Four years after JEA delivered mountains of power plant ash to road crews in Charlton County, Ga., the utility is spending millions to haul what's left of that to a landfill.

The county an hour from downtown Jacksonville has covered about 20 miles of dirt roads with ash that JEA markets as a construction material called EZBase.

But that work has stalled since Georgia's Department of Natural Resources started questioning whether EZBase could leach metals or other pollutants into soil and groundwater more than two years ago.

And it turns out that huge stacks of ash piled up in Georgia carried expiration dates.

"It actually has exceeded its shelf life," said Scott Schultz, who runs JEA's EZBase office. "It became so hard that ... it was no longer suitable."

Since July, JEA has spent about $3 million to take nearly all of one EZBase mountain in Folkston to the nearby Chesser Island Road Landfill, where it will stay permanently. JEA agreed to cover most of the removal costs because they were more than the county could cover.

A second stockpile in St. George is still waiting to be carried off by JEA. A contract from 2006 says the county bought 200,000 tons of EZBase at $2 per ton, but no one is sure how much is left in the two big stacks.

The excavation reflects the halting process JEA has faced in seeking regulators' approval to recycle ash from its Northside Generating Station to be used as road material.

"We're going to start over," said Jeff Cown, a land protection manager at the Georgia agency's Environmental Protection Division.

Cown's office and JEA have traded letters and proposals this summer for turning a mile of rural dirt road, probably in a forest, into a test site for a one-year study of whether an EZBase road will leach harmful amounts of metals or other substances into nearby soil and groundwater.

The Georgia agency doesn't see evidence of a problem, it's just trying to be careful, Cown said.

"Our goal is to make sure that any of the metals would not cause problems," he said.

A similar test road was designed in Baker County to answer questions from Florida's Department of Environmental Protection. Florida allows EZBase to be used under pavement or on top of dirt roads - but not around homes or standing water.

JEA could save millions of dollars in landfill bills if the ash can be marketed to more Georgia counties.

"Georgia is potentially a very good market for our product, especially with all the forest roads they have," Schultz said.

The ash can also be used as a base layer in asphalt-paved roads.

EZBase is a gritty gray powder made mostly of limestone and residue from petroleum coke, which itself is a byproduct of oil refineries recycled as fuel by JEA. It's ground up and partly moistened before its spread onto roadways.

Power plant ash is usually mostly coal, so JEA has to let environmental agencies take their time and study which of their usual rules about coal ash make sense with EZBase.

Schultz said the ash would normally develop a thin outer crust and stay usable for several years, but the mounds in Charlton County turned hard because they were compacted by trucks and heavy equipment driving across them. He said roads made after the EZBase was compacted didn't make good examples for state regulators to study, and JEA actually wanted the stockpiles removed.

Georgia transportation officials have vacillated in the past few years on whether they were comfortable with EZBase, Charlton County Administrator Steve Nance said.

He said his county is spreading dirt on the roads where ash has already been used and will wait for some consensus before using it again.

"The county reached a sort of informal standstill agreement," Nance said.

steve.patterson@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4263

link: http://jacksonville.com/news/florida/2010-09-15/story/jea-spends-mi...