Martin Creek Lake State Park in Tatum is known for its bass fishing and camping, but the park’s most memorable quality is a noise. A colossal coal-fired power plant has rumbled on its shores for nearly a half-century, greeting visitors with a low drone.
Visitors to the lake could hear something new by the end of the decade or even sooner. Silence.
Luminant-owned Martin Lake Power Plant is facing a multitude of economic and regulatory headwinds that are all but certain to shutter the aging facility, according to industry analysts and environmental groups. The plant is among the country’s leading emitters of mercury pollution, harmful sulfur dioxide gas and smog.
Pressure compounded when the Environmental Protection Agency finalized rules this past month targeting coal plant pollution and greenhouse emissions. The rules would require a series of costly retrofits at the Martin Lake facility, which is also reaching the end of its service life after 47 years of operation.
“All of these pieces line up to paint a fairly bleak picture for the plant,” said Joshua Smith, a senior attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program.
Coal’s share of the Texas energy market fell below 10 percent for the first time this year as Luminant and other private utilities race to decommission plants in exchange for cheaper, cleaner and more profitable renewable options.
Once Southwestern Electric Power Co.’s Welsh Power Plant in Pittsburgh is decommissioned in 2028, Martin Lake will be the last ember of the coal industry burning in East Texas.
The closure of Martin Lake, like its sister plant in Mount Pleasant in 2018, would mean hundreds of lost jobs for plant operators in an area already stricken by the collapse of the coal mining industry.
Texas lignite, a low-grade form of coal strip mined out of East Texas and fed into plants such as Martin Lake, has few remaining customers.
An earlier round of federal regulations combined with declining lignite coal demand led Luminant to close its Oak Hill lignite mine south of Longview in 2018 with layoffs affecting four other mines close to Martin Lake. The company followed up with another round of local mine layoffs in 2021.
But Martin Lake’s closure would also mean cleaner air for Tatum and millions of residents in a multi-state region, environmental health experts say.
A 2023 study published in Science, a peer reviewed academic journal, found pollution from Martin Lake contributed to 195 premature deaths a year between 1999-2020, making it the deadliest coal plant in the United States.
Emissions modeling by the Clean Air Task Force, a national clean air advocacy group, linked plant pollution at Martin Lake to 63 heart attacks per year. The at-risk population in the 12 miles surrounding the plant numbers more than 18,000 residents, roughly 4,800 of whom are children, according to the model.
Luminant did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the EPA rules or the future of the plant.
However, the company’s website states: “Luminant is proud of its strong track record of meeting or outperforming all environmental laws, rules and regulations.”
New federal rules explained
The EPA’s new set of coal-fired plant rules has four parts with separate compliance deadlines.
The first concerns carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. Coal-fired plants that wish to operate past 2039 would need to cut carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2032. However, if a utility plans to close a plant before 2032, the rules will not apply.
“The rule addresses existing coal-fired power plants, which continue to be the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector,” the EPA said in an April press release.
The agency calculated that this rule alone would slash the annual emissions equivalent of 328 million gasoline cars by 2047 and produce $370 billion in climate and public health benefits over the next two decades.
The second rule focuses on mercury and other heavy metals and hazardous air pollutants generated by burning coal. The compliance deadline is April 2027.
Martin Lake is routinely among the largest mercury polluters in the United States, and the rule is seeking a 70 percent reduction in mercury pollution.
Mercury particles are pushed out of the plant’s smoke stacks where they waft to the ground, leaching into soil and water. Aquatic bacteria take the mercury and transform it into methylmercury, which can concentrate in the food chain and eventually within fish that people consume.
“Since Martin Lake is a lignite burning plant with poor particulate matter controls, it falls into both categories of this pollution rule. So that will likely require Luminant to install new equipment to remain in compliance if they don’t choose to shut the site down,” said Smith, with the Sierra Club.
Public health experts and federal regulators have recently focused their attention on a separate but far reaching air pollutant associated with coal plants.
The smallest particulate matter generated by plants — less than 2.5 micrometers wide or 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair — carry some of the greatest risks for human health and travel vast distances.
Where larger particles are caught in the lungs and coughed or sneezed out, these tiny particles are absorbed through the lungs and into the bloodstream.
Exposure to particulate matter can lead to premature death in people with preexisting heart and lung conditions, childhood asthma, reduced lung function, lung cancer, and elevate the risk of heart attacks, according to the American Lung Foundation.
Last year, a study published in Neurology, an academic journal, linked the microscopic particles to Parkinson’s disease and identified East Texas as a hotspot for the neurological disorder.
Those living close to facilities face the greatest risk, but Smith said a Sierra Club air modeling study found particulate matter from Martin Lake affecting air quality in communities as far away as St. Louis, further highlighting the importance of regulating plant pollution.
“This particular facility has been linked to PM (particulate matter) problems throughout the region and beyond it,” Smith said.
Luminant said the Martin Lake plant is installed with an electrostatic precipitator system to reduce particulate matter. The Sierra Club counters that Martin Lake’s air scrubbers are the same vintage as the plant and fail to remove as much pollution as modern scrubbing technology.
The third and fourth rules target industrial wastewater discharged from the facility as well as coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal that’s stored in pools and landfills on site.
Wastewater flows can carry heavy metals such as mercury into streams and lakes, and the Martin Lake plant has received two Clean Water Act Violations in the past 12 quarters, according to the EPA.
Coal ash is another concern at the almost 50 year-old facility. The rule will address legacy coal ash storage areas that are no longer used but may leach heavy metals into soil and water if they were not remediated properly.
Pollution data reported by Luminant from multiple groundwater monitoring wells around the plant show several pollutants present and above health-based thresholds. Some of those pollutants include, arsenic, lead, mercury, lithium and selenium.
Martin Lake’s legacy coal ash storage sits beneath the existing pools, Smith said. Pending further monitoring, “the rules could require the company to excavate and remediate the storage areas.”
Legacy coal ash disposal was unregulated by the federal government until the EPA rules were finalized.
What comes next?
Before the rules can have any impact, they’ll have to survive legal challenges of their own, said David Spence, a University of Texas at Austin professor of natural resources law.
“Certainly, many existing coal fired power plants will probably choose to shut down if those rules survive judicial review,” he said. “But these rules are also vulnerable during review, and the plant owners know that.”
The National Mining Association, of which Luminant’s parent company, Vistra, is a member, called the new EPA rules “illegal” and that they “demand legal intervention, which we are beginning today,” according to a May press release from the association.
The Electric Power Supply Association, another trade association with Vistra on its membership roles, stated in April that the rules will hamper the energy industry’s capacity to meet surging demand by placing “onerous” emissions limits on plants.
Meanwhile, industry analysts argue that Martin Lake’s closure is a foregone conclusion regardless of federal rules. Owing to Texas’ free-market energy grid — Electric Reliability Council of Texas — which sees utility companies compete to provide the cheapest electricity to customers, Texas companies are transitioning to the cheapest, most competitive means of generating power: solar, wind and natural gas. (Longview and much of the rest of Northeast Texas, except for Smith County, are not part of ERCOT.)
“Coal’s market share in ERCOT is declining across the board,” read an April report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “These shifts in power production — solar’s increasing role, and coal’s decline in the nation’s most power-hungry state—show just how substantial the changes have become in the energy transition.”
Tatum’s outgoing mayor, Don Hall, said he was conflicted about the future of the Martin Lake plant.
“If (Luminant) can control the air quality, I think it should stay open, but they shouldn’t put the people who live here in harm’s way,” Hall said. “There’s no money worth somebody’s life. A lot of people here have lung cancer, though it’s hard to say if the plant is causing it.”
Samuel Shaw is a Report for America corps member for the News-Journal, covering East Texas’ rural to urban transformation. Reach him at sshaw@news-journal.com .
