The
Energy Challenge
Navajos and Environmentalists Split on
Power Plant
By Felicity Barringer,
New
York Times, 07/27/07
BURNHAM, N.M. — For the Navajo nation,
energy is the most valuable currency. The tribal lands
are rich with uranium, natural gas, wind, sun and, most
of all, coal.
But two coal-fired power plants here,
including one on the reservation, belch noxious fumes,
making the air among the worst in the state. Now the
tribe is moving forward with plans for a bigger plant,
Desert Rock, that Navajo authorities hope will bring
in $50 million a year in taxes, royalties and other
income by selling power to Phoenix and Las Vegas.
The plan has stirred opposition from
some Navajos who regard the $3 billion proposal as a
lethal “energy monster” that desecrates Father Sky and
Mother Earth and from environmental groups that fear
global warming implications from its carbon dioxide
emissions.
New Mexico, which has no authority over
the tribal lands, has also expressed misgivings and
has refused to grant the plant tax breaks.
The struggle is a homegrown version
of the global debate on slowing climate change.
Developed countries are trying to reduce
emissions of carbon dioxide, the most ubiquitous gas
usually linked to climate change, and argue that rapidly
growing nations like India and China should avoid building
coal-fired power plants. The critics’ targets say it
is unfair to keep them from powering their way to prosperity
with cheap and abundant coal.
The Navajo president, Joe Shirley Jr.,
said his tribe felt similar pressure. Mr. Shirley said
the plant here would mean hundreds of jobs, higher incomes
and better lives for some of the 200,000 people on the
reservation. The tribe derives little direct financial
benefit from the operation of the existing coal-fired
plants and it has not yet invested heavily in casinos.
“Why pick on the little Navajo nation,
when it’s trying to help itself?” he asked.
The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources
Defense Council, teaming with local groups like the
San Juan Citizens’ Alliance, point to environmental
shortcomings in the federal government’s tentative blessing
of the plant, as laid out in a 1,600-page draft environmental
impact statement and an analysis by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.
The staff of Gov. Bill Richardson, a
Democratic presidential aspirant, recently issued a
statement saying that the plant “would be a significant
new source of greenhouse gases and other pollution in
the region” and that Mr. Richardson “believes, as planned,
it would be a step in the wrong direction,” undoing
his proposed reductions in emissions.
In 2003, the Navajo invited Sithe Global
Power, a merchant power company based in New York, to
build the $3 billion 1,500-megawatt plant with the Navajo-owned
Dine (pronounced dee-NAY) Power Authority.
In most respects, the plant would be
relatively clean, with emissions of mercury, soot and
smog-forming pollutants lower than most such operations.
But each year, it would emit 12 million tons of carbon
dioxide, the equivalent of adding 1.5 million average
cars to the roads.
Coal-fired electricity contributes more
than half of the 57 million tons of annual carbon-dioxide
emissions in New Mexico. Together, the two existing
plants emit 29 million tons.
Tom Johns, a vice president of Sithe
Global Power, said he, too, was concerned about climate
change. Desert Rock, Mr. Johns said, would be part of
the solution.
“Carbon is emitted when we use energy,”
Mr. Johns said. “By not building one plant but another
or by using older inefficient plants instead of new
ones, we don’t solve the problem. The solution to carbon
issues is to be more efficient in how we use energy.”
Worries about pollution from a new plant
build on lingering concerns about the ill effects of
previous energy exploitation on the tribal lands. Navajos
have been sickened and killed by uranium tailings, leading
the tribal government to ban uranium mining. Mercury
contamination has led New Mexico to warn children and
pregnant women against eating large carp and catfish
from much of the San Juan River, which passes through
the northeastern end of the 26,600-square-mile reservation.
And the ozone levels in San Juan County, which includes
the eastern part of the reservation, have exceeded suggested
new federal standards.
Elouise Brown, a Navajo whose family
is from the area around the proposed plant, has led
a group called Dooda (pronounced dough-DAH) Desert Rock,
Navajo for “No to Desert Rock,” in a seven-month protest
at the site.
The tribal council voted overwhelmingly
to back the project, but Navajos are divided, with each
side claiming to speak for the majority.
“It’s not just that it’s so close to
my house or my family,” Ms. Brown said. “It’s the pollution
and what the impacts are going to be from the pollution
to all the people that live there. Not only the people
that live there, but it adds to global warming. So it’s
going to be a worldwide issue.”
The fight, in one of the emptiest regions,
echoes in many respects the debates over the more than
100 proposals to build coal-fired power plants.
Organizations like Environmental Defense
and the Natural Resources Defense Council have the equivalent
of strike forces criticizing proposed plants. They recently
won a victory in Florida, where regulators rejected
two plants.
A major Texas utility, TXU, was bought
by a financial group that agreed to scrap 8 of its 11
proposed coal-fired plants.
The Desert Rock fight is complicated
by the status of the Navajos as a sovereign nation within
a nation. Although some federal approvals are required
for the project to proceed, no state regulators can
tell the tribe what to do. Even with their divisions,
the Navajos are thinking big about the possibilities.
The tribal council is trying to find banks to lend it
up to $750 million to buy a 25 percent ownership stake.
The council also plans a transmission
line to carry electricity from Desert Rock and, perhaps,
future wind farms.
The arrangement would be lucrative for
the struggling tribe, which earns $102 million a year,
much of it from selling coal and other minerals, and
$400 million or so in government grants. The new power
line might help send electricity to 20,000 remote houses
— one-third of the residences on the reservation — that
lack it.
Local opponents, like Mike Eisenfeld
of the San Juan group, are more concerned about potential
health and environmental costs.
“Your conclusion when you read the federal
environmental impact statement is things are so bad
already that you won’t even notice another power plant,”
Mr. Eisenfeld said.
Some backers of the plant hope that
Desert Rock could be a proving ground for an experimental
technology to reduce carbon emissions by capturing them
and injecting them deep in the ground.
Mr. Johns of Sithe Global Power and
Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who is
chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, expressed hope
that the carbon-capture technology could be incorporated
into the plant with an additional $1 billion investment.
The Senate Finance Committee approved
a measure for a production tax credit of $20 a ton for
sequestered carbon dioxide, and Mr. Bingaman said he
was looking for bill to attach it as an amendment.
Mr. Shirley, the Navajo president,
said he hoped that the plant would be running by 2012.
That may be optimistic. The plans are subject to final
approval not only by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but
also from at least three other federal agencies. If
they come, lawsuits are a good possibility.
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