Certain parcels that Wiscasset owns near Mason Station are moving into Phase II of brownfield assessment. The assessment, also called a Phase II investigation, will commence in May. Brownfields are former industrial or other sites where significant pollution is likely. The Phase II assessments are being done with a grant under the auspices of the Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission.

The parcels had already had a Phase I assessment, and enough evidence of contamination existed that the Phase II investigation was called for,  according to Mary Ellen Barnes, executive director of LCRPC.

Rehabilitating Mason Station

The former Mason Station, a roughly 600 megawatt coal-fired power plant located on the banks of the Sheepscot River in Wiscasset, was owned by Central Maine Power until it divested its energy holdings and became a transmission and distribution system only. Mason Station was sold to Florida Power and Light, which owned the property until 2004.  It was purchased by Greenwich, Connecticut-based National RE/sources, a company specializing in brownfield remediation and redevelopment. Since then, the same parent company has owned the property, under a series of several smaller, limited liability corporations.

The company had intended to turn the Mason Station plant into a combination office/retail/dining site, and the surrounding land into a housing development, with a marina. The LLC in 2004 was incorporated as Point East Maritime LLC. Work commenced, with two model homes erected, a small office made over from a brick outbuilding on the river, roads built, and trees planted. But when the amount of pollutants in the former plant itself began to become known, people who had expressed interest in the properties began to pull out, and then, in 2008, the floor dropped out of the housing market, and the model homes were, at least temporarily, not worth the materials that went into them. Today, they remain vacant, decaying amid weeds and untended roads.

Pollution at Mason Station

Coal-fired plants are among the dirtiest energy producers on the planet, and not all the pollution goes away after the fires die out. According to Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Protection Agency, a typical 500-megawatt plant annually produces 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, a leading ingredient in acid rain. It produces 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide, the main component in smog, and another cause of acid rain. Dioxins, persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, are produced by coal-burning plants as well. Dioxins remain in fatty tissues, and can cause cancer and reproductive problems many years after exposure.  Bottom-feeding marine animals, such as lobsters and shellfish, fish that live for many years, such as tuna and salmon, and long-lived livestock, such as cattle that may graze on contaminated soil, are at particular risk.

The average coal-burning plant also generates 225 pounds of arsenic, 19 pounds of mercury, 114 pounds of lead, four pounds of cadmium, and other toxic heavy metals, as well as a trace amount of radioactive uranium. Mason Station, like other coal-burning plants, would have produced these materials every year for the life of the plant, according to the EPA.

Mason Station was in operation from late 1941 until 1991. As a higher-megawatt plant, it also had a 20 percent higher output than the typical plant.

A lot of these substances are spewed into the air, and with prevailing winds from the south-southwest, were carried over the town of Wiscasset and beyond, but the heavier and more dangerous particles fell fairly close to the plant, including the land around the plant, and the Sheepscot and Back rivers, according to a document by Steve Hinchman of the Conservation Law Foundation. The foundation was among the opponents to a proposed coal gasification plant at the site. As a result, the 33 acres that make up the Mason Station site and the generating plant itself are polluted, according to the document.

The extent to which they are heavily polluted with heavy metals will be the focus of the Phase II assessment.

In addition, the plant is known to be contaminated with asbestos, and an effort to remove the asbestos and create a fill area on the north end of the property met with stiff resistance from neighbors in 2010. Some of the asbestos was removed as equipment was removed for sale to a foreign power plant; the removal and sale was halted because of pending legal issues. Today, those pieces of equipment are shrink-wrapped on site and haven't moved anywhere.

Gasification flirtation

Once a greater understanding of the pollution became apparent, National RE/sources attempted to pivot toward a use of the property that would be more acceptable than summer residences and fine dining and shopping. They, under a new LLC, Twin Rivers Energy Center, proposed a coal gasification plant to be built on the site, with the understanding that as the technology became available, the carbon generated by the plant — some 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide and 220 tons of hydrocarbons annually — would be “sequestered” — that is, captured and stored somewhere so that it would not enter the atmosphere.

Because Maine's fractured bedrock is not a good candidate for carbon capture and sequestration, the closest possible site to store the carbon from the gasification plant would have been on Canada's Sable Island. There was no explanation forthcoming about how the carbon could have been transported to the island.

Joe Cotter, the head of National RE/sources' Twin Rivers Energy project as well as the failed Point East housing and retail project, had said that the plant would employ sulfur scrubbers. However, the issue of the heavy metals was not addressed, nor the issue of the coal slag and other coal-based ground level pollution that would have run off into the Sheepscot River. In addition, the carbon capture and sequester system would not have been available anytime in the immediate future of the plant.

Because the plant is in a rural zone, the only thing that stood between the owner and the gasification plant, initially, was a vote by the townspeople to eliminate the height requirement for a smokestack. After a bitter and divisive campaign, in 2007, Wiscasset voted by a 2-1 margin to turn down the height variance, and thus, kill the gasification plant.

National RE/sources also owned an industrial park in Wiscasset, on former Maine Yankee land for which the town was the lien holder. It had only attracted a single client, Rynel, Inc. and in 2009, National RE/sources defaulted on a principal loan for the property, prompting Wiscasset to begin foreclosure proceedings against the company.

Hydro energy on Back River?

Another corporation was temporarily interested in the site. Riverbank Corporation of Toronto was interested in creating a hydropower generation plant, called Aquabank, that would create energy during peak times and use cheaper energy at night, by letting water enter an underground silo on the river bank, turning turbines, and using cheap nighttime wind energy to pump the water back into the Back River. Initial testing was done to make sure that the geology was sound for the project, and the process for federal energy regulation was going forward, until the economy failed in 2009, and Riverbank pulled back.

The perils of owning a brownfield

Wiscasset now owns several parcels that National RE/sources once held, including the housing lots at Mason Station, but the Mason Station plant is not one of them. Marian Anderson, town manager, acknowledged that the town was not owner of the parcel. It is owned by a new LLC, Mason Station LLC, also owned by National RE/sources.

The town foreclosed on the house lots around Mason Station, and in March, agreed to sell the two existing houses to Peregrine Consulting LLC, which will lease space to a subsidiary, Peregrine Turbine Technologies. That company is presently located at Wiscasset Municipal Airport, but needs more space, according to CEO David Stapp.

Stapp said that plans are proceeding to close on the property and to move the business, sometime between the closing date in mid-May and October, when the lease expires on their current location at the airport.

The company is currently doing its own assessments of issues that have cropped up, including possible water and plumbing issues, and the decaying nature of the homes themselves.

Meanwhile, Barnes said that the Phase II investigations may help smooth the path for the sale of these and other properties around Mason Station. “You can't address what you don't know is there. The house lots around Mason Station may need more remediation if they are being used for housing than if they are being used for office space, for instance.”

Barnes said that until assessments are made, and mitigations agreed to, a site like Mason Station itself is not saleable if it requires a mortgage. It is the first thing a bank would ask for. “The cost to remediate a site such as Mason Station requires a great deal of money, in the tens of millions of dollars,” she said. “It is expensive to do, the materials have to be sent to specialized landfills, and that's all before any new use can be made of the property.”

Most buyers wouldn't buy a seriously polluted property, which Mason Station is expected to prove to be, given its history and the history of other coal-fired plants of its size and type. “Any buyer would have to have a lot of resources available to rehabilitate such a property, which is why significantly polluted sites often find their way into the hands of a buyer of last resort, often the government,” Barnes continued.

When the federal government steps in and cleans up a property like Mason Station, it is often done under the auspices of the EPA through its Superfund program. Several substances known to be present at the site, including asbestos, and several strongly suspected to be present at the site, including dioxins and heavy metals, are particularly strong foci for the Superfund site program. But there are a lot of properties on the waiting list for funding, according to Julia Valentine of the EPA, and the properties around Mason Station are only in the initial phases of investigation. The former coal plant itself has never been properly assessed, she said.

To become a Superfund site, the site investigations must first be done, determining the level of contamination.  This process is currently being done at the surrounding lots. Then, the site is ranked on a national list of priorities. The focus of the EPA is currently to clean up asbestos sites, dioxin sites, and sites contaminated by lead, all thought to be present at Mason Station. Radiation is another national priority, which might be a slight issue at Mason Station as well.  Next, a remedial investigation and feasibility study is performed, assessing the level of the threat to human health and the environment, and the cost of remediation. Alternatives are proposed and considered, and a list made of all the past attempts to clean up the site. An action plan is put together, and the work is done, and finally, the site is deleted from the national priority list.

There are currently 1,328 sites on the national priority list for Superfund cleanup. Only 391 have been completed to the point where they have been “deleted” from the list.

Wiscasset could take Mason Station in lieu of delinquent tax payments on the parcel, but is in no financial position to perform the remediation. Thus, the property lies abandoned, in the hands of the owners who bought it in 2004, believing it could be turned around and made profitable.