Federal regulators have ordered the Alabama Department of Environmental Management to rework portions of the air quality permit it issued for Alabama Power’s Plant Barry near Mobile, siding with environmental groups that argued the permit failed to adequately address sulfur dioxide pollution from the coal- and gas-fired plant.
In an order signed June 14, an Environmental Protection Agency administrative court partially granted two of nine objections raised by a coalition of three environmental organizations challenging ADEM’s air pollution controls for sulfur dioxide, or SO2, under National Ambient Air Quality Standards. The ruling found ADEM needed to provide additional background and explanation regarding how it set SO2 limits for the plant, and directed the state agency to include reasonable precautions in the permit, such as water application to materials on site, to control fugitive dust generated by the plant’s use of coal.
ADEM now has 90 days to correct the deficiencies identified in the order.
The decision matters well beyond the paperwork it corrects. Title V operating permits are the master documents that govern how a major industrial facility may pollute — what it emits, how it monitors its emissions and what conditions it must meet to keep running. When an EPA review finds a state-issued permit deficient, the state agency must reopen it, and the corrections become enforceable terms. For the communities between the plant and downtown Mobile, the order also marked a rare instance of federal oversight overriding the state’s initial judgment on a contested air permit.
How the Challenge Began
Plant Barry first received an operating permit in 2003 and has been required to renew it every five years since. ADEM issued the plant’s most recent permit in February 2021.
The permit renewal opened the window for public comment, and it was there that the coalition made its case. The Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition, the Sierra Club and the Group Against Smog and Pollution jointly filed the complaint that led to the EPA’s review, arguing that monitoring showed SO2 emissions from Plant Barry exceeding federal standards.
The Sierra Club, the country’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization, has long tracked coal plant emissions across the Southeast. The Group Against Smog and Pollution, a Birmingham-based clean air nonprofit founded in 2010, built its practice on reviewing ADEM permits statewide, where its staff analysts frequently file detailed technical comments. The Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition brought the local dimension: an organization of residents and advocates working in the historically Black communities north of Mobile — including Africatown, the Plateau and Magazine Point — that sit closest to the industrial corridor along the Mobile River.
The formal objection process that followed is a routine but consequential part of the Clean Air Act. When a state agency issues a major-source air permit, the EPA reviews it, and any person may petition the agency to object within a 60-day window. If the EPA declines to object on some grounds, petitioners can press those issues further, and an administrative tribunal within the agency evaluates whether the state permit complies with federal law. That is the review that produced the June 14 order, in which the tribunal found merit in two of the nine objections the coalition raised and rejected the remainder.
Why Sulfur Dioxide Draws Scrutiny
The EPA has previously found that short-term exposure to sulfur dioxide can affect the lungs and heart, particularly in people with asthma. The pollutant forms when coal containing sulfur is burned, and it is a principal ingredient in the fine particulate haze that aggravates breathing problems during high-emission days. Children, older adults and people with existing respiratory disease are considered most at risk.
The federal government tightened its attention to short-term SO2 exposure substantially in 2010, when the EPA replaced its older 24-hour and annual sulfur dioxide standards with a one-hour standard designed to protect against brief peaks in concentration near large sources such as power plants. States were required to monitor or model air quality around their biggest SO2 emitters, and utilities across the Southeast spent the following decade installing scrubbers, retiring older coal units or switching boilers to natural gas to come into compliance. Plant Barry, which burns both coal and natural gas, sits within that regulatory landscape, and the arguments in the permit case turned on whether ADEM had done enough to demonstrate that the plant’s limits would keep peak concentrations below the health-based standard.
The groups also argued that the area affected by the plant’s emissions plume includes a disproportionately high share of Black and Indigenous residents who already face elevated rates of poverty and cancer. That framing placed the dispute within the environmental justice movement, which examines how industrial burdens concentrate in communities with the least political and economic power. The communities along the Mobile River north of downtown — anchored by Africatown, founded after the Civil War by survivors of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States — have carried the Paper Mill Road corridor’s industrial heritage for generations and have organized in recent years around air quality, stormwater and zoning concerns.
Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition President Ramsey Sprague called the EPA’s decision a matter of following the letter of the law under the Clean Air Act.
The coalition’s position throughout the process was that the technical record — monitoring data, modeling assumptions and the state’s own permitting files — supported stronger controls, and that federal law required the state to justify its choices rather than simply assert them. The order effectively agreed on that procedural point: ADEM was not required to adopt specific new emission limits outright, but it was required to explain, on a documented record, how the limits it chose protect air quality, and to add practical dust-control measures that the original permit had left out.
Water application for fugitive dust control is among the most standard precautions in coal-handling operations. Coal stockpiles, conveyor transfer points, unloading areas and ash handling all generate airborne particles that wind and equipment can carry beyond the plant fence line. Spraying or misting those materials keeps dust from becoming airborne in the first place, and permits for coal-fired plants commonly require it alongside covered conveyors, paved roads and sweepers. Writing that practice directly into Plant Barry’s permit converts a customary industry measure into an enforceable condition that residents can hold the plant to.
What Happens Next
The 90-day clock set by the order puts ADEM on notice to issue a revised permit or a legally adequate justification for its original terms. In practice, the state agency will draft the changes, place them out for public notice and comment again, and answer the deficiencies the federal review identified. The environmental groups that brought the challenge will have another opportunity to weigh in, and further review remains possible if they find the revision insufficient.
For Plant Barry itself, the order does not halt operations; the plant continues running under its existing permit while the corrections are made. But the decision adds conditions and scrutiny that will carry into every future renewal, and it establishes a record that the plant’s neighbors can cite. For ADEM, it is a reminder that its permitting judgments are subject to federal review, and that the explanations attached to a permit can matter as much as the numbers in it.
And for the communities north of Mobile, the ruling is a benchmark in a longer effort to make the industrial corridor’s air a matter of measured fact rather than complaint — a shift they have pursued through monitoring, petitions and, in this case, a federal process that required the state to show its work.
Plant Barry’s place in the regional power grid gives the permit fight its scale. The plant, formally the James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, sits in the Bucks community of north Mobile County along the Mobile River, where Alabama Power has generated electricity for the Mobile area since the mid-20th century. It remains one of the largest power plants in the state, burning coal in some units and natural gas in others, and its output underpins the electrical service for the city of Mobile, its suburbs and the industrial customers along the river. Any condition written into its operating permit therefore applies to one of the biggest fixed sources of air emissions in southwest Alabama.
Alabama Power is the largest subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Company, one of the country’s biggest electric utilities, and its Mobile County operations have gone through significant environmental upgrades over the past two decades — including scrubbers and other controls intended to reduce sulfur emissions. The utility maintains that its plants operate within the limits of their permits, and it participates in each renewal as a matter of course. The EPA’s order does not dispute the plant’s operation; it directs the state regulator to document and justify the terms it set.
ADEM, the state agency on the receiving end of the order, was created in 1982 and administers most federal environmental programs in Alabama under delegated authority — air permits, water permits and waste programs among them. With headquarters in Montgomery and a field office serving the southwest region, the agency issues and renews the permits that govern Alabama’s industrial base. Delegation carries an obligation: federal law requires the state’s permits to meet the same standards EPA would enforce itself, and the June 14 order is the mechanism by which that requirement is tested.
The coalition of groups that pressed the case reflected a newer model of environmental advocacy in Alabama, pairing a national organization’s resources with a state-level technical watchdog and a grassroots coalition rooted in the neighborhoods nearest the plant. Their petitions tend to be long, technical documents that quote the state’s own files back to it — the approach that produced the two sustained objections in this case, one demanding a fuller explanation of the SO2 limits and the other demanding enforceable dust controls.