EDITORIAL AND OPINION — The front or back end of the pipe? — Governments and BACT

Alberta and British Columbia may be neighbors, but those Rocky Mountains are, at times, much more than a geographic barrier.

Both provinces have substantial resources of coal, which contribute much to provincial coffers. But while British Columbia exports almost all of its coal, some of Alberta’s production is consumed domestically in coal-fired power-generating plants.

If you are thinking antiquated plants, acid rain and pollution — think again. These are modern, state-of-The-Art operations built to high environmental standards.

A few years ago, an Alberta-based company wanted to build a similar plant just across the border in eastern B.C. The newly elected New Democratic Party government hemmed and hawed, not knowing what to make of this novel concept, as most power in the province is generated by hydroelectric dams.

After some delay, the company was told that it might be allowed to go ahead, but only if the project met the government’s standard of “best available control technology” (or BACT), to minimize the impact on the atmosphere.

The only problem was that no one was sure what the best available technology was. After all, governments are in the business of collecting and spending the public’s money; they are not experts in coal-plant technology, or in much else, for that matter. While the company was prepared to risk its capital to build and market the product, and create some good-paying jobs in the process, the government was not prepared to take a chance that the company knew what it was doing. Delays and indecision eventually led to a decision to pull out, and the project went off the rails.

All this is not to say that government has no business involving itself in environmental assessment. On the contrary. But, as the above example illustrates, governments sometimes interfere in the business process by setting restrictions on the type of technology used.

A recent essay, No Place in the Boardrooms of the Nation, written by Alan Scarth and published by The Canadian Institute of Resources Law, states that a “major concern” of business today is the invasiveness of both the federal and provincial processes in the private sector.

“With sustainable development as an environmental ideal, our environmental assessment process should be directed to establishing the carrying capacity of the ecosystem to be affected, and then to specifying licence conditions for proposed development which will keep their impact within that carrying capacity,” Scarth writes.

In other words, the government’s attention should be at the “end of the pipe.” Scarth says government agencies should dictate the permissible limits of the impact on an ecosystem, as measured in the air and water at the boundary of the plant, and in the earth beneath it. “The space within these points of measurement, including the boardroom and plant floor, should be the preserve of the private sector.”

Scarth also points out that while the concept of BACT has taken root in Canada, it originated in the United States during the glory days of the Environmental Protection Agency. He says the EPA did not hesitate to select and mandate technology in tandem with its monitoring requirements. For example, the EPA promoted something called “regenerative thermal oxidation.” The only problem was that at the first plant in which this mandated technology was installed, the equipment failed and the plant had to be shut down at great cost.

Whether the technology should have been tested operationally is not the question, Scarth says. “The question is, Why should an agency with the authority to require monitoring of emissions and shut down plants that don’t comply get involved in technology in the first place?”