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A hearing on U.S. Steel's plans to upgrade the Clairton Works is slated for 6:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Clairton Municipal Building on Ravensburg Boulevard.

The Allegheny County Health Department's Air Quality Division must give its consent to the $1 billion project to replace three old coke batteries with one newer facility.

Neil Bhaerman, a program organizer for Clean Water Action, says the environmental advocacy group is pushing the Health Department to do a more thorough examination of the work that U.S. Steel is planning.

In addition, the group wants the county to get more data on the coke works in Germany that the Clairton plant's new equipment will be modeled after.

"I'm glad they're putting the investment into the coke works in Clairton, and I'm glad they're making coke, but they need to be doing it as cleanly as possible," Bhaerman says.

"That's why it's going to be really important what the Health Department puts into the permit," he says. "We're not opposing the new batteries. We just want to make sure that they use the best technology."

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U.S. Steel and its predecessors have been making coke in Clairton for more than a century.

Used to fuel furnaces and boilers, coke is created when coal is heated to burn off impurities. Cooking the coal releases gases and soot; some of the gases are captured to create chemicals used in paints, glues, plastics and solvents, but others escape into the air.

The Clairton Works is the largest coke-making plant in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Despite modernization projects throughout the 1980s and '90s, the plant has also been blamed by the American Lung Association and other groups with causing abnormally high levels of air pollution in the Mon Valley.

The Lung Association in April called the Pittsburgh region the "sootiest" metropolitan area in the nation based on air pollution readings taken in Liberty Borough, directly opposite Clairton.

U.S. Steel argues that the new batteries being installed at Clairton will be more efficient and emit radically lower levels of soot and gases.

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The technology was pioneered by the German steelmaking giant ThyssenKrupp AG at a new coke plant built in Duisburg, Germany, in 2002.

The plant replaced a 100-year-old facility that ThyssenKrupp says had generated complaints from residents about pollution.

"Demands for the coke-oven plant's closure became more and more insistent," the company reports in a book about the works.

Duisburg is located in Germany's Essen region, which remains a steel center comparable to the Mon Valley during the 20th century.

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Engineers for ThyssenKrupp, which needed to continue making coke to fuel its nearby mills, designed a plant with fewer but larger ovens, which theoretically should provide fewer places for gases and soot to escape.

According to the company, environmental controls at the Schwelgern plant allow air pressure inside each coke oven to be individually adjusted. Each oven remains under negative pressure --- suction --- to prevent coke gas from leaking out.

Pressure is automatically lowered before the oven doors are open, which ThyssenKrupp claims "almost entirely" prevents emissions from the doors.

In addition, the hot coke is cooled with water, rather than by exposure to air, to meet strict German air quality standards.

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Although U.S. Steel and county Health Department officials both contend that the upgrades will dramatically reduce pollution from the Clairton Works, Bhaerman claims that pictures of the Schwelgern plant provided by German activists show "incredibly dirty emissions."

The county Health Department in March sent its own representatives to Duisburg to examine the coke plant, but Bhaerman argues their inspection was not extensive enough to spot any pattern of environmental problems.

"The Health Department really should have examined the application from that plant and their inspection records," he says. "It might be the best (technology) but there might also be problems they haven't examined without really going through all of the records of that plant."

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The Allegheny County Health Department is still accepting comments via email at aqpermits@achd.net. Details of the proposed upgrades can also be downloaded from the department's website. Click the links in the upper right-hand column under the headline, "Air Quality Permits in Public Comment."