Red Hills Generation Facility

Red Hills Generation Facility is a coal-fired power station owned and operated by GDF SUEZ near Ackerman, Mississippi. The plant uses coal from the Red Hills Mine.

Proposed Red Hills Power Project
Synthesis Energy Systems Inc. and North American Coal Corporation announced in 2008 that they had entered a joint development agreement to evaluate a gas-to-liquids project near Red Hills Mine in Mississippi. If built, the facility could produce synthetic gasoline, chemical feedstocks or synthetic natural gas. The companies planned to conduct a “pre-feasibility study” to determine if “they will engage in a front-end engineering design study to further develop the opportunity.”

In 2010, the Sierra Club reported that the pre-feasibility study had not been released and that the Mississippi DEQ had not received an air permit application. Sierra concluded that the project was defunct.

Plant Data

 * Owner: Choctaw Generating LP
 * Parent Company: GDF SUEZ
 * Plant Nameplate Capacity: 514 MW (Megawatts)
 * Units and In-Service Dates: 514 MW (2001)
 * Location: Pensacola Rd., Ackerman, MS 39735
 * GPS Coordinates: 33.371389, -89.217222
 * Coal Consumption:
 * Coal Source:
 * Number of Employees:

Emissions Data

 * 2006 CO2 Emissions: 3,921,216 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions: 2,149 tons
 * 2006 SO2 Emissions per MWh:
 * 2006 NOx Emissions: 2,114 tons
 * 2005 Mercury Emissions: 60 lb.

Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from Red Hills Generation Facility
In 2010, Abt Associates issued a study commissioned by the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, quantifying the deaths and other health effects attributable to fine particle pollution from coal-fired power plants. Fine particle pollution consists of a complex mixture of soot, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. Among these particles, the most dangerous are those less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which are so tiny that they can evade the lung's natural defenses, enter the bloodstream, and be transported to vital organs. Impacts are especially severe among the elderly, children, and those with respiratory disease. The study found that over 13,000 deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis, acute bronchitis, asthma, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, dysrhythmia, ischemic heart disease, chronic lung disease, and pneumonia each year are attributable to fine particle pollution from U.S. coal plant emissions. These deaths and illnesses are major examples of coal's external costs, i.e. uncompensated harms inflicted upon the public at large. Low-income and minority populations are disproportionately impacted as well, due to the tendency of companies to avoid locating power plants upwind of affluent communities. To monetize the health impact of fine particle pollution from each coal plant, Abt assigned a value of $7,300,000 to each 2010 mortality, based on a range of government and private studies. Valuations of illnesses ranged from $52 for an asthma episode to $440,000 for a case of chronic bronchitis.

Table 1: Death and disease attributable to fine particle pollution from Red Hills Generating Facility
Source: "Find Your Risk from Power Plant Pollution," Clean Air Task Force interactive table, accessed February 2011

Citizen groups

 * Mississippi Sierra Club

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * Existing U.S. Coal Plants
 * Mississippi and coal
 * GDF SUEZ
 * United States and coal
 * Global warming