The company said it will start to heat the coke ovens at the plant this month and charge, or load the first coal in ovens in November to make coke. Coke is made from heating coal to temperatures above 2,000 degrees in brick ovens, leaving a highly concentrated carbon material similar to charcoal behind, according to the American Coke and Coal Chemicals Institute. The coke is used as a fuel in a blast furnace to make steel.
For 40 days during the initial ramp up period, the plant, under its environmental permit, will have uncontrolled emissions.
Karen Shaffer, whose property line is next to SunCoke’s property, has worries about those emissions and plans to be out of town during that period.
Mike White, SunCoke Energy vice president of operations, said, “We will operate this plant within all the requirements of our environmental permit and will do everything possible to be a good neighbor.”
Shaffer said her family is an outdoor family. Before the plant was built, the Suncoke property had one of the oldest and largest trees believed to be in the area where the family would picnic when the kids were younger. It was cut down. And now she doesn’t open the windows of her house anymore.
“What I worry more than anything is the 2,500 tons of pollution added,” she said.
Karen and David Shaffer have owned the property on Hamilton Middletown Road in Monroe 40 years next year, with plans to retire and enjoy the outdoors. They can see the plant from their backyard, including the row of train cars full of coal ready to go Friday. An invisible line in their backyard is all that separates them from SunCoke’s property and one time David chased their cat on the company’s property and was told he was trespassing.
But life goes on, she said.
“What I notice the most is it’s so dusty,” Shaffer said.
Shaffer is on the SunCoke Energy Middletown Community Advisory Panel with Lisa Frye that meets once a month.
Frye, who is one of the biggest critics of the plant, is a Monroe resident on Niederlander Lane. She said SunCoke built a “mammoth” coke plant in the middle of a residential, nursing home and school area, but she feels the company is trying to pretend nothing will change as a result of them being there.
Frye is president of SunCoke Watch Inc., a group of Middletown and Monroe residents who oppose the plant, and which currently has a lawsuit against the plant. It’s been four years in February since she said she first heard the plans for the project.
“It’s no more right that it was four years ago. If anything, it’s more wrong,” Frye said. “From talking to them we’re not going to experience anything. But I don’t believe that when you’re producing 550,000 tons of metallurgical coke half a mile away from my house.”
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