeen, which had been misreporting Toxic Release Inventory data for years, vice president of operations Grant Johanson said.

Johanson said there was confusion about the reporting thresholds “and, come to find out, (the reports) had been done incorrectly all these years.”

The mistake was caught in June after the company hired an outside consultant, he said, and it’s now revising its old reports.

“What happened is, we had someone in-house submitting those forms annually,” he said, “and that person’s no longer with the company.”

The EPA said it was looking into the matter after the Argus Leader questioned the figures.

Unfunded mandate, administrator says

In South Dakota, the Toxic Release Inventory is administered almost entirely by EPA, unlike other federal environmental programs that are delegated to the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

DENR groundwater quality administrator Bill Markley called the Toxic Release Inventory an “unfunded mandate“ and said the state already tracks health and environmental hazards through its facility permitting programs. A company that generates enough chemicals to trigger a Toxic Release Inventory report probably also is permitted under a separate air or water quality program. Pollution limits for those permits are set by a broader determination of what kind of pollution loads the local ecosystem can handle.

The state’s Toxic Release Inventory pointwoman is environmental scientist Trish Kindt, who holds an annual workshop for companies that have to report chemicals.

Kindt, who has other duties, said coordinating Toxic Relase Inventory reporting consists largely of making sure that affected industries understand the reporting requirements and that local emergency managers know which chemicals are present where.

Reported release numbers probably represent the low end of actual releases, since facilities are allowed to simply estimate their releases rather than actually measure them. Mistakes in self-reported values can be overlooked since the EPA doesn’t require monitoring for many Toxic Release Inventory facilities, and federal inspectors are spread thin.

Cheryl Turcotte, chief of the regional EPA toxics enforcement unit, which has three inspectors responsible for inspecting 695 Toxic Release Inventory facilities in six states, said they audit each site randomly for compliance across multiple programs.

Besides giving people information about neighborhood toxins, Turcotte said, the public nature of the Toxic Release Inventory data has provided an incentive for companies to reduce their overall toxin load.

Rare top five rating for ethanol plant

The Glacial Lakes Energy ethanol plant in Watertown released a total of 71,778 pounds of toxins last year, the fifth-highest release by volume in the state. This is a small fraction of the more than 3 million pounds released by the John Morrell meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, which was the No. 1 polluter. Formic acid, a byproduct of the fermentation process, was the primary toxin released from the Glacial Lakes plant.

Seurer, the Glacial Lakes CEO, said his company — and the industry as a whole — takes seriously its responsibility to reduce emissions.

“We want to be considered good stewards of the environments in which we operate,” he said.

Last year was the first time an ethanol plant cracked the top five on the Toxic Release Inventory since 2007, when the Poet-owned Northern Lights Ethanol plant in Big Stone did. The Big Stone plant later found itself on an internal watchlist of EPA offenders, and last year Poet was fined $150,000 for exceeding limits of volatile organic compound emissions at its Big Stone and Groton plants.

The stack failure that led to the fines has since been addressed, and the plant is now operating well below its permit ceiling, Slattery said in comments provided by company spokesman Nathan Schock.

“We’re proud of the environmental performance of our facilities, and that we have been able to consistently improve efficiency so that on a per-gallon basis, emissions from our ethanol plants are decreasing,” Slattery said.

Poet’s pilot cellulosic ethanol plant in Scotland, S.D., saw widely varying releases of acetaldehyde and benzene through the years, swinging from zero pounds in some years to 1,000 in others, and 4,926 pounds in 2010.

Slatterly said these variations were a result of the company’s need to innovate.

“As a research center, we are constantly testing new processes and chemicals in an effort to improve the efficiency of all our ethanol plants,” he said. “Because the process is changing regularly, you can have noticeable shifts in emissions.”

Carcinogen releases by South Dakota ethanol plants are increasing at about the same rate as plants in Iowa. Although ethanol plays a proportionally bigger role in South Dakota’s economy, Iowa has more facilities and different types of industries reporting Toxic Release Inventory releases.

During the past decade, South Dakota has edged up in the ranks for pounds of carcinogens released nationwide. From 2005 to 2010, South Dakota had the sixth largest percentage increase, making the state 43{+r}{+d} in the amount of carcinogens emitted.