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Phosphate's Significance in Tampa Bay

While Peace River advocates focus on mining, a fertilizer plant has monopolized attention in Tampa Bay.

A weary bayfront community is still recovering from 2001, when Mulberry Phosphates filed bankruptcy and skipped town, leaving behind a fertilizer plant at Piney Point and a gypsum stack brewing with more than a billion gallons of wastewater.

The debacle at Piney Point, and ongoing efforts to offload the wastewater stored in its stack so the facility can be permanently closed, has thrust one part of the industry into the public spotlight while another largely escapes notice.

Few Hillsborough County residents are aware of activities in the county's rural Southeast corner, where the world's largest phosphate-producing mine churns out rock.

The irony isn't lost on industry folks, who bristle at the bad publicity one bad apple can bring, while taking pride in the products they produce, their economic contribution and environmental ethic.

That pride is not without justification. In Hillsborough County, the phosphate industry and related shipping concerns pump billions of dollars into the local economy. Phosphate - related products are the #1 export out of the Port of Tampa, and fuel U.S. dominance in world trade of ammonium phosphate. By providing American farmers with 75% of their fertilizer needs, Florida phosphate is a chief reason why food prices in this country remain relatively low, for now.

"People forget what it means to be able to go down to the store and get a loaf of bread for a buck - they forget how that's possible," says industry consultant and former CF Industries employee Craig Kovach.

Kingpin Mosaic, which dominates the Florida and Tampa Bay markets, is generally considered to be a good and environmentally responsible neighbor - despite a dike breach last year during hurricane season that sent 65 million gallons of acidic wastewater into Tampa Bay.

A far more damaging spill by Mulberry Phosphates into the Alafia River in 1997 killed more than a million fish. Past transgressions, and the visibility of stacks that loom large on an otherwise pancake-flat horizon, are a key reason phosphate remains in the public eye.

After Mulberry left town in 2001, Cargill (now Mosaic) stepped in with an offer to help close its gypsum stacks, a move that shaved an estimated $20 million off the state's cleanup tab. Mosaic also has invested considerable money and sweat equity into establishing and enhancing bird rookeries near its Riverview facility, and funded habitat restoration along the bay.

Mining in the Tampa Bay region occurs in the upper watersheds of the Alafia, Little Manatee and Manatee rivers. Overall contributions to nitrogen loadings in the bay from phosphate operations appear to be relatively minor, except in the Alafia basin, where they are responsible for an estimated 13% of the nitrogen load (averaged for the period 1999-2003). Runoff from some port-side fertilizer loading facilities was a problem in the 1990s, until consent orders prompted their cleanup.

About 55,000 acres in Hillsborough County are associated with phosphate mining. Mining's active and reclaimed lands in Manatee County, by comparison, total around 16,000 acres, with several thousand additional acres slated for mining.

Manatee in the middle

Manatee County's history with phosphate dates back to the 1960s, when a then largely rural county, eager for growth, wooed Borden Chemical to become its first major port tenant.

"The plant was plagued with problems from day one," says Rob Brown, senior administrator of the county environmental management department created to keep tabs on the facility. Once the plant was approved, long before regulatory oversight was established, all of a sudden there were huge stacks and uncontrolled releases, Brown adds.

Multiple owners and decades later, the Piney Point plant fell into the hands of Mulberry Corporation for one last, infamous hurrah. "I don't think you'll ever see another fertilizer processing plant in Manatee County," says Brown.

Mining is another matter. They treat it like any other development, and understand that the industry has certain vested rights. "We had some bad actors in the early years," says Manatee County Commissioner Pat Glass, "but we're beyond the dark ages. One of the ways you protect yourself is to put together the kind of rules that spell out how it will be done," she adds, stressing that the county's posture has been to hold the industry accountable rather than fight its presence.

"I think the industry's gone a long way to improve its image, and we've all grown up a lot in Florida," said Glass, who chairs the Peace River/Manasota Regional Water Supply Authority. "There is a greater realization that water is not a renewable resource and that we need to preserve those resources. But we can manage our natural resources with careful planning and regulation, and proceed to do what government should do - be good stewards."

Glass points to the region's aquifer storage and recovery system, which captures excess water in rainy months and stores it for use during dry periods. During an extended drought in 2000-2001, the ASR supplied water for 200 days when withdrawals from the Peace River had to be discontinued to support minimum flows. Current ASR storage capacity is at 6.5 billion gallons; at present demand and supply levels, ASR could furnish water for more than a year.

The county recently adopted a new mining ordinance, strengthening radiation and reclamation standards. Brown says it is probably the most stringent local ordinance in the state. The key concern is future development of former mine lands where there is low-level background radiation.

Brown also lauds the county's effort to work with the industry to conserve former mining parcels. "If (the industry) is going to spend millions to restore the land, the board wisely is getting concessions for conservation easements and land grants."

That's a bonus in a county growing by leaps and bounds, sprouting subdivisions on almost every available corner.

"It's a scary thing," says Brown, "but in 50 years some of the former mined lands may be the only open sites we have in Manatee County."

Hard-Earned Lessons From Piney Point

Managers at Piney Point are finally comfortable when it rains.

That wasn't the case in 2001, when a tropical storm dumped 12 inches of rain on the site, forcing the release of 10 million gallons of partially treated wastewater into Bishop Harbor. Carrying three times the annual nutrient budget for the pristine but poorly circulating estuary, the release contibuted to a significant algae bloom.

Four years, over 1.6 billion gallons of wastewater and more than $160 million later, the gyp stacks at Piney Point can accommodate more than 50 inches of rainfall, far worse than even a worst-case scenario.

And the lessons learned at Piney Point will hopefully help manage water at other phosphogypsum stacks, adds John Coates, a program administrator with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. "It's the first large-scale treatment of process water using reverse osmosis and I hope we can deploy the technology at other sites."

DEP has since instituted more stringent financial assurance rules for phosphate companies, and proposed rules that require operators to better plan for emergencies.

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