This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Within a thicket of the Big Cypress National Preserve, established a half-century ago to protect the marshes and sloughs here that make up a vital part of the Florida Everglades, a series of wells extracts oil from more than two miles underground.

The oil field is situated deep within a pine forest of the preserve — the first in the country — which channels more than 40 percent of the water flowing into Everglades National Park and shelters iconic and imperiled species like the fabled ghost orchid and Florida panther, the official state animal. The wells penetrate thousands of feet beneath an underground aquifer, an important drinking water source, and draw up oil from the so-called Sunniland trend, a reserve stretching across southwest Florida from Miami to Fort Myers, although most of the reserve is situated beneath Big Cypress.

For decades, oil production has endured in this corner of the fragile Everglades, a watershed that spans much of the peninsula and is the focus of a $21 billion federal and state restoration effort, one of the most ambitious in human history. Big Cypress is among some 10 percent of federally protected lands nationwide where the government owns the surface terrain while private entities retain the mineral rights underneath.

“Big Cypress National Preserve is very sacred to us,” said Talbert Cypress, elected chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, a federally recognized tribal nation located in the Everglades. “We have a lot of ceremonial grounds that have been in Big Cypress National Preserve, burial grounds, places where we gather our traditional medicine. So just seeing that sort of damage in a place that really matters to us a lot, it’s sad to see it.”

Now the Miccosukee, longtime environmental stewards in Florida who notably helped steer stringent water quality standards for their sacred “river of grass,” have a plan for phasing out oil drilling within Big Cypress.  

The tribe has joined with WildLandscapes International, a nonprofit land conservation group, to engineer a multimillion-dollar deal with the Collier family, which owns the vast majority of the mineral rights beneath the preserve. If the agreement is finalized, the family would give up the mineral rights associated with some 465,000 acres to the federal government.

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“Unfortunately I cannot share. It’s under a non-disclosure,” said David Houghton, director of WildLandscapes International, when asked about the details. “The deal includes all the lands that the Colliers own the mineral rights on, minus what they currently have under lease.”

The proposal comes amid interest in expanding oil exploration and development within Big Cypress, even as rising global temperatures associated with fossil fuel emissions represent yet another threat to the Everglades, a watershed responsible for the drinking water of some 9 million Floridians. Most recently a Texas oil and gas company submitted a permit application to the National Park Service for two new sites within the preserve.

“We think we’ve got a deal here. We don’t know that, but we think,” Houghton said. “We’ll get a number, and that number either will work or it won’t — and I think it will.” 

Liquid tar

The Everglades are Florida’s most important freshwater resource. The watershed spans central and south Florida, encompassing the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee, sawgrass prairies to the south, and Florida Bay. It includes several federal- and state-protected lands including the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Everglades National Park. Various efforts over the last century to drain the Everglades, the largest steered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have made modern Florida possible and left the river of grass drastically altered. 

The Humble Oil and Refining Company, a predecessor of Exxon Mobil, discovered oil in Southwest Florida in 1943, after the governor and cabinet at the time offered a $50,000 reward to those who first found oil in the state.

Today, Florida is responsible for less than 0.04 percent of the nation’s oil production, according to a report the Conservation Economics Institute, a nonprofit research organization, prepared for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The industry employs fewer than a thousand members of the state’s workforce and accounts for $25.4 million or 0.0002 percent of its gross domestic product. A separate study by the American Petroleum Institute concluded the oil and natural gas industry contributes nearly $22.1 billion to the Florida economy and supports nearly 266,800 jobs.

The vast majority of the state’s oil production occurs in the Panhandle, according to the Conservation Economics report. The two oil fields within Big Cypress, Bear Island and Raccoon Point, together were responsible for 585 barrels a day in 2020, about one-seventh of the state’s daily total. Oil was discovered at Bear Island, which is located partially within the preserve, in 1972, before the preserve was established, and production began a year later. At Raccoon Point, southeast of Bear Island, oil was detected in 1978. Production began in 1981, and the field was expanded in 1992.

Big Cypress was established in 1974. Two years later, the Collier family, for whom Collier County, where a large portion of the preserve is situated, is named, conveyed 76,790 acres to the National Park Service to help create the preserve, with the family maintaining the underground mineral rights. The Colliers can trace their family tree to the early 20th century advertising magnate Barron Gift Collier, at the time the largest landowner in Florida. In 1996, the family conveyed an additional 83,000 acres to the National Park Service to expand Big Cypress. Today, Big Cypress encompasses more than 700,000 acres, including much of the western Everglades.

In 2003, the federal government agreed to purchase the Colliers’ mineral rights for $120 million, but the purchase fell through. At the time, various appraisals valued their mineral rights beneath Big Cypress, the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge at between $5 million and $475 million.

The oil here is of the heavy-sour variety, with a consistency of liquid tar, according to a website of the Collier Resources Company, which manages the family’s mineral holdings. When refined, the oil is used in auto, aviation and diesel fuels, lube oils, and asphalt. Edward Glab, director of the Global Energy Security Forum in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, characterized the oil as not high-grade or worth a lot of money. Multiple phone calls to the Collier Resources Company were not returned.

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“To me it makes no sense drilling for oil anywhere in the Everglades,” Glab said. “It just doesn’t because the reserves are simply not going to be there to justify that sort of investment.”

“It’s a lot of trouble for something that’s not producing a ton of oil, and it’s not like premium-grade oil. It’s like machinery oil, the kind used for heavy machinery,” said Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. “For us, when we see the amount of work that goes into the extraction, the damage that they do, it doesn’t seem worth it.”

Acidizing rather than fracking is more likely to be used in Florida to extract oil because of the state’s geology, which is characterized by porous limestone that harbors underground aquifers, according to the Conservation Economics report. Acidizing involves injecting the oil-bearing rock formations with a mixture of acid, water, and other chemicals, dissolving the formations and allowing the oil to flow more easily to the well. Some 93 percent of the state’s population depends on groundwater for drinking water, far more than any other state in the nation.  

Wastewater from such techniques can contain pollutants and threaten the groundwater, although the Collier family says multiple precautions are taken throughout the drilling process to protect the sensitive environment here, according to the Collier Resources Company website. For instance, to safeguard the aquifers, a series of steel casings and thick layer of cement surround all oil-producing wells. At the well sites a limestone pad is constructed with a berm around it to prevent stormwater runoff from carrying pollutants into the environment. The pads also include a liner to protect the groundwater. The Collier family website also says water sampling has revealed no evidence of groundwater contamination.

But spills have occurred. A spill at Raccoon Point in October 2018, caused by corrosion in a production well, released 2,000 gallons of wastewater mixed with oil. The operator at the time, under lease with the Collier family, said the fluids stayed within a bermed area, and most of the fluids were recovered, according to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection report.

“There’s just so many potential damages that can happen here, and when it’s such a small amount of oil that’s being produced it does not make economic sense,” said Evan E. Hjerpe, executive director of the Conservation Economics Institute and author of the report. “It’s kind of an antiquated or artifact of previous times, and it would benefit the public much greater to move forward without having these potential risks going on.”

“The reason we survived”

For hundreds of years, the Miccosukee people hunted, fished, and held religious ceremonies among the soaring cypress swamps and sweeping sawgrass prairies of Big Cypress. During the First and Second Seminole Wars, in the first half of the 19th century, they were pushed deep within the watery wilderness and found sanctuary on the tree islands scattered here.

“We have a mother-child relationship with the Everglades because it helped us survive the removal era as well as the termination era, and so without it we would not exist as a sovereign entity. We would have either been annihilated or removed to the West,” said Curtis Osceola, chief of staff for the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. “Our land is the reason we survived. It is the reason why we’re here, and so we have a duty to the land that once protected us. And so that’s what it is to be Miccosukee, is to serve and protect the lands of our environment.”

Today, most of the 600-member tribe lives on tribal lands within Everglades National Park, although some 100 to 200 Miccosukees, members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and other Native people of Miccosukee and Seminole heritage live in 15 villages within Big Cypress. About eight of the communities, as well as a school, are situated downstream from Raccoon Point, raising concerns that spilled oil could flow in their direction, affecting surface water and the underground aquifer, which some residents have tapped with residential wells. Osceola said back when Big Cypress was established and the Collier family maintained the underground mineral rights, the Miccosukees were left out of the negotiations.

“Part of our culture tells us that the land should rest, and those fluids beneath the land should go undisturbed. That includes natural gas, oil, things like that,” he said. “So the extraction of oil is a very unnatural act.”

Oil drilling within Big Cypress is the latest environmental issue the tribe has taken up. After the federal government sued the state in the 1980s over water pollution in Everglades National Park and the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, the Miccosukees got involved in the issue as defenders of the river of grass. The litigation led to a monumental state cleanup effort, which remains in progress today.

The tribe’s pending deal with the Colliers would halt all future drilling within Big Cypress, although existing production could continue at least for now. The agreement likely would upend a plan for two new sites in Big Cypress that Burnett Oil Co. Inc., an oil and gas company based in Fort Worth, Texas, is pursuing.

In 2017 and 2018, Burnett, under a lease with the Collier family, conducted an off-road seismic survey of 110 square miles of Big Cypress. The survey involved applying vibrating plates to the ground and sending seismic signals deep beneath the surface to map potential oil. To access the remote area, 33-ton vibroseis trucks were used. The hefty vehicles sank into the soft, water-soaked soils, leaving deep ruts, consequential in an ecosystem where the boundary between land and water is blurred and inches of elevation can mean vast differences in habitat. The effort also harmed slow-growing mature dwarf cypress trees. As many as 500 of the trees were cut down to allow the trucks to move through the area, according to a 2023 report by the National Parks Conservation Association.

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Six years later the landscape has not recovered, the report said. The survey left lasting scars including soil compaction and deep twisting furrows, and almost none of the felled cypress trees has shown signs of regrowth. The National Parks Conservation Association wants the National Park Service to compel Burnett to replant the trees and address the other problems. Burnett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The two new sites Burnett is proposing would be similar to the one at Raccoon Point, according to the company’s permit application to the National Park Service. The document says the project is designed to minimize environmental impacts and avoid historical, cultural, and archeological resources, including Miccosukee and Seminole areas.

If the National Park Service were to approve Burnett’s plan, that would contradict the Biden administration’s demonstrated commitment to confront climate change, said Christina Reichert, senior attorney in the Florida office of Earthjustice, a nonprofit litigating environmental issues.

“It doesn’t match up to the promises that we’re hearing and the focus that this administration should be having on fighting the climate crisis. This would be creating brand new fossil fuel infrastructure in a time where we need to be transitioning away from that,” she said. “Wetlands are carbon sinks. One of the things they do is absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it. So it doesn’t make sense to destroy wetlands and then build fossil fuel infrastructure.”

Hjerpe of the Conservation Economics Institute said closing an oil well can be difficult and costly, sometimes making it more advantageous to continue operating the well even when the oil is not of the highest quality. He said it is possible Burnett’s lease agreement with the Collier family mandated exploration plans or focused on increasing new development.

“When you see the path forward, and there’s certainly potential for a buy-out of your minerals and buy-out of your operations, then it completely makes financial sense to make sure that you are heavily invested in the area and that you keep producing and illustrating the value and increasing the value of your operations,” he said.

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Next steps

Climate change associated with fossil fuel emissions is poised to have a big impact on the Everglades. Rising temperatures will increase evaporation, stressing the watershed that already is pressured by explosive population growth and development. The hotter temperatures also will lead to precipitation changes, raising concerns about whether the water management infrastructure here, some of the most complex in the world, is up to future challenges.

The agreement involving the Miccosukees, Colliers, and WildLandscapes International includes three phases. Under the first phase, completed last year, the Collier family sold 11,141 acres, including the mineral rights, to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and South Florida Water Management District. The second phase, focused on the mineral rights beneath Big Cypress, still faces several steps, said Houghton of WildLandscapes International.

“The way the deal is set up we have a floor value, and if the appraisal meets that or above then the Colliers are obligated to sell,” he said. “If the appraisal is below, the Colliers could get out.”

If the agreement moves forward, Congress would appropriate the funding, which could take a few more years. The money would come from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that puts earnings from offshore oil and gas leasing toward land conservation. The third phase involves land near Everglades City, a small town outside of Big Cypress.

Cypress, chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, said future plans go further. Eventually the tribe wants to stop all oil drilling within Big Cypress for good.

“Florida is going to need more freshwater, more drinking water, and we don’t have that without the Everglades,” he said. “It matters to everybody in Florida.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Miccosukee Tribe plans to stop oil drilling in the Everglades once and for all on May 5, 2024.

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

April signaled the beginning of blistering heat for much of Texas. And while the summer heat is uncomfortable for many, it can be deadly for the people incarcerated in Texas’ prison system where temperatures regularly reach triple digits.

With another sweltering summer likely ahead, on April 22 prison rights advocates filed a complaint against Texas Department of Criminal Justice executive director Bryan Collier, arguing that the lack of air conditioning in the majority of Texas prisons amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The filing came from four nonprofit organizations who are joining a lawsuit originally filed last August by Bernie Tiede, an inmate who suffered a medical crisis after being housed in a Huntsville cell that reached temperatures exceeding 110 degrees. Tiede, a well-known offender whose 1996 murder of a wealthy widow inspired the film “Bernie,” was moved to an air-conditioned cell following a court order but he’s not guaranteed to stay there this year.

Last month’s filing expands the plaintiffs to include every inmate incarcerated in uncooled Texas prisons, which have led to the deaths of dozens of Texas inmates and cost the state millions of dollars as it fights wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits.

The plaintiffs ask that an Austin federal judge declare the state’s prison policy unconstitutional and require that prisons be kept under 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Texas jails are already required to keep facilities cooler than 85 degrees, and federal prisons in Texas have a 76 degree maximum.

Between June and August last year, the average temperature was 85.3 degrees — the second hottest on record behind 2011. And this year does not look to be much cooler. The most recent winter season ranked warmest on record for the contiguous U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientists have found that climate change has resulted in more severe and longer lasting heat waves. In the last decade, Texas has experienced over 1,000 days of record-breaking heat, compared to a normal decade.

In the hot summer months, those concrete and metal cells can reach over 130 degrees, formerly incarcerated Texans said during an April 22 press conference. Legal representatives hope to prove those conditions are unconstitutional.

“What is truly infuriating is the failure to acknowledge that everyone in the system — all 130,000 prisoners — are at direct risk of being impacted by something that has a simple solution that has been around since the 1930s, and that is air conditioning,” attorney Jeff Edwards told reporters. Edwards was the lead attorney in a 2014 prison rights case that cited the nearly two dozen Texas prison inmates who died from heat stroke over the previous two decades. That case culminated in a settlement, where TDCJ agreed to install air conditioning at the Wallace Pack Unit near College Station.

About two thirds of the inmates housed across TDCJ’s facilities live in areas without air conditioning. Advocates and inmates’ families have long fought to cool prisons in a state where summer temperatures routinely exceed triple digits and pose dangerous conditions to inmates and correctional officers.

Although the state has not reported a heat-related death since 2012, researchers and inmates’ families dispute those statistics. A 2022 study found that 14 prison deaths per year were associated with heat. Last year, a Texas Tribune analysis found that at least 41 people had died in uncooled prisons during the state’s record-breaking heat wave.

Health problems that have been linked to excessive heat include renal diseases, cardiovascular mortality, respiratory illnesses and suicides, Julie Skarha, a epidemiology researcher at Brown University who authored the 2022 study, told reporters on Monday.

Skarha said while death certificates may not list heat strokes — a condition when the body can no longer control its temperature — as the official cause of death, her research indicates that many prisoners have died from heat-related causes.

“Heat deaths haven’t magically stopped,” the lawsuit states. “TDCJ has simply stopped reporting or admitting them after the multiple wrongful death lawsuits and national news coverage.”

TDCJ spokesperson Amanda Hernandez declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying the agency does not comment on pending litigation. But she emphasized that the department has been adding more air conditioning units since 2018.

“Each year we’ve been working to add cool beds, and we’ll continue to do so,” she said.

She also pointed to the departments’ “enhanced heating protocols” which are activated from April to October and include providing ice water to inmates and allowing them to purchase fans and cooling towels from the commissary.

Lawyers argue that these mitigation tactics are insufficient to combat the state’s sweltering temperatures. To survive the heat, incarcerated people report having to flood their toilets or sinks and lie down in the water on the cell floor to try to cool their bodies, the lawsuit states.

“This isn’t an unpredictable event,” said attorney Erica Grossman, who is one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. “It gets hot every summer, and much like every other building in Texas — including buildings that have animals — we cool the building.”

TDCJ staff who work in the facilities are similarly impacted by the heat, said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and LBJ School. The excessive heat invades all aspects of life in prisons: Staff must do physical work in heavy uniforms in the heat; the heat results in more violence among those incarcerated; and it leads to more use of force against prisoners, she said.

The TDCJ states on their heat mitigation protocols that staff are “encouraged to increase their water intake” during the hot summer month and are allowed to wear cooling towels and dri-fit compression shirts.

New research Skarha has conducted found that the number of assaults that occur in prisons without air conditioning increased as much as five times during summer months compared to that number in climate-controlled facilities.

Prison rights advocates say the state could easily fund air conditioning units across its prisons but has simply been unwilling to do so. During the last legislative session — when the state recorded a record surplus — the House proposed spending $545 million to install air-conditioning in most of the prison facilities lacking it. But the final budget did not include any money dedicated to air conditioning.

The House also passed a bill requiring prisons to be kept between 65 and 85 degrees, which is required already in jails and most federal facilities. But the bill failed in the more conservative Senate.

“We have the resources. We just seem to not have the compassion to do it,” Rep. Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, said during the press conference. Sherman was one of the authors of the bill that would have regulated prison temperatures.

The Legislature did allocate approximately $85 million for “additional deferred maintenance projects,” in Texas prisons, and TDCJ is using that money to pay for air conditioning units. Hernandez estimated that those dollars will provide air conditioning for an estimated 10,000 inmates.

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas inmates are being ‘cooked to death’ in extreme heat, complaint alleges on May 4, 2024.

It’s an unfortunate irony that the things we do to keep ourselves clean can pollute…

The post Getting a Greener Clean: Shampoo appeared first on Earth911.

A centuries-old town emerged in the Philippines recently when a long drought dried up a dam.

Southeast Asia has been experiencing deadly extreme heat, causing school closures, work-from-home orders and withered crops.

The ruins of the town of Pantabangan in Nueva Ecija province have given local residents in the rice-growing region another income source from tourists coming to see the historic sight.

“When I heard about the sunken church of old Pantabangan town resurfacing, I got excited and wanted to see it,” said Aurea Delos Santos, a retired nurse in her early 60s, as Reuters reported.

Taking tourists to and from the island has boosted some locals’ earnings significantly.

“Back then, I was only earning 200 pesos ($3.50) from fishing, but when the tourists arrived, I’m earning 1,500 to 1,800 per day,” said Nelson Dellera, a local fisherman, as reported by Reuters.

The dam — constructed after the town was relocated during the 1970s to make way for a reservoir — is now the primary water and irrigation source for Nueva Ecija and other provinces in the area, the local government said, as The Guardian reported.

Water levels at the dam have fallen 85.3 feet already this year, revealing the foundations of the nearly 300-year-old town and portions of a church. The current level at Pantabangan dam is 23 feet lower than last year.

Marlon Paladin — a supervising engineer with the country’s National Irrigation Administration — told AFP that parts of the town started resurfacing in March following several months with “almost no rain.”

Pantabangan has reappeared five other times since the reservoir was created, but this was the longest Paladin had seen at one time.

The Philippines is one of the countries most at risk from climate change impacts, as its warm and dry season can bring drought and extreme sea surface temperatures, while the wet season can result in huge storms, including Super Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the country in 2013 and is known as one of the strongest ever recorded.

“The general impact of climate change on the Philippines is warmer temperatures. The heat that we are experiencing, it could steadily increase in the coming days,” Benison Estareja, a meteorologist with the state’s Pagasa weather bureau, told BBC News.

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Even the Jesus Good Shepherd School in the city of Imus, south of Manila — which has an air conditioner in every classroom, a rarity — sent students home last week, reported The New York Times.

“It is hard for the students and teachers alike to concentrate, because the air-con is struggling, too,” said Ana Marie Macarimbang, one of the school’s fifth-grade teachers who has been teaching for almost two decades. “We are in a tropical country, yes, but the heat now is more intense than I can remember.”

Global heating due to human-caused climate change is contributing to extreme weather all over the planet, including more deadly and frequent floods, heat waves, wildfires and supercharged storms.

The post Extreme Drought in Philippines Reveals Centuries-Old Town appeared first on EcoWatch.

The Biden administration announced plans to expand two national monuments in California: the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.

The move, announced on May 2, will add protections to nearly 120,000 acres of land in the state. The expansion contributes to President Joe Biden’s target of conserving and restoring at least 30% of lands and waters in the U.S. by 2030 under the America the Beautiful Initiative.

The expansion of the monuments will preserve areas of cultural and ecological importance. 

“These expansions will increase access to nature, boost our outdoor economy, and honor areas of significance to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples as we continue to safeguard our public lands for all Americans and for generations to come,” Vice President Kamala Harris shared in a statement.

The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, near Los Angeles, will increase by 105,919 acres, adding to an existing 346,177 acres. The area includes habitat for the endangered California condor as well as California spotted owl and Nelson’s bighorn sheep, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Because of increased visits to the park, the administration also announced plans to increase park staff, improve accessibility and reduce pollution, among other investment projects for the national monument.

In northern California, the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument will expand by 13,696 acres, adding to an existing 330,000 acres. As part of this expansion, the ridgeline in the expansion area will be renamed from Walker Ridge to Molok Loyuk, or Condor Ridge. This sacred and ecologically important ridgeline includes rare wetlands, and the lands in the expansion area include nearly 500 native California plant species. The expansion area is also home to wildlife such as tule elk, mountain lions, bald eagles and golden eagles, according to a news release from The White House.

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“These expansions honor Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples by protecting sacred ancestral places and their historically important features, while conserving our public lands, protecting scientific features, including critical wildlife habitat and migration corridors, safeguarding clean water, and supporting local economies,” The White House said in a statement.

As The Associated Press reported, critics have argued the expansions would limit resources for agriculture and other uses outside of conservation.

According to The White House statement, these expansions will not impact the state’s or private land owners’ property rights, and any lands under state or private ownership within the expansion areas are not included in the monuments.

The two expansion projects bring the total of national monument expansions under the Biden administration to seven. The administration has also conserved over 41 million acres of U.S. lands and waters so far.

The post Biden Expands Two National Monuments in California appeared first on EcoWatch.

Take a moment to give nature a chance, and see what happens. This week’s quote…

The post Earth911 Inspiration: Give Nature A Chance appeared first on Earth911.

Aluminum is a crucial raw ingredient in the fight against climate change. But to ensure the transition off fossil fuels is a clean one, the industry needs a serious makeover. A new federally funded “green smelter” could help make that happen.

Making this remarkably versatile metal requires a huge — and near-constant — supply of electricity. Much of it is generated by burning fossil fuels, which is one reason aluminum manufacturers are responsible for about 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. That’s more than twice the amount all of Australia spews annually.  

Cleaning things up poses a huge challenge, one the Department of Energy, or DOE, wants to help solve. In March, the agency announced $6 billion in funding for “industrial demonstration” projects that showcase promising strategies for reducing the climate impact of heavy industry. The need is particularly acute, because heavy industrial processes like aluminum production generate nearly one-third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

The beneficiaries of the government’s cleanup effort include Century Aluminum Company, which could receive up to half a billion dollars to build the nation’s first new aluminum smelter in 45 years. The facility, dubbed the Green Aluminum Smelter, could double the amount of virgin, or primary, aluminum the country produces while emitting 75 percent less CO2 than older smelters, thanks to increased efficiency and the use of renewable electricity. The grant, which is awaiting finalization, is a “huge vote of confidence and a shot in the arm” for the industry, said Annie Sartor, the aluminum campaign director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit focused on industrial decarbonization. 

That could boost a sector on life support. Although the United States once led the world in producing the lightweight and durable metal, most of the country’s aluminum smelters have shuttered since the 1980s due to rising energy costs, falling prices, and a broader trend of American firms sending manufacturing overseas. Production, which peaked in 1980 at 4.65 million metric tons per year, has declined by more than 80 percent since then, according to the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of environmental organizations and labor groups. That puts the U.S. in a tricky position as demand surges: A report released last year by researchers at Dartmouth and Princeton universities found that the country’s wind and solar industries alone could require nearly 8 million metric tons of the material annually by 2035. That’s nearly double the amount of primary and recycled aluminum the country produced in 2022.

And that’s to say nothing of the aluminum required for EVs, power transmission lines, and countless other applications, from cookware to cell phones. Even recycling the stuff requires virgin material, which is mixed into all those melted cans and car parts and other scrap to produce quality metal.

While there’s little question the U.S. will need a lot more aluminum, how it is made is increasingly important. Production starts with converting bauxite, an aluminum-rich ore, into a purified powder called alumina. That material is then smelted to produce the metal. All that mining and processing creates ecological destruction, generates toxic waste, and releases a cocktail of pollutants. It can also help warm the planet: Carbon emissions occur throughout the process, but more than 60 percent of them come from generating the electricity used in smelting. A large operation can require enough juice to power millions of homes.

“We’re talking about truly eye-watering amounts of electricity,” said Rebecca Dell, an industrial decarbonization expert with the nonprofit ClimateWorks Foundation. If the industry hopes to reduce its carbon footprint, “the first, most important thing to do is to use clean electricity.”

Such efforts are underway throughout the world. Although China, the world’s largest producer of primary aluminum, relies upon coal-fired power plants to generate much of the electricity needed to hold that title, others are proving that clean energy can deliver dramatic emissions reductions. Smelters in Norway and Quebec, Canada, release far fewer greenhouse gases because they use hydropower, while those in Iceland tap the nation’s abundant geothermal resources.

Century Aluminum, a global producer that’s been around since 1995, already operates a low-carbon smelter in Iceland that’s capable of churning out over 300,000 tons of aluminum each year. The company hopes the DOE funding will allow it to bolster its presence in the U.S., where it operates two smaller smelters in Kentucky and another in South Carolina, while significantly expanding its production of low-carbon aluminum. It hasn’t said exactly how much of the metal its proposed smelter will be able to produce, but based on the expectation that it will roughly double the nation’s virgin production, Sartor suspects the goal is to churn out “just under” a million tons of the metal annually. (The U.S. produced 750,000 tons of virgin aluminum in 2023.) Neither Century Aluminum nor the DOE have said when the smelter might begin operations.

While many details are uncertain, including the smelter’s production capacity and the construction timetable, one thing is clear: The new plant will be expensive. Sartor said Century Aluminum will need all of the money DOE is offering and much more.

“Building a new, large-scale, modern aluminum facility is far more than just twice that amount,” Sartor said. According to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, aluminum smelters outside of China can cost up to $4 billion per million tons of annual production.

Beyond building the infrastructure needed to produce aluminum lies the question of how to produce the clean electricity needed to power it. According to the DOE, Century Aluminum’s preferred site is in Kentucky, a state with lackluster clean energy credentials. In 2020, the Bluegrass State had a paltry 30.1 megawatts of solar generating capacity and no wind energy production whatsoever. Sartor says she expects a plant of this size to require “somewhere in the neighborhood of a gigawatt” of power. That’s enough to serve 800,000 U.S. homes for a year. “The only way that will happen is if gargantuan amounts of clean energy get built in Kentucky,” Sartor said. “There’s no other way around this.” 

A representative for Century Aluminum told Grist the company is “excited to move this transformational project forward,” but declined to answer other questions or say how it plans to secure the carbon-free energy required. The DOE wouldn’t speak to the challenges that may arise procuring clean energy, citing ongoing award negotiations. 

That said, the site hasn’t been finalized, and locations within the Ohio and Mississippi River basins are also reportedly under consideration. Dell believes that brings an interesting political dimension to the project because Century Aluminum expects the smelter to create more than 1,000 full-time union jobs and another 5,500 construction jobs. 

“That’s a very attractive economic development opportunity for a state like Kentucky — or maybe for its neighbors,” Dell said. Century Aluminum, Dell said, is effectively putting Kentucky and nearby states — many of which haven’t exactly embraced renewables — on notice that “there’s a huge opportunity on the table if you guys can figure out a way to develop the electricity that’s needed.”

If Century Aluminum succeeds in finding the clean energy it needs, it could help catalyze changes in other industrial sectors such as steelmaking. Dell notes that in most of the “high value added markets” for steel, like the automotive sector, the primary competition is aluminum.

“Both of these industries are constantly trying to convince the car companies, ‘use our metal, not their metal,’” Dell said. “Having more clean aluminum out there will certainly act as an encouragement to the steel industry to clean up their act.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The country’s first new aluminum smelter in 45 years could cut production emissions by 75% on May 3, 2024.

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Celeste Flores can tell you the good news about living in Waukegan, Illinois: The air is safer to breathe now.

“Thankfully, we are no longer breathing coal being burned,” said Flores, a co-chair of Clean Power Lake County, or CPLC, an environmental justice organization serving the mostly Latino suburb about 40 miles north of Chicago. The explanation behind that is simple: The Waukegan Generating Station near the shore of Lake Michigan closed in 2022 after decades of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and coal ash into the ground. 

Flores can also tell you the bad news: The toxic coal ash is still there, dangerously close to the groundwater. 

But the explanation behind why the pollution remains in the ground is more complicated than shutting a plant down.

Coal ash is a cocktail of hazardous pollutants leftover from coal combustion. Across the country, plant operators dumped that heavy metal-laden sludge into holes in the ground, sometimes called ponds or impoundments. Sometimes these ponds are lined, and sometimes they aren’t. None of the ponds in Waukegan that are lined meet current state and federal standards. 

In 2019, the state confirmed what advocates like Flores had long suspected: that coal ash had leached into nearby groundwater. Worse yet, the coal ash was stored right near Lake Michigan.

That same year, Flores helped push Illinois lawmakers to pass landmark coal ash regulation, which compelled managers of coal ash owners to submit plans to either clean up their operations or shut down. 

About three years ago the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) finalized exactly how operators had to submit these proposals. But plans are on hold for securing the three coal ash storage pits in Waukegan. The IEPA hasn’t finalized permits for those sites, so they continue to threaten groundwater.

“When it comes to the implementation of these rules, it’s 2024 and we don’t have permits yet,” said Flores. “And I don’t think anyone was expecting that.” 

Illinois set itself apart from the majority of the country when it finalized its coal ash rules back in 2021. Most states, save for a handful like North Carolina and Michigan, relied on 2015 federal guidelines designed to monitor and clean up only some coal ash residuals. 

For years, the federal rule excluded inactive coal ash ponds and landfills from oversight. An analysis by Earthjustice found that the 2015 rules grandfathered in over 300 of these sites across 48 states. Illinois’ more protective mandate, however, brought them into the state’s regulatory orbit.

Even so, advocates say the forthcoming permits are dragging.

“The Illinois EPA has been reviewing these proposed permits for almost two years,” said Andrew Rehn, the director of climate policy at Prairie Rivers Network in Champaign. “And that’s, like, a long time for these permits to sit and just be under review.” 

The Illinois EPA is currently reviewing 44 separate coal ash surface impoundment permit applications for 25 current or former power plant sites across the state. Earlier this month, two and a half years since the first permit applications were submitted, the agency issued its first two draft permits.  

The agency said in a statement to Grist and WBEZ that, “due to the complexity of the information required in the applications, in most cases [the] Illinois EPA has requested additional information or clarification from the applicants.” The statement went on to say that it can take weeks to months to “gather additional information or to analyze groundwater modeling data.”

Coal power plants have sought to make exceptions for their permits and have effectively stalled the permit process until the Illinois Pollution Control Board is able to resolve the requests. According to the IEPA, this is the major holdup with the Waukegan permits. 

Meanwhile, new federal regulations issued last week give the nation’s fleet of coal power plants and new natural gas plants an ultimatum: adapt or shut down. The power plants have eight years to come up with a plan to capture 90 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions or commit to closing by 2039. 

Advocates with the Waukegan group see this long awaited move as a step closer to phasing out coal for good. Although the coal business is in decline, it still has an outsized role in driving climate change and polluting surrounding communities. More than half of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions from electric power generation are attributable to burning coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

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Almost every coal power plant operator in the country is now staring down the same finish line in 2039. Included in the new rule are stricter safeguards for the coal ash pollution those plants will leave behind in the meantime.

“With the 2015 rules, there was a circle of ponds and landfills that were subject to regulation,” said Megan Wachspress, a staff attorney with the Sierra Club. “That circle of ponds and landfills and other dump sites just got bigger.”

Inactive coal ash ponds and landfills are now part of the family of coal ash dumps that the federal government demands operators monitor and clean up when they threaten water resources. 

If it was just a coal plant in Waukegan, Flores said, her organization’s fight might be more manageable. “But there’s so many other things.”  

There are five Superfund sites scattered in and around the north shore suburb. These are abandoned lots so contaminated with hazardous materials that the federal government has taken over cleanup. Pointing in several directions, Flores said there are Superfund sites immediately north, south, and west of the old coal plant.

And that means generations of Waukegan residents have had to struggle with medical problems and even premature death because of their toxic environment. 

There’s no question for Flores about what comes next: The coal ash must be removed from the ground. But to do that, state and federal agencies need to pick up the pace. 

“It’s about making sure that we know that we’re leaving behind a community that’s healthier than what we received,” Flores said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Illinois passed a law to clean up coal ash 5 years ago. What’s taking so long? on May 3, 2024.