Breathing Out

Sometimes it’s the little stories that are most fun. They can tell us more about ourselves, and how we operate as a culture, than the big stories.

This little story begins down in Vernon, the belly of the industrial beast in L.A. If it’s big and ugly, it probably gets made in Vernon. As the saying goes, Vernon may not be hell, it just smells like it.

Smack in the middle of Vernon sits a little company known as Sunlaw Energy Corp. In 1995, Sunlaw did a remarkable thing. It built a new generating plant for electricity at the corner of Downey and Fruitland.

Nothing so remarkable about that, except this plant probably spews fewer pollutants than any other fossil-fuel plant in the world. In fact, “spews” is the wrong word to use with the Sunlaw plant. On a moderately smoggy day in L.A., the emissions coming out of its stack are cleaner than the air surrounding it.

Or to put it another way, the plant is five times cleaner than required by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. It’s more than twice as clean as its nearest rival and many times cleaner than most plants.

Sunlaw was created by a man named Robert Danziger. As an industrialist, he is hard to classify. He’s had previous lives as a jazz musician and scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a large man, very large, and when standard golf clubs didn’t fit him he designed his own. The living room of his house has been converted to a sound studio.

After World War II, this city was full of entrepreneurs like Danziger, men who habitually poked into the margins of things, making and sometimes losing several fortunes in their lives. Now, most of them are gone.

But Danziger remains. When he decided to build the clean stacks for his plant, his motives were clearly commercial. At that time, the best equipment for cutting pollutants involved injecting ammonia into flue gases. This process, called selective catalytic reduction, or SCR, worked well enough but was infamous for the dangers it posed.

For example, SCR demands the delivery of liquid ammonia in tanker trucks at regular intervals. A single truck accident producing a bad spill of ammonia can kill hundreds, and perhaps thousands in an urban setting. Spilled ammonia is so lethal that it has killed drivers on highways who have merely passed through a gas cloud created by an accident.

SCR also has the paradoxical effect of increasing ammonia in the atmosphere because some of the ammonia is expelled up the stack.

Danziger believed he could invent a better process and make some money at the same time. Under the AQMD rules, better pollution devices can be certified as “best available control technology” and required for new plants. Sunlaw, being the manufacturer with the patent, would get the sales.

“We were betting a few million dollars that we could beat SCR, make some money and get rid of the ammonia danger all at once,” says Danziger. “It was such a good package, we couldn’t pass it up.”

All went well. After some twists and turns in the road, Sunlaw installed a new system at its own plant in the spring of 1995. It worked splendidly. No ammonia, no dangerous materials of any kind, and the Sunlaw system cut out more pollutants than the old system. By far.

Test results showed how good it was. The plant’s emissions of nitrogen oxides, one of the main ingredients of smog, fell to 1.99 ppm. Another pollutant, carbon monoxide, fell to 1.28 ppm.

Those concentrations are so low that, on any summer day, the Sunlaw plant is actually cleaning the background air in its neighborhood. The AQMD was so impressed that it publicly praised Sunlaw for reducing emissions “by more than 80%” and eliminating the toxic hazard of ammonia.

Ronald Reagan himself could not have dreamed up a better example of capitalism at work. No public monies had been spent. The air gets cleaner, toxics get reduced and jobs get created.

But guess what. Sunlaw has made no sales of its technology. Even as Sunlaw was being praised, its industrial brothers in the energy business were maneuvering to stall the adoption of new pollution equipment. Arguing that technological breakthroughs were wreaking havoc on their enterprises, they begged for a dose of big government intervention.

And big government listened. The good Republicans in the state Legislature decided government regulation was required. They fashioned legislation aimed solely at the South Coast AQMD, ordering it to add long waiting times and layers of regulatory obstacles to the adoption process.

For example: the old system allowed new technology to be adopted after a one-month test period. The new system requires a year of test time.

Another: The old system OKd the new technology as a matter of course after it was proven to be successful. The new system requires lengthy staff reviews, presentations before public hearings and an approving vote by the governing board of the AQMD before adoption is allowed.

And, best of all, the AQMD now interprets the law to require an environmental impact statement for any new anti-pollution device. Oh, the irony. As we all know, an EIS can take a year or more all by itself.

It now looks like it could take until 2000 to get the Sunlaw system adopted. If then. One AQMD official, trying to make a tortured explanation of the whole affair, finally said, “Sunlaw got screwed.”

And so did the rest of us. Those ammonia trucks trundle in and out of UCLA, downtown L.A. and dozens of other locations week after week, posing their deadly threat. The SCR systems keep pumping more unused ammonia into the air. All because simple capitalism wasn’t allowed to work.

And Sunlaw? It’s leaving town. The plant will stay, but the company headquarters is folding its tent and moving to Knoxville, Tenn.

Greener pastures, says Danziger. Sunlaw’s business prospects are simply much better outside of California. And besides, he says, his employees hate the smog.

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Last week I misnamed the late, great Jesse Bevlin of R & B fame. Apologies to all.