The company proposing a $4 billion aluminum smelter near Inola said Thursday it has cut the plant’s projected fluoride emissions by 37%.
Fluoride emissions are an important element of a lawsuit by Attorney General Gentner Drummond seeking to halt the facility’s construction or at least delay it until several environmental questions are answered.
In Thursday’s filings with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, Oklahoma Primary Aluminum says it now expects those emissions to be no more than 0.64 pounds per ton of aluminum produced. With a capacity of 750,000 tons a year, that works out to 480,000 pounds of fluoride annually.
“This submission is not the end of the process. It is part of the process,” project development team leader Ziad Fares said in a Zoom call.
“We are now going to be working very closely with with the (Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality) to demonstrate through very detailed science, very detailed modeling on how that amount of fluoride will be emitted in the atmosphere is going to spread … beyond the fence line of the smelter, and what will be the impact on the neighboring communities.
“We will be demonstrating that this is safe,” Fares said, “that at those levels it is safe for a smelter to be there, and the impact on those communities around us is going to be well below levels that could be harsh.”
Fluoride is used to help separate aluminum from raw ore, but most is captured for reuse during the smelting process, Fares said.
Even after scrubbing, fluoride is emitted into the air in both particulate and gaseous forms.
Small amounts of fluoride are harmless and even helpful, according to the National Institutes of Health, but daily intakes of more than .7 milligrams for infants up to 10 milligrams for teens and adult are unsafe.
Hailed at its announcement more than a year ago as a potential economic boon locally and statewide, and as means of more than doubling the nation’s aluminum production, the smelter has encountered opposition, especially locally, amid concerns about environmental impacts, as well as water and electricity usage.
Another issue, unrelated to Thursday’s announcement, is the project’s ownership structure: 60% of Oklahoma Primary Aluminum is controlled by United Arab Emirates interests, and the largest shareholder in minority partner Century Aluminum is a Swiss company.
Drummond, who narrowly lost the Republican runoff election for governor on Aug. 25, sued in early June. A second lawsuit, on behalf of four Inola-area residents, was filed last week contending the project violates federal environmental law.
Fares and Matthew Aboud, Century Aluminum’s senior vice president of strategy, acknowledged Thursday that the project has received a waiver from provisions of the National Environmental Protection Act.
Aboud, though, said the waiver is intended to speed up the permitting process, not exempt the project from environmental requirements.
“We can’t do anything until the NEPA process is fully completed,” said Aboud. “By having this waiver, we’re allowed to, once we go through those consultations, we can begin early site work and continue the construction process in parallel with doing all of the remaining work.
“The benefit to the project is that it just allows the project to move a little faster, but the project is still going to complete all of the necessary ingredients that would have normally come through NEPA. It just now this allows us to save some time.”
Fares said he expects work on the facility to begin next spring with completion in 2029.
Original article online at: https://tulsaworld.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/article_a4fe99a0-91ef-41e5-8c17-d86a7695962c.html