toledoblade.com --

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency yesterday reinstated several of the major 2005 permit modifications that a state panel stripped away from FDS Coke Plant LLC in June, including one that attempts to cap the proposed coking facility's mercury emissions at 51 pounds a year.

The latest version also calls for a few new additions, including an emission limit for hydrochloric acid based on tests at Ohio's only operating coking facility, the Haverhill North Coke plant in Scioto County, the state agency said.

Mercury is the most contentious pollutant of the proposed facility, now part of an $800 million project to include a co-generation power plant on 51 acres owned by the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. The site is along Lake Erie's Maumee Bay, where East Toledo and Oregon meet.

The project is expected to generate up to 150 permanent jobs, plus hundreds of temporary construction jobs.

At 51 pounds a year, the facility would be one of the nation's cleaner coking operations - yet also one of the Great Lakes region's larger generators of airborne mercury, a neurotoxin known to impair development of children who eat contaminated fish or are exposed to it in the womb.

Children also can be exposed by ingesting mercury in breast milk of mothers who have excessive amounts of the metal in their bodies.

The project, led by an unidentified consortium of investors, has the support of numerous politicians in job-starved Ohio, including Gov. Ted Strickland, despite a 1988 pledge among Great Lakes governors to seek reductions in mercury and six other pollutants.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said that mercury converts into highly potent methylmercury after settling on large bodies of water, such as the Great Lakes.

Methylmercury contaminates fish, including ones humans eat.

Written comments are being accepted through Dec. 13 on the proposed modifications.

The Ohio EPA is explaining its proposal at a public information session at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 6 in the Clay High School cafeteria, 5665 Seaman Rd., Oregon. Comments will be taken at a public hearing that night, immediately following the session.

The Ohio EPA said state-of-the-art pollution controls are expected to capture about 90 percent of the mercury emissions, limiting releases to 36 pounds a year from normal plant operations and 15 pounds a year during bypasses.

Comparatively, FirstEnergy Corp.'s coal-fired Bay Shore power plant in Oregon is allowed to release 198 pounds of mercury a year.

DTE Energy's coal-fired power plant in Monroe, one of the nation's largest, is allowed to release 780 pounds of mercury a year, according to an Ohio EPA fact sheet.

"Ohio EPA does not have any reason to believe that the emissions of mercury from this facility are likely to cause any adverse health effects," the fact sheet said.

The agency proposes eight days of uncontrolled venting of pollutants per stack annually while doing maintenance, the same as what FDS negotiated for its 2005 modification.

That could allow up to 48 days of uncontrolled venting, because the 2005 proposal was for six stacks.

It is not immediately known how many stacks the new proposal will have, although the proposed redesign of 168 ovens configured into two batteries, down from the original design of 248 ovens configured into four batteries, has been carried over from the 2005 modification.

So has the plant's proposed capacity of 1.44 million tons of coke per year.

Oregon Mayor Marge Brown, one of the project's biggest supporters, said the FDS facility "will be the world model for the coking industry."

Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner said he was "delighted that a development project we have been discussing for five years is, at last, heading down the home stretch."

Lucas County commissioners praised Mr. Strickland and the Ohio EPA for striking what the board views as "the right balance" between environmental controls and economic development.

The county has a $500,000 loan invested in the project.

Mr. Finkbeiner said he is eager for construction to begin before the end of the year.

Frank Lyons, FDS attorney, told The Blade that groundbreaking has been pushed back into early 2008.

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