By Mike W. Ray, Southwest Ledger
Municipal officials in two Pushmataha County communities have lodged protests with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission against a proposed hydroelectric power plant that would be built on the Kiamichi River.
Complaints of the mayor of Antlers and the town board of Albion include anticipated withdrawals of enormous volumes of water; depletion of groundwater wells; destruction of mountains to create a three reservoirs and dams; seizure of thousands of acres of private property for private financial gain solely to generate electricity in Oklahoma exclusively for Texas; myriad adverse environmental effects; and the potential collapse of a tourism industry central to the area economy.
The $3.1 billion Pushmataha County closed-loop pumped-storage hydropower plant is envisioned by Southeast Oklahoma Power Corporation – which was incorporated in Nevada and is based in Dallas, Texas. Its principal officer is Johann (Yau On) Tse, a Chinese American who has extensive ties to China.
The SEOPC project would require construction of three reservoirs: an upper lake created by impounding Long Creek behind a concrete face rockfill dam 886 feet long (the length of almost three football fields) and 282 feet high, and would encompass a surface area of almost 600 acres (a square mile is 640 acres); a lower lake with a surface area of 887.37 acres (almost 1.4 square miles) created by an earthen dam 13,615 feet (two and one-half miles) long and 69 feet high; and a 40-acre “regulating” reservoir.
Other elements of the project would include:
- A “headrace” tunnel, constructed of steel and concrete, to convey water from the upper reservoir to the powerhouse. The tunnel would be 7,030 feet (1.3 miles) long and 33 feet in diameter (the width of a two-lane highway with 4-foot shoulders).
- The concrete pumping station would be an underground cavern 550 feet long (equivalent to almost two football fields), 93 feet wide, and 189 feet high (roughly the equivalent of 14 stories). It would contain four pump/generating units with a total capacity of 1,200 megawatts – more than double the entire maximum production from the eight hydroelectric power plants on the six lakes and the Arkansas River Navigation System managed by the Tulsa District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
- The “tailrace” tunnel would be a concrete tunnel 8,243 feet (a mile and a half) long and 33 feet in diameter. It would transfer flows between the upper and lower intake structures. A tailrace tunnel is a channel that carries water away from a hydroelectric plant after it has been used to rotate turbine blades.
- The water intake would be a concrete structure 40 feet wide and 40 feet long located approximately a foot and a half above the bottom of the Kiamichi River. The structure would be funnel-shaped and would taper down over its length to the water supply channel.
Electricity generated with Oklahoma water would be sent to Texas
SEOPC’s hydro power plant would generate electricity to be transmitted via a 100-mile-long, 345-kilovolt power line that would pass through Pushmataha and western McCurtain counties in Oklahoma, and Lamar and Red River counties in Texas, where it would connect to an Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) substation at Paris, Texas.
Responding to a question from KOTV-6 in Tulsa, Tse said the SEOPC project would “support both the Oklahoma and Texas electric grids.”
However, he failed to mention that ERCOT operates Texas’ electrical grid, the Texas Interconnection, which supplies power to more than 25 million Texas customers and represents 90% of the Lone Star State’s electric load. ERCOT is not linked to the Southwest Power Pool, which manages the electric grid and wholesale power market for the central United States, including Oklahoma.
Water issues
Construction of the SEOPC project would “necessitate removal of massive amounts” of shale and sandstone “from its natural, original location,” Antlers City Manager Michael C. Taylor noted. That material would be “subject to weathering processes” and “inevitably” would “cause components of the disturbed materials to wash into” the Kiamichi River.
Taylor informed FERC in an Aug. 8 letter that the Kiamichi is “the sole source of drinking water for our city of 2,453 people, including a hospital and two nursing homes.”
Taylor and the Board of Trustees of Albion informed FERC that manganese and iron “are already present in high concentrations in our raw intake water” from the river, and would “likely increase” because of “long-term erosion of components of the disturbed material.”
During construction of the hydropower plant, “the level of dissolved solids and sediments” would increase in the river,” which probably would increase the mortality of endangered “mussels and other aquatic life,” Albion Mayor Doris Turnbull and Trustees Beverly Logan and Brent Kennedy wrote in a Sept. 3 letter to FERC.
“This would be an extinction-level event for endangered mussel species on the river,” cabin owner Seth Willyard of Talihina told KOTV-6.
Filling SEOPC’s upper, lower, and regulating reservoirs would require 118,184 acre-feet of water (38.5 billion gallons). In addition, approximately 20,000 acre-feet (6.5 billion gallons of water) would be siphoned from the river each year “to provide maintenance flows to replace water lost to evaporation and leakage,” a report states.
In a related matter, damming Long Creek would “adversely affect the Little River Basin, home to threatened and endangered mussel species.”
Albion’s governing board pointed out that the SEOPC project would “conflict” with the Water Settlement Agreement reached among Oklahoma City, the State of Oklahoma, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw nations in 2016.
That agreement authorizes OKC to siphon 115,000 acre-feet of water (almost 37.5 billion gallons per year) from the Kiamichi River. The hydropower project envisioned by the Southeast Oklahoma Power Corporation would withdraw even more water from the river.
Since there is a well-known link between surface water and groundwater, residents of Albion, a community of perhaps 100 residents, are worried that the hydropower project would deplete their water wells.
The Town of Albion urged FERC to require SEOPC to perform a current assessment of “the actual available flow of the Kiamichi River” at its proposed project site approximately five miles south of Talihina.
The water available study submitted by SEOPC “uses a location 20 miles downstream from the project area and right after the dam that releases water from Sardis Lake into the Kiamichi River,” Albion officials related. “Any studies regarding water availability should be taken on the proposed diversion site to ensure” data that is accurate and up-to-date.
Albion officials also seek an evaluation of the river’s “minimum flow against the project’s operational requirements,” including the estimated annual evaporative losses.
When KOTV asked Tse why he chose the Kiamichi River, “far from any metropolitan area,” for the SEOPC project, he replied:
“Pumped storage projects need to have access to water to fill two reservoirs. One reservoir needs to be at a higher elevation and the lower reservoir needs to be as close as possible horizontally to the upper reservoir for maximum efficiency. These elevational differences are seldom found in close proximity, making it difficult to site pumped-storage facilities. The siting of this project near the Kiamichi River has both the vertical and horizontal requirements for the reservoirs.”
Project would affect
55 square miles,
520 landowners
The Albion officials said SEOPC’s plans would encompass 35,235 acres of land – 55 square miles – and would directly affect approximately 520 landowners in Oklahoma and Texas. Construction of the hydropower plant and transmission line would “require vast condemnation of private land.”
The majority of land in the FERC study area is “right-of-way for transmission lines to Valliant, Oklahoma, and then to Paris, Texas,” Tse told KOTV.
Tse conceded that neither he, his investors, nor SEOPC owns any land “within the project boundary area.”
In conclusion…
The Albion board also complained that “meaningful participation on the part of the prospective applicant [SEOPC] has been wholly lacking in substance, and no earnest attempts have been made to consult the Town of Albion” – which would be “impacted more extensively” by the SEOPC project than any other community because it lies “less than a mile from the proposed project boundary.”
During an Aug. 7 meeting in Paris, Texas, Seth Willyard of Talihina, “a landowner within the project boundary” and a Kiamichi River Legacy Alliance board member, told FERC that SEOPC’s presentation “contains many irregularities and deficiencies,’” and maps they presented “were unreadable.”
The Albion board members informed FERC that “this area relies heavily on tourism to support the local economy,” and they addressed a critical aesthetic issue.
The proposed hydropower plant would “forever be a blight and a nuisance to residents who enjoy the outdoors and appreciate the scenic wonders of this region, including the unpolluted night sky allowing for stargazing.”