BY THE NUMBERS
SunCoke Energy Middletown Operations
100: Employees
550,000 to 580,000: estimated annual amount of tons generated in 2012 by SunCoke Energy Middletown Operations
4.3 million: annual amount of tons of coke generated by SunCoke Energy’s six facilities.
$76.7 million: revenue generated in third quarter 2012 (Middletown)
$480.5 million: revenue generated in third quarter 2012 (all SunCoke operations)
$72 million: revenue generated in second quarter 2012 (Middletown)
$460.9 million: revenue generated in second quarter 2012 (all SunCoke operations)
$68.5 million: revenue generated in first quarter 2012 (Middletown)
$481.3 million: revenue generated in first quarter 2012 (all SunCoke operations)
22: smoke, odor or fugitive particulate complaints linked to Middletown Operations
3: amount of violations cited by the Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency in 2012, two of which were self-reported
Sources: SunCoke Energy, Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency
In the first year since SunCoke Energy’s Middletown plant started operating at full capacity, there’s been no shortage of coke, community involvement or controversy.
The $400 million facility, which is owned by Illinois-based SunCoke Energy, was built to supply the steel industry, and primarily AK Steel, with coke, a key product used in the steel-making process.
It’s done that by creating nearly 600,000 tons of coal this year, while also bringing scores of jobs to the region, organizing a volunteer program to encourage local students to graduate and make good life decisions, and donating to area causes and events.
But there have also been complaints from residents who live near the site and a number of environmental violations, the majority of them self-reported.
Those infractions were “inevitable” to Lisa Frye, president of SunCoke Watch, who first caught wind of SunCoke’s designs on 157 acres along Yankee Road in February 2008, when the city of Middletown sought to rezone the site.
“My expectations was that there would be problems because there are inevitably are going to be when you’re dealing with a coking process that has unknowns factored into that,” she said. “That was our argument from the beginning, is that’s why you don’t put this in a neighborhood when you’re dealing with the level of environmental issues that you’re dealing with with that.”
Frye said she is grateful that the first year of operations have been characterized by company officials being responsive and allowing its community advisory panel to continue beyond the plant’s opening.
“They have been open to feedback, whether they’ve wanted to hear it or not,” she said. “That’s been the biggest blessing of the CAP, to have that open forum where I can come and represent part of our community and confront them sometimes, listen at other times and share information at other times.”
But Frye, who can see and smell the effect of the plant from her Niederlander Lane home, said she will always believe that there is no amount of time that can justify putting a coke plant in the middle of a school, nursing home and residential area.
“There’s not one night that I drive home and I look off in the distance beyond my home and it looks like an amusement park, but there’s nothing amusing about it,” Frye said. “It’s so bright and you see the white emissions coming from the plant.”
SunCoke has a 20-year contract to supply AK Steel with coke with an option for additional years.
“AK Steel’s long-term supply agreement with SunCoke is an important part of our company’s strategic goal to more fully integrate our raw material supply,” said Barry Racey, a company spokesman. “In particular, the new SunCoke Middletown plant is playing a key role in the competitiveness of AK Steel’s Middletown Works.”
Racey said AK is “very pleased” that SunCoke Middletown’s state-of-the-art operation is now providing AK Steel with a steady, cost competitive supply of high quality, metallurgical grade coke, which is critical to fuel AK’s nearby Middletown Works blast furnace,” Racey said.
Additionally, SunCoke’s Middletown plant is utilizing waste process heat from the facility to provide a portion of Middletown Works’ electrical power, he said.
AK Steel subsidiary AK Coal Resources, located in Somerset County, Penn., is now supplying prepared coal to SunCoke Middletown for conversion into coke to fuel AK Steel’s Middletown Works blast furnace, Racey said.
SunCoke Energy officials have said Middletown Operations is the company’s most successful startup since 1998, when it launched an expansion of its business with the first of five new facilities.
The Yankee Road plant, which opened late last year with 100 employees, generated more between 550,000 and 580,000 tons of coal since then, significantly boosting to the company’s revenues in each quarter this year.
In addition, SunCoke Energy Middletown Operations has been a good community partner in its first year, according to Denise Hamet, the city’s economic development director.
“Clearly, from a job stand point, they’ve hired and they’ll be hiring more,” she said. “And when you combine the payroll from actually hiring the people and compare that with the payroll from the investment and building a new plant … there’s been a big economic benefit from that.”
SunCoke Energy operating out of Middletown helps the city highlight investment in the community, Hamet said.
“I think that it adds to the interest from other companies,” she said. “We’re getting more interest all the time. It demonstrates faith in the community.”
In addition, SunCoke has been a good neighbor when it comes to its control of the rail spur that leads into Made Industrial Park, a route used by several area businesses.
“Any time you can get transportation and rail and make that accessible, that’s really important,” Hamet said.
The jobs added at SunCoke along the Yankee Road corridor allowed the city to “tell a better story” about employment numbers along the Yankee Road corridor while applying for money for the next phase of improvements, which are expected to start early next year and extend south to Middletown’s border with Monroe, she said.
To garner community input, SunCoke Energy conducted two community surveys regarding its local plant, according to Middletown Mayor Larry Mulligan, a member of SunCoke’s Community Advisory Panel, which is comprised of the company’s Middletown Operations employees and area citizens.
“They want to be engaged with the community so I take that as a positive,” Mulligan said. “They want to understand what the concerns are.”
In addition, the company has stepped up on another level by providing campaign support for a public safety level and sponsoring the Broad Street Bash, he said.
When SunCoke used only 25 of the 100 doses of the flu vaccine it purchased for Middletown Health Commissioner Jackie Phillips to administer to SunCoke employees, the company donated the remaining 75 doses back to the city to be used for Middletown residents.
“Anybody else could have asked for that money back, since it wasn’t being used, but they stayed committed to it,” Mulligan said.
Also in the past year, Dovie Majors, general manager for SunCoke’s Middletown Operations, organized and recruited volunteers for CHOICES, an interactive decision-making workshop program introduced earlier this year to more than 300 Middletown Middle School eighth-graders by SunCoke Energy’s Citizens Advisory Panel.
“I think it’s awesome,” said Sherry Gaston, a counselor at the school. “Students always know where we stand with education, but when they actually see people (from) outside of school who are telling them about the importance of making the right decisions, they really do listen.”
Middletown Operations’ first year of operations also saw a carryover from the controversy generated by the plant’s arrival in the area, which generated opposition and lawsuits by the city of Monroe and a residential organization called SunCoke Watch.
The suits were settled in May, when SunCoke agreed to pay the city’s legal fees and to abide by stricter standards than environmental laws require.
But stricter standards haven’t meant a clean slate when it comes to environmental concerns. A list of more than 20 complaints filed with the Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency show residents reporting thick brown or black plumes of smoke, fugitive particulate matter and a “burnt rubber or burnt tire smell.”
Since the plant opened, its received three notices of violation from the Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency, an agent of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In January, the company was cited for a violation concerning fugitive dust emissions. In February, it was cited for a self-reported Jan. 25 violation concerning excess solids in the water of the plant’s quench tower, which is used to cool the coke when it emerges from the ovens.
Both matters were corrected by the company through engineering and other adjustments and neither violation has reoccurred, according to Bradley Miller, assistant director of the Southwest Ohio Air Quality Agency
A self-reported violation in November concerning the monitoring of mercury emissions from the plant’s main stack remains unresolved as company officials work toward a solution.
“The permit required that SunCoke do testing of that stack and continually monitor how much mercury was coming out,” Miller said. “They had a six-month period to do this evaluation and the way permit was worded, after six months, they had to inject (a certain amount of) carbon into the stream (to control the mercury) … or have a 90 percent control efficiency.”
However, at the end of the evaluation, SunCoke found it could not meet the control efficiency limit in the permit and also found that injecting carbon into the stream could lead to sulfur dioxide violations.
“They basically are not at that level where they can meet either one of those (conditions), so we sent out the notice of violation,” Miller said. “They’ve got a plan in place to evaluate, so it’s not like they’re not doing anything to control the mercury emissions. They are getting some control efficiency on mercury … around 30 percent.”
The agency is required to perform a full compliance evaluation of every air emission unit at the plant once every two years but performs other tests and site visits to investigate complaints far more often than that, Miller said.
SunCoke, in general has been “fairly responsive” to agency notifications in its first year of operations in Middletown, he said.
“We’ve had these notice of violations and they’ve been quick to put some corrective action in place and resolve the issue,” Miller said. “We’re not seeing a lot of recurring violations.”
Minor malfunctions that occurred with some frequency early on in the plant’s operation have decreased over the course of time, he said, something that can be attributed to the facility becoming fully operational.
“This is a fairly large, complex operation … so you would expect some issues in starting up,” he said.
About the Author
