Algoma Steel’s pending electric transition is set to drastically reduce the amount of toxic pollution the plant expels. A recent study reveals that when coke ovens go dark, the health benefits can be so drastic and immediate that it is akin to quitting smoking
As Sault Ste. Marie grapples with the economic blow of Algoma Steel’s accelerated transition to electric arc steelmaking, a recent study out of the U.S. suggests the trade-off may come with a boost to the community’s health.
While the city braces for job losses, evidence from a similar plant closure reveals that extinguishing the coke ovens could trigger a rapid, massive drop in local heart attack and asthma rates — benefits that begin almost the moment the smoke clears.
On Jan. 7, 2016, the Shenango Coke Works, located just west of Pittsburgh, shut down completely, silencing coke ovens that had been operating for more than five decades.
What happened next was a surprise even to a leading scholar of the human health impacts of air pollution.
“I mean, even knowing what I know about air pollution, I knew that there would be some benefit, but I never imagined it would be as large as it was,” said George Thurston, a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
The health benefits of the Shenango plant closure were significant — and immediate. Right after the plant closed, the local population saw a 42-per-cent decrease in emergency department visits for cardiovascular issues, a 41 per-cent drop in pediatric asthma issues and an overall decrease in respiratory ED visits of 20.5 per cent.
And it kept getting better from there. The Shenango study found continued reductions in hospital visits over the next three years, suggesting “a healing of the population over time” as the air cleared of toxic elements like sulfur dioxide, selenium and arsenic.
Why the Shenango data matters to the Sault
Algoma Steel calls its electric arc transition the “single largest decarbonization project in Canada”, projecting a reduction in CO2 emissions of three million tons annually (up to 70 per cent of current emissions) and “a substantial reduction or elimination of benzene, benzo(a)pyrene, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide emissions” as it moves away from cokemaking.
That transition had previously been pegged to be complete by 2029, at which point, Algoma says it would be in compliance with Ontario’s general air pollution standards. The latest news is that the EAF project is being fast-tracked because of the impact of crushing U.S. tariffs, but the company’s new timeframe for compliance isn’t yet clear.
In the meantime, environmental groups have criticized the Sault steelmaker’s application for a new site-specific standard that would massively surpass Ontario’s air pollution regulations during the electric transition. The Canadian Environmental Law Association says Algoma filed for the following standards:
Benzene: 884 per cent of the provincial standard
Benzo(a)pyrene: 53,000 per cent of the provincial standard
Suspended particulate matter: 112.5 per cent
Sulfur dioxide: 615 per cent hourly and 340 per cent annually
Algoma has noted that the site-specific standards do not represent an actual increase in emissions. Rather, current air pollution rules simply can’t be met by coal-based steel facilities in the province and its electric transition “cannot happen overnight,” says the company.
Why is cokemaking so dirty?
Thurston described the particle emissions from a cokemaking plant as “a regular coal particle on steroids.”
Coke is a high-carbon fuel used in the steelmaking process and creating it requires heating bituminous coal to an extremely high temperature in the absence of oxygen. During the process, chemicals like arsenic, selenium, cobalt, cadmium, and sulfur are squeezed out of the coal.
“You’ve got the particles coming out, but then you’ve also got all these vapours that are coming out and it’s being squeezed out and going into the air and then condensing on these particles,” said Thurston. “The particles become a vector for bringing all of these toxins into the lung.”
When Shenango closed, Wuyue Yu, the study’s co-author, and Thurston observed drastic changes not necessarily in the quantity of particulate matter being picked up by air quality sensors, but in the toxic material attached to the particles.
They saw immediate drops in sulfur, selenium and arsenic as well as cobalt and cadmium. Yu said the most obvious sign to look for when Algoma’s coke ovens close is a reduction in sulfur dioxide, which dropped immediately after the Shenango closure and had been reduced by 90 per cent over the next three years.
The human ‘subsidy’
Thurston views coke emission reductions not just as environmental compliance, but as the removal of a burden placed on the community’s most vulnerable. He describes the health impacts of pollution as a “subsidy” paid by residents to the fossil fuel industry.
“What’s been happening in the past is that these facilities, yes, they do create positive economics for the community, but at the same time they’ve been putting out this pollution which has been having health (impacts) and therefore economic damage to the people breathing the air,” said Thurston.
Yu points to the long-term economic ripple effects of that pollution.
“When children develop asthma in their younger years, it’s a lifetime thing,” she told SooToday.
“It’s going to be the cost of asthma medication needed for years, and then (children) miss school. Their parents will miss work days.”
What is going to happen here?
Whether Sault Ste. Marie will experience such a dramatic “healing” when Algoma Steel fully switches over production to its two electric arc furnaces and no longer operates coke ovens won’t be clear without further study.
Thurston said the health benefits could depend on the nature of Algoma’s current emissions controls and how the topography around the plant impacts dispersion of those emissions. Thurston said it’s possible that emissions from Algoma Steel are lesser than those at Shenango, or that they disperse better than they did in Alleghany County leaving less room for improvement.
Thurston says we should be paying attention when the transition happens as it is an opportunity for a “natural experiment” similar to the one he and Yu did and he suggests local officials take the steps needed to study it. That includes what air pollution impacts might stem from the cleaner electric arc furnaces, which are considered far ‘greener’ than cokemaking but still come with their own risks.
Whether plans are in place for such a study is also unclear. Algoma Public Health referred questions about the potential health benefits of Algoma’s EAF transition to the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, which has not provided any information on its plans as of the publication of this article.
The Shenango study has garnered significant attention worldwide because it had previously been difficult to tell whether negative health outcomes around cokemaking facilities were caused by the plant, another source of air pollution, or because those living near these facilities typically have low incomes, said Thurston.
In the Pittsburgh example, the results were far from ambiguous. The Shenango Coke Works closed on Jan. 7, 2016, which allowed Yu and Thurston to go back and look at air quality readings and hospital data from three years before the closure and three years after. They also compared the data to the same measurements from two control sites — a nearby community that continued to have a working cokemaking plant (the Clairton Coke Works), and Johnstown, Penn., a community without a similar plant.
Yu and Thurston didn’t just look at cardiac and respiratory data. They also counted injury-related emergency department visits to see whether those visits had seen a similar drop after the Shenango closure. They hadn’t.
Is the Sault about to kick a 100-year smoking habit?
The link between air pollution and human health is that the pollution we breathe can be the thing that pushes an underlying condition (like cardiovascular disease) “over the limit,” said Thurston.
In fact, the kinds of health benefits observed after the removal of coke-related air pollution are similar to those you see after a person stops smoking, said Thurston.
“The bottom line is that this kind of pollution basically exacerbates, worsens all of these (conditions) and causes the development and the progression of diseases systemically throughout the body,” he said.
“The one that stands out is cardiac . . . because so many people have terrible diets and don’t exercise enough and so they’re at high risk especially in our western civilization.”