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Sun looking in region for coke plant site
Friday, March 12, 1999 By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The company considering Hazelwood as a site for a new coke plant is looking at other locations in Pennsylvania that could offer tax exemptions.
Geoff McLaughlin, a spokesman for the state Department of Economic and Community Development, yesterday said Sun Coke, a subsidiary of Sun Co., has requested and received names of other Western Pennsylvania communities that qualify as tax-free Keystone Opportunity Zones.
Sun spokesman Bud Davis confirmed that the company requested a list of KOZ sites from the state. But Davis would not name those communities under consideration and said the review is "very preliminary."
Tax abatements for the controversial project - designed to supply LTV Corp. with coke - were effectively killed late last year by the Pittsburgh School Board, which rejected the Keystone Opportunity Zone designation for a 140-acre site in Hazelwood that includes the old LTV coke works closed last year.
That decision, LTV spokesman Mark Tomasch said yesterday, has forced Sun to look for alternatives. But Tomasch would not say that Pittsburgh is out of the running for the controversial $350 million facility that would produce coke and electricity as a byproduct.
Sun would build and operate the plant using its technology and would sell most, if not all of the output to LTV. Coke, which is baked coal, is used as fuel and a refining agent in blast furnaces during iron production.
"It's not going forward at the moment because we're trying to resolve the issue of the KOZs," Tomasch said.
There are 5,000 acres of land deemed to be Keystone Operating Zones in southwestern Pennsylvania including sites in McKeesport and Duquesne in Allegheny County. There are also KOZ sites in Armstrong, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties.
LTV has said it prefers Pittsburgh for a new plant because it was asked to do so by the United Steelworkers, which opposed the company's decision to close its own Hazelwood plant and buy coke from U.S. Steel's Clairton plant. Plans for the new plant, however, have been met with considerable community resistance.
"We've said all along that our preference was to build it on the site of the old plant and we said that because of the local Pittsburgh constituents who asked us to do that," Tomasch said. "We said we would do it provided the Pittsburgh site could be made to be economically competitive with other sites."
Sun and LTV have been negotiating the sale of the Hazelwood property but no deal has been reached. The Allegheny County Health Department announced Wednesday that it is returning Sun's permit application because the companies have ignored numerous requests for additional information.
Davis, in response, said the company does not plan to resubmit a new air quality application to the county until it has signed a deal with LTV. He declined further comment yesterday.
Sun is also known to be looking at farmland in Haverhill, Ohio, owned by the Norfolk & Southern Railroad. The company has filed a permit application with local health officials there.
Robert Walton, a member of the Southern Ohio Port Authority, yesterday said the permit application for Haverhill, near the Ohio River in Scioto County south of Portsmouth, is slowly going through the review process.
"I don't necessarily think there are any serious insurmountable problems, but it's a long-drawn out process," Walton said in a telephone interview. "It's kind of an off and on situation."
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