National coal capital fears for its survival

When Toríbio Castro Filho, 79, arrived in Candiota (RS) in 1964, the place was just a small village for workers in a thermal plant opened three years earlier to take advantage of the region’s coal reserves.

Candiota was still a district of Bagé and attracted workers from the region to the plant and mine that supplied the fuel. “What we had here was just work. Nobody stayed put”, he jokes, who is from Pelotas.

Toríbio married a worker in the cooperative linked to the mill and his two children are now workers in the sector. Her daughter-in-law, her father and a nephew too. “The plant has always given us good conditions and I decided to follow the path”, says one of the children, Alex Madruga Castro, 47.

Stories like the one about Toribio’s family are common in the city: in Candiota, anyone who doesn’t work in this industry has a relative in it. With two mines and two plants in operation, the city of just under 10,000 people has around 10,000 jobs linked to coal, many of them occupied by people from the region.

It is an industry that, confirming Alex’s perception, guarantees good living conditions: according to the latest data from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), formal workers in Candiota had in 2019 the third highest average salary in the country: 5, 3 minimum wages.

With the increased pressure against fossil fuels, however, the population lives with great apprehension about the future. “If these plants close, it is better for everyone to pack their bags and leave”, summarizes Adão Marques Teixeira, owner of a restaurant.

In the 60 years after the opening of the first plant, the city has grown, but it still looks like a workers’ village. Its four districts are generally made up of standardized one-storey houses, which were built over time to receive workers.

Although it is home to the newest coal-fired thermal in the country, Pampa Sul, which opened in 2018, the city is already feeling the effects of the environmental siege against fuel. In recent years, two generating machines at the Candiota plant were stopped for not meeting the requirements for pollutant emissions.

More modern, Candiota’s third generating machine has an energy supply contract only until 2024. With the end, in 2027, of the subsidy for the purchase of coal, it will have difficulties to compete in new auctions.

Pampa Sul, inaugurated in 2018, has a contract until 2043, when it will depend on new auctions. Without the plants, the municipality’s mines have no reason to operate, since the transport of Brazilian coal is made impossible by the high content of ash. “Then, huh, there’s no more Candiota. It’s over,” says Alex.

Operator of the Candiota plant, the subsidiary of Eletrobras CGT Eletrosul defends that the project complies with all the pollutant gas emission limits established in the environmental licensing and that the local impact is small.

A study carried out by EPE (Energy Research Company) in 2014 and republished in 2018 indicates that Candiota “has favorable weather conditions for the dispersion of pollutants”, making the construction of new plants in the region viable.

Although the city ranks 26th in the Brazilian ranking of greenhouse gas emissions, discounting emissions from deforestation, long-time residents such as Toríbio’s family claim they have lived through worse days.

Toribio remembers an amateur soccer championship that was paralyzed by excessive soot in the air. “We used to take ash from the house in the bucket”, completes his wife, Ana Anita Madruga Castro, 76.

Today, the sector defends, new technologies have reduced the emission of soot and toxic elements such as sulfur. Small eucalyptus groves serve as natural barriers to prevent the spread of soot generated by crushing coal at the Candiota plant.

The mine recently opened by mining company Copelmi on the other side of town to supply the Pampa Sul plant, however, is a source of complaints.

“Since the plant started operating, this dust has been coming here,” says rural worker Elmo Ribeiro Rodrigues, 60, who lives near the coal crushing unit. “And there are nights that you can’t sleep, it’s a drumbeat that comes from there.”

Owner of a dairy herd, Aírton Luiz Duarte, 53, says that after the unit began operations in 2018, cases of abortions began to occur with the animals.

“There are cows there that have not given birth for more than a year”, says he, who has lived in the region for 28 years and says that he has also recently noticed problems in the teething of cattle, presumably due to eating pasture with ashes.

The mine’s operations manager, Adolfo Carvalho, admits that the evolution of the exploration of the deposit had initially unexpected local impacts and promised Aírton a natural barrier with trees around his property.

Trees have also been planted around the coal crushing unit, which will also receive a screen called a “wind fence”, which controls the wind speed and contains the spread of dust.

The mine was idle until the start of operations at Pampa Sul. Today, with a production capacity of between 2.8 and 3 million tons per year, it supplies the two plants operating in the city. According to EPE, the municipality’s coal reserves would guarantee the operation of 15 plants for 25 years.

“We are aware that the energy transition will come, but we need to give it some time”, says the city’s mayor, Luiz Carlos Folador (MDB), arguing that the industry must be maintained until cleaner alternatives for the use of coal are viable.

Among them, he says, is the transformation of coal into gas or fuel and the production of fertilizers or methanol from the mineral. “The technology evolves so that we can use coal for a purpose other than generating energy”, he says.

But to survive until then, the activity depends on subsidies, admits the sector, which this month managed to pass a law in Congress determining the mandatory contracting of coal-fired thermal plants in Santa Catarina until 2040.

“These short-term movements, in my view, do not resist the economy”, says the coordinator of the Energy Portfolio of the ICS (Instituto Clima e Sociedade), Roberto Kishinami. “Today, renewables are cheaper, more competitive and offer energy security.”