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As Indiana approves the expansion of a BP refinery, Illinois officials muddy real issues
By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune
The cynic might say that Mayor Richard M. Daley is making a stink about increased Lake Michigan pollution from a planned expansion of a BP refinery because he wants to avert attention from allegations that an old friend of his had mob connections.
Daley is going full tilt in his fight against Indiana and Washington approvals of the $3.8 billion upgrading of BP's Whiting, Ind., refinery because it supposedly will degrade the lake with more "sludge" and ammonia. His outrage has flowed. "That is our drinking water. That is our economic development. That is our recreation," Daley exclaimed with such passion that it might have left the impression that we're going to find viscous, black muck oozing from our faucets. Not missing the hint, the Park District (read: the taxpayers) is organizing a petition drive to flood the Indiana governor with "thousands" of signatures.
Happily for Daley, this cross-border assault on us by Indiana came just as a key witness in the Family Secrets mob trial was talking about how a Daley pal -- Fred Barbara -- helped bomb a suburban restaurant in the early 1980s. Daley wasn't as forthcoming with reporters about that, so the cynics might be right about the BP expansion being a handy diversion.
Not being a cynic, I think that the explanation is simpler: opportunity. Opportunistic politicians -- such as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who can be counted on to demagogue anything handy, and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), desperate to appease his increasingly liberal North Shore constituency -- are making similar stinks. Opportunity, as in a chance to ride the wave of ill-informed and knee-jerk criticism that is pounding the shore.
I'm as devoted to maintaining the cleanliness of the Great Lake as the next guy who never goes in the water because it's always too cold, or because the suburbs near my home charge "non-residents" outrageous prices just to sit on the beach.
But the level of discourse about this project has been anything but rational or informed. Consider the critics' reference to the sludge that supposedly is going to crud up the lake. The description conjures up 19th Century images of thick, viscous blobs of muck percolating from a filthy concrete culvert into the lake.
Just for the record -- and everyone is allowed to argue with it -- here is the company's response to the assertion that it will be pouring sludge into the lake, an explanation I don't see much mentioned by the critics: There is no sludge in the discharges.
Sludge refers to the concentrated larger solids that are removed by treatment from the wastewater before any discharge into the lake. Sludge is disposed of as a solid waste; it never reaches the lake. Tiny dispersed solids, too small to be caught by the treatment's fine filters, do reach the lake; they are about 10 microns in size (1/25,000 of an inch.) The 20 million gallons of treated wastewater discharged daily into the lake is 99.999 percent water; the remaining 0.001 percent is mostly two kinds of salt -- chloride and sulfate -- and even tinier amounts of nutrients, organics and metals, most of which are found naturally in Lake Michigan.
The critics like to say, as a matter of shorthand, that BP wants to "dump" 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more "sludge" into the lake every day. But citing percentages alone is misleading without reporting the huge raw number upon which the percentages are based. In fact, a 35 percent increase in maximum daily particulates translates into an increase of less than a dozen parts per million. The actual increase would be more on the order of 8 parts per million. Same infinitesimal increases apply to ammonia.
BP notes that if the wastewater were toxic under the definitions and regulations of the 1977 Clean Water Act, no discharge would be allowed. Simply stated, according to the company, the current or planned discharge is not toxic; it is not harmful to humans or aquatic life. If you don't believe that, then argue with the legal limits.
These kinds of technical and legal arguments deserve airing, as the critics demand. Certainly, you can argue with the facts and the company's interpretations of them but that would be a vast improvement over the current level of hysterical discourse. This is a monumentally complicated technical issue, one that is too easily simplified. That's understandable, because we all yearn to have the world explained in simple, comprehensible terms. Passion in arguing the issue is OK. But that doesn't excuse the politicians and BP's
