Energy plant battle brews
Company plans appeal of ruling on regulatory review
The company looking to build a large waste-to-energy facility at the old BASF chemical site was dealt a setback this week when an administrative judge ruled that it would have to reapply for a special use permit granted in 2018 that the current city administration says has lapsed.
But a lawyer for Biohitech said the company plans to appeal and is braced for a lengthy legal fight.
The Rensselaer City Council and former Mayor Richard Mooney in 2018 approved Biohitech’s permit request to build a waste-to-energy plant at the site. At the time, they said there would be no environmental impacts.
The city ’s new mayor, Mike Stammel, in June said the Biohitech plant would have to go through a full state environmental quality review, which studies the environmental, social and economic impact of a proposed project, before it could move forward.
With that in mind, the state Department of Environmental Conservation was holding back on air and waste permits needed for the facility.
Biohitech appealed that decision, but Administrative Law Judge James Mcclymonds on Tuesday sided with the state.
“Based upon the uncertainties regarding the SEQRA status of the Project, Department staff acted rationally,” Mcclymonds said of DEC’S decision to hold back on the permits.
“Local permits expire,” said Victoria Leung, a lawyer for the Riverkeeper organization, which is also worried about the proposed plant because it is along the Hudson River. “They really just sat on it,” she said.
But Tom West, the lawyer representing Biohitech, said he would appeal Mcclymonds’ decision to the state environmental commissioner and if need be, contest it in civil court.
“I think it’s a really ridiculous decision,” West said. “They have to have a rational basis to make a different deci
sion,” he said, referring to the state’s contention that the permit process needs to be started anew.
Biohitech is proposing a $35 million facility that would convert municipal waste like tires, discarded plastics and railroad ties into fuel that could be burned in cement plants or other such facilities that use large kilns.
They say burning such waste would offset the need to use fossil fuels like oil, gas or coal in cement plants. The process was developed in Italy and is used in Europe and in West Virginia.
The plant would process up to 50,000 tons of waste annually — which is close to the amount that now goes to the landfills in Albany and Colonie. Residents, though, worry about the truck traffic, and environmentalists fear seepage from a large waste pit into the nearby Hudson River.
The truck issue isn’t new to city residents. There have been complaints about truck traffic as well as dust from another large facility, the S.A. Dunn construction and demolition debris landfill about 2 miles away.
The landfill as well as Biohitech was one of the issues that Stammel ran in last year’s mayoral race.