What You Actually Breathe: Putting Our Emissions in Perspective
We hear the concerns. “What’s coming out of those stacks?” It’s a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer — not corporate jargon. So here’s a comparison using something in most of our kitchens.
A familiar comparison.
Most of us cook dinner on a gas stove several times a week without giving it a second thought — and there’s no reason we should. It’s one of the most ordinary activities in daily life.
But it does produce combustion byproducts. When natural gas burns on a stovetop, small amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and fine particles enter your kitchen air. No one worries about it because the quantities are tiny and the exposure is brief. It’s just cooking.
What makes that useful as a yardstick is this: the amount of those same pollutants that would reach your home from Ridgeline is a small fraction of what you already experience making dinner. If cooking supper has never concerned you, our facility — with industrial-grade pollution controls and the entire open atmosphere between us — shouldn’t either. The nearest structures to Ridgeline are 1.3 miles away, and because this is a rural area with a couple of small towns nearby, the vast majority of residents are even further than that.
Here’s how the math works.
The numbers, side by side.
These are real concentrations — what would actually reach your lungs in each scenario. Our figures use the maximum limits from our legally binding West Virginia air permit (R13-3713). We assume we emit at the limit, not below it.
Nitrogen Oxides (NOx)
A normal byproduct of any natural gas combustion, including your furnace and water heater.
Carbon Monoxide (CO)
Present in trace amounts wherever natural gas burns — stoves, furnaces, fireplaces.
Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5)
Microscopic particles produced whenever food meets heat. Sometimes called “PM 2.5” or “P2.5” in conversation.
What about range hoods? Studies show only about a third of households regularly turn on their range hood while cooking — and many installed hoods simply recirculate air through a filter rather than venting it outside. Even a properly vented hood running on high only cuts these concentrations by roughly half to two-thirds. That still leaves kitchen levels many times higher than what Ridgeline would contribute at any distance.
How small is PM2.5, exactly?
A PM2.5 particle is about 1/30th the width of a single human hair.
Width
Particle
Cooking produces PM2.5 whenever oils or fats meet heat — it’s completely normal and happens in every kitchen. Ridgeline burns purified natural gas under high-efficiency turbine conditions with no grease, no food, and no open-air flame, so it produces far less particulate matter to begin with — and what little it does produce disperses across the open atmosphere long before reaching any home.
“But the facility runs 24 hours a day.”
We hear this one a lot, and it’s a fair point. Here’s why continuous operation doesn’t change the math.
The key difference isn’t duration — it’s dilution.
A home has a fixed air volume of roughly 340 m³. When you cook, the combustion byproducts stay in that enclosed space with you. It’s a small, still box of air. Perfectly normal — and perfectly manageable — but concentrated.
Our exhaust leaves a tall stack at around 180°F with strong upward momentum. It rises, spreads, and mixes into a moving atmospheric reservoir of billions of cubic meters. By the time it reaches the nearest home — 1.3 miles away, with most neighbors even further — the concentration has dropped to a tiny fraction of a part per billion — around the clock.
Here’s the bottom line: the everyday act of cooking supper on a gas stove exposes you to more combustion byproducts than Ridgeline would add to your air over an entire 24-hour day. Nobody thinks twice about cooking, and the science says they’re right not to. Our contribution to your air is a sliver of even that.
How we’re held accountable.
We don’t ask Tucker County to take our word for it. Our WVDEP construction permit is a legally binding document with enforceable limits. Here’s what it requires of us:
Catalyst temperatures, fuel flow rates, and ammonia injection rates are tracked every hour, around the clock — not spot-checked occasionally.
Within 180 days of startup, formal performance tests — which the state has the right to witness — will verify our NOx, SO2, CO, and formaldehyde levels against the law.
We burn clean natural gas. Our limited backup diesel is ultra-low sulfur — capped at 15 parts per million — to prevent sulfur dioxide buildup.
Our permit caps emissions at 30.80 lbs/hr of NOx, 6.30 lbs/hr of CO, and 23.30 lbs/hr of PM. These are legal limits, not suggestions.
What’s actually in the exhaust system.
Before any exhaust reaches the sky, it passes through two stages of industrial cleanup inside our Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG):
Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) injects an aqueous solution over a catalyst bed that converts nitrogen oxides into two things: ordinary nitrogen (78% of the air you’re breathing right now) and water vapor.
CO Oxidation Catalyst works the same way the catalytic converter on your truck or car works — it chemically breaks down carbon monoxide molecules before they ever leave the system.
The combined effect is that the exhaust leaving our stacks has already been scrubbed down to parts-per-million concentrations. Then atmospheric dispersion does the rest.
You can review our complete air quality permit yourself. It’s on file with the West Virginia Division of Air Quality as Permit R13-3713.