April 28, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

County of Lamont announced on April 25, 2007 a massive land grab for a tenfold increase of the area zoned “heavy industrial”.

This will restrict development of farm operations and will restrain the possibilities of expansion for the Town of Bruderheim and the Town of Lamont.  It will also aid the increase of pollution levels in the area.

Full story and images

Posted in Community & Industry, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

April 28, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Post-Tribune

French chemical company Rhodia Inc. will pay $2 million in fines and spend about $50 million to control air pollution at sulfuric acid plants, including one in Hammond….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Fines & Penalties, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Related Construction Costs | Print | No Comments »

April 26, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Tricity TN/VA [USA]

A 150-pound cylinder of sulfur dioxide fell off of a DPC Enterprises tractor-trailer just after 9 a.m. Wednesday, closing traffic on Interstate 26 for more than six hours.

The spill originally happened near the Eastern Star Exit, southbound on I-26, as the truck was heading to a water treatment plant in Johnson City.

Kingsport Police quickly closed the east- and westbound lanes of I-26 and the Kingsport Fire Department was called in to take charge of the chemical spill cleanup.

Four people breathed in the sulfur dioxide fumes including a firefighter. All four people were treated at local hospitals and released….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Pollution: Health Issues, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

April 26, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

NewsBlaze

Acid manufacturer Rhodia Inc. will pay a $2 million penalty and spend approximately $50 million on air pollution controls at eight production plants in four states across the country, to resolve allegations that the company violated the Clean Air Act. The pollution controls are expected to reduce harmful emissions from its production plants in Texas, Louisiana, California and Indiana by 19,000 tons per year….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Fines & Penalties, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Related Construction Costs | Print | No Comments »

April 20, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

NYMEX

European Gasoil Contracts: Change to Sulfur Specification in January 2008 Due to European Union Directive 1999/32/EC, beginning in January 2008, the sulfur content for European Gasoil will be reduced to 0.1% maximum from the current 0.2% maximum level. Consequently, the Exchange will adjust the sulfur specification to 0.1% maximum beginning in January 2008 for all European Gasoil-related swaps futures contracts listed on the NYMEX ClearPort® platform. (Source — off-site)

Posted in Ultra-Low-Sulphur Diesel | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

P R Buzz

Written by Shaan Oosthuizen

Pretoria, South Africa, Apr 19, 2007 — /prbuzz/ — The CSIR and industrial partner Key Structure Holdings (KSH) have signed a contract with Anglo Coal for the building of a demonstration plant aimed at the recovery of products from waste gypsum, via the patented GypSLiM process.

Anglo Coal and the CSIR have cooperated for more than a decade in the development of water treatment technologies that addresses acid mine water problems. The successful implementation of the CSIR’s limestone-neutralisation technologies at Anglo Coal South Africa’s plants have cut the cost of acid water neutralisation in half, with water treatment plants based on the technology having been built all over Southern Africa and recently in Australia. Anglo Coal is presently constructing the world’s first plant to produce drinking water from acid mine drainage. The plant with a capacity of 20 megaliters per day (Ml/d) will aim to satisfy growing demand for drinking water at the Emalahleni Local Municipality….(Full Story — off-site)
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Note by folc.ca: Let’s hope that they will keep the radioactive heavy-metal isotopes from the waste gypsum within tolerable levels in the drinking water they will produce. — folc.ca

Posted in Pollution: Health Issues, Heavy-Metal Poisoning & Pollution, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Related Construction Costs | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

300 Chinese villagers still hospitalized after sulfur dioxide gas cloud from fertilizer plant

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIJING – About 300 villagers remained in the hospital after a huge discharge of sulfur dioxide gas from a chemical plant in southwestern China, state media said Thursday.

Fourteen were seriously ill from the leak, which was caused Monday by an equipment malfunction at the fertilizer plant in Guizhou province’s Xifeng county, the official Xinhua News Agency said….(Full Story — off-site, related story)

Posted in Pollution: Health Issues, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

ABC News Online [Australia]

Mining company Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines has been fined $25,000 by the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) for a breach of its operating licence nearly two years ago.

The penalty was issued over an incident in May 2005, when sulphur dioxide above permitted levels from the company’s Gidji roaster was detected at Coolgardie, about 30 kilometres away in south-east Western Australia….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Fines & Penalties, Emission Incidents & Issues, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Robson Valley Times [B.C.]

By Andru McCracken

Valemount’s volunteer fire department responded to a call for help from CN Rail last Tuesday afternoon.

Fire Chief Rick Lalonde said that a westbound train carrying sulphur had one car on fire and was headed towards Valemount….(Full Story — off-site)

Posted in Explosions & Fires, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

April 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

folc.ca

Is Fort Air Partnership “cooking the books?”

By Walter Schneider

The home page of the Fort Air Partnership (FAP) states that,

The Fort Air Partnership exists to develop relevant, credible information that can be used to manage regional air quality, protect environmental health, and influence policy.

The home page of the FAP repeats the preceding statement in the third and last paragraph on that web page.  To that end, the FAP operates and maintains 40 passive and 8 continuous monitoring stations in the 4,500 square kilometers of the FAP air-shed zone. (Note: That web page frequently does not work properly, it frequently fails to display correctly and often contains many non-functioning links.)

In examining publicly accessible environmental monitoring station data produced by FAP through its Elk Island monitoring station on April 19, 2007, a download at noon showed extreme exceedences that had vanished from the data set that was downloaded 5 ½ hours later, at 17:30 hrs.  There is nothing very credible about treatment of data that now you see and now you don’t. (Full Story)

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