The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Pittsburgh is taking comment until Dec. 5 on an application from Kentucky Power for a Section 404 Clean Water Act permit covering new coal waste disposal area at the 1,600-MW Mitchell power plant in northern West Virginia.
The current landfill is used to dispose of coal combustion by-products and is projected to reach its capacity in 2019. Kentucky Power, a unit of American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP) that owns 50% of the plant and is the operator, proposes to expand the existing Mitchell Landfill facility boundary as part of the construction of Phases 3 and 4, which entails removal of approximately 500,000 cubic yards of excess soil and rock from the landfill and disposing within the proposed Expansion Area, and to later harvest overburden soil from the Expansion Area for use as cover material at the landfill.
The expansion will require the clearing and grading of an approximately 21.51-acre footprint. This work will include the installation of 6-inch high density polyethylene perforated underdrains in approximately 3,023 linear feet of headwater ephemeral and intermittent streams, followed by the placement of approximately 16,834 cubic yards of earthen material on top the stream channels. The project will also involve the placement of 994 cubic yards of earthen material on top of 0.025 acre of palustrine emergent wetlands at the landfill site and 0.026 acre of palustrine emergent wetland will be impacted at the proposed mitigation site.
An AEP subsidiary in Ohio had to divest Mitchell earlier this decade under Ohio’s utility deregulation program. After passing through an unreguated AEP subsidiary, 50% of Mitchell wound up with regulated Kentucky Power and 50% with the regulated AEP subsidiary Wheeling Power.
