San Antonio’s Top 10 Climate Polluters

Originally posted by Greg Harman on Deceleration News

US industrial greenhouse gas emissions may have dipped slightly last year, but in San Antonio they made a sharp jab skyward, according to numbers released last week by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2017, local power plants and industry belched out roughly 1. 6 million more metric tons of climate-destabilizing gases than they did in 2016, according to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.

[See: San Antonio’s Top Toxic Polluters.]

Overall, Bexar County’s contribution to the global climate crisis from large industrial sources grew from 11.9 million tons of CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent, to 13.5 million tons CO2e. (CO2e represents the standard unit for measuring a facility’s carbon footprint.)

Most significant in this increase was the ramping up of City-owned CPS Energy’s JT “Dirty” Deely coal plant resulting in the generation of roughly 1.47 million tons of pollution, from 2.77 million tons in 2016 to 4.2 million tons in 2017. Emissions from CPS’s younger coal plant also grew, from 5.5 million tons to 5.9 million tons from 2016 to 2017.

Check out Deceleration’s detailed map of the polluters here

San Antonio’s Top Climate Polluters

1. JK Spruce Coal Plant
2. JT Deely Coal Plant
3. VH Braunig Gas Plant
4. Alamo Cement
5. Capitol Aggregates
6. OW Sommers Gas Plant
7. Tessman Road Landfill
8. Covel Gardens Recycling and Disposal Facility
9. Nelson Gardens Landfill
10. Leon Creek Gas Plant

While City-owned CPS Energy has pledged to close down the decades-old Deely by the end of the year—scrubbing millions of tons of climate pollution and a huge amount of toxic pollution from our air—until then they’re going to make that old plant work for its keep.

CPS has been taking advantage of extreme summertime heat and record-breaking electricity demand.

The EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), which began capturing data in 2010, covers all industrial facilities emitting more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year.

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