Today in Coal

Anyway, two items came across my desk this morning and both are about coal.

1) The Range’s biggest power plant, Minnesota Power’s Clay Boswell facility in Cohassett, is entering its second summer of construction on a $200 million environmental upgrade. Like U.S. Steel’s expansion at KeeTac, this is a solid jobs project that is in the basket. It also has the benefit of modernizing and cleaning a major source of base load power in northern Minnesota.

2) And then, the bad news. I’ve always been confident that Excelsior’s boondoggle Mesaba Energy Project (a proposed Iron Range coal gas plant that purportedly runs on apple pie fumes and the American Dream) will never receive permits. Why? The federal haze standard. You can’t build too many big industrial things near national parks because they reduce visibility and air quality in the parks. We’ve got all sorts of mines and stuff here and have been hovering just below the point where visibility is compromised in the Boundary Waters or at Voyageurs National Park. There is enough room under the haze standard to build the steel plant and other project, but not for this crazy power plant. It’s all an exercise in futility.

Well, then I see this from the Washington Post today. The Bushies are trying to dump the haze standard! They just don’t care anymore. This isn’t a done deal, of course, and the action isn’t specifically related to Excelsior. But you can bet those overpaid sharks down in Minnetonka are yucking it up over a bottle of something expensive paid for by the taxpayers.

A reporter friend of mine summed up the Excelsior/Mesaba saga quite well with this line: “Every time we run a story about this project people only become more confused.” That’s what happens when a project is run by people trained in confusing the public in area where public officials are generally confused anyway.

Remain vigilant, public.