Published On:Wednesday, August 26, 2009

By LARRY SMITH

During a recent visit to Abaco, concerns were raised by environmentalists about the island's new power plant at Wilson City, which is now under construction. Very little information on this $105 million project has been divulged by either the government or BEC, so fears are being fed by rumours. Tough Call has reviewed the EIA for the plant that was completed in October 2008 by KES Environmental Services Inc of Florida and will try to cut through some of the obscurity.

THE Environmental Impact Assessment of BEC's 48 megawatt power plant now being built on Abaco is more interesting for what it reveals about BEC's environmental management practices than for what it tells us about this huge project deep in the pine forest.

Tough Call visited the power plant site a few days ago. It lies some 14 miles south of Marsh Harbour, five miles east of the Abaco Highway, and about two miles from the coastal ruins of Wilson City, the fabulous lumber town that operated for about 10 years in the early 1900s.

The site consists of a 25-acre fenced clearing, with foundations already laid out for a tank farm, powerhouse, transformer substation and office building. Another 75 acres of forested land has been assigned to the site for future expansion, but not yet cleared.

Access is via the old tramway that once hauled logs to the Wilson City sawmill. This has been widened from the highway to the plant for vehicles and transmission poles, but before the road gets to Wilson City proper, it cuts to the right, crossing over to the Bight of Old Robinson, where a pier and terminal will be built for tankers to offload fuel.

Along this road you can still find bits of iron railroad ties and fragments of the terra cotta water pipeline that once supplied Wilson City. BEC plans to bury a 12-foot diameter corrosion-resistant pipeline under the road and pump fuel from the dock to the power plant. New transmission lines also will be required to supply electricity to the grid, but EIAs for these projects are still in progress.

The plant will enclose four 12 megawatt generators supplied by the European firm Man B&W, which has supplied engines for BEC plants on several islands in the past. A tank farm will be built within an impervious area known as a bund. And a cooling system will draw water from the underground aquifer and discharge it via a deep injection well.

Officials say the Wilson City site was picked because it is one of the few areas on the island within reasonable distance of a coast that can be approached by a fuel ship. Expansion of the existing power plant at Marsh Harbour would have conflicted with the city's development. The only other clear option was Snake Cay, a few miles south of the city, where a terminal was built by Owens-Illinois in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, the entire coastline around Snake Cay and Wilson City is a relatively untouched wilderness of mangroves, tidal creeks and shallow bights, all connected by a network of blue holes. In fact, the area is so ecologically sensitive that the Bahamas National Trust and Abaco Friends of the Environment want to make it a national park.

And one of the only two shipping approaches to the Wilson City fuel terminal goes right through the existing Pelican Cays Land and Sea Park, an area of great natural beauty.

So you can see why environmentalists are alarmed about the new power plant, despite the obvious benefits it will bring to Abaco's economy, which suffers through endless load shedding every summer. Their concerns are heightened by the fact that the plant will run on heavy fuel oil, like the one at Clifton that has been such an environmental disaster over the years.

In fact, BEC paid scant attention to such matters until the mid-1990s, when it belatedly introduced an environmental management policy. According to the EIA, several third party audits of that policy over the years have outlined the corporation's chronic failures. For example, drains discharged oily water into the ground for years at Clifton, resulting in a huge hydrocarbon plume in the freshwater lens and discharges into the sea from caves below the cliffs.

State Utilities Minister Phenton Neymour admitted recently that more than a million gallons of oil had been recovered from these caves in recent times, at a cost of over $1 million so far.

The EIA also reported that large areas of the Clifton plant were covered in semi-solid oil in 1996 (two years after the EMP was introduced) while the Blue Hills plant did not have an impervious floor to its bund enclosure, which "grossly contaminated" the site. Chronic problems were also noted at out island plants, including "widespread and undocumented oil discharges, inadequate bunding, no clean-up facilities and poor drum storage."

The EIA expressed concern over the lack of resources allocated to BEC's environmental oversight and concluded that the corporation's culture was at fault: "Clifton has suffered significant impacts requiring ongoing assessment and corrective action...Poor handling of materials at Clifton and Marsh Harbour has required the need for extensive ground clean up and plant upgrading to remedy historical oil pollution problems."

Added to this history of gross incompetence is the risk of a shipping disaster in pristine waters.

This is not as rare as you might think.

In 2005, former Transport Minister Glenys Hanna Martin reported on several oil spills around Abaco, Grand Bahama and New Providence.

They included the spilling of over 2,000 gallons of fuel by BEC at the dock in Marsh Harbour, several spills at the Freeport ship care facility, a wreck off Xanadu Beach, and the spilling of tons of lubricant oil at Clifton during a storm.

But the EIA remains optimistic that spills like this will not occur at Wilson City. Fuel will be transferred from the tanker via a state-of-the-art hose system and pumped to the power plant through a pipeline with safety valves installed every 500 feet. And the plant's storage facilities will be built to international standards within an impervious concrete bund designed to contain the catastrophic discharge of a million-gallon tank.

Clean-up equipment and supplies also will be based at the terminal, but the potential risks should not be minimised. During a tour of BEC's Clifton plant last December, Minister Neymour said, "It is important that we demonstrate to the Bahamian people that we are serious about cleaning up oil spills and incidents, and also demonstrate to BEC and its staff how costly it is to clean up incidents after they have occurred."

In addition to the choice of a conventional power plant, Abaconians have complained about the type of fuel it will use. Oil-fired electricity generation in the United States is only a tiny fraction of total production because natural gas is a cheaper and widely available alternative. And the costs of pollution controls and extra maintenance often outweigh the lower cost of using fuel oil.

But the EIA says that renewable energy options are not yet feasible for Abaco on a utility scale -- winds are inconsistent, solar collectors require too much land, and the island's current waste stream cannot generate enough power to meet demand.

"This leaves oil-fired generation as the only reasonable solution," the EIA said. "A balance must be found between meeting the island's energy needs and environmental responsibility. A no-development option would mean more reliance on small diesel generators, which are not as clean or efficient as utility engines. Doing nothing is not a viable option."

Critics have pointed to the air pollution that could result from the burning of fuel oil. The Bahamas has no emissions standards, but the EIA says that exhaust from the 106-foot-high smokestacks at Wilson City will not exceed US standards, and BEC will monitor air quality on a regular basis.

"The plant is unlikely to contribute significantly, if at all, to acid rain based on the use of low sulphur fuel and engine efficiency. Atmospheric dispersal from the stacks will be effective."

An incinerator will be installed at the site to burn garbage, waste oil and sludge. Non-burnable items will be trucked to the landfill at Snake Cay. And all water discharges will be monitored.

"Protection of the underlying aquifer is of paramount importance," the EIA said. "In the event of a discharge, clean-up must begin immediately in accordance with the environmental management plan."

The EIA acknowledged that a fuel or chemical discharge from the power plant, pipeline or tanker would be an ecological catastrophe.

It says that a strictly applied environmental management plan will be essential to ensure that the plant operates with the least risk to the environment.

A Salvadoran construction company has been subcontracted to build the plant and many Central American workers are already at the site, with a big influx expected in the next few weeks.

The three-storey high generators will arrive in November and be slowly trucked from Marsh Harbour to Wilson City, entailing the cutting of many power lines along the way. It is unclear how many Bahamians will be employed at the site.

There has also been a puzzling escalation of the cost of this project. In 2007 Minister Neymour said the plant would cost $66 million. Prime Minister Ingraham pegged it at $80 million a year later, and Minister Neymour said $90 million in June. But in the budget debate shortly afterward, the cost was put at $105 million. A full outline of the project has never been disclosed, and no public consultations have been held on Abaco, despite frequent requests.

Meanwhile, the existing 25.6 megawatt plant at Marsh Harbour is barely keeping up with the demand from Abaco's 15,000 residents, 1500 second home owners, and 100,000 visitors. Over the past five years peak energy demand has risen by 64 per cent, the EIA said, and planning has been underway since the late 1990s to meet this growth.

But the corporation's (and by extension, the government's) lack of transparency on this project has fueled anger and disappointment among environmentalists and other concerned citizens on Abaco, and this is despite the fact that BEC's chairman -- Fred Gottlieb -- is a popular Marsh Harbour lawyer.

Following Tough Call's inquiries, we were told that a town hall meeting is being planned for mid-September. Perhaps then Minister Neymour, Chairman Gottlieb and General Manager Kevin Basden will be prepared to respond to the following questions that they were unable or unwilling to answer for this article:

1. What is the reason for the increase in estimated costs for this project?

2. What is the actual signed contract figure?

3. What scope of work does the contract price cover?

4. Are the engines that will be installed new or used?

5. Does Man B&W have the overall design-build contract?

6. Has Man B&W subcontracted the construction to a Salvadoran firm?

7. How many foreign workers will be employed at the site at maximum?

8. Will Bahamian firms and workers be employed at the site?

9. When do you expect power to be delivered by the plant?

10. Will this be over new transmission lines?

11. What assurance do we have that BEC will implement an effective EMP, given its past track record?

12. What is your current assessment of BEC's environmental management at Clifton, Blue Hills, Marsh Harbour and other family island sites?

What do you think?

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larry@tribunemedia.net

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