COAL COUNTRY - Towns in Coal Country hope they have enough room for the hundreds of workers who will be pulling in to build a pair of air pollution scrubbers at the Leland Olds power plant in Stanton.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative will spend $410 million to build pollution control equipment to remove most of the sulfur dioxide being emitted at its two coal-fired electrical units built three decades ago alongside the Missouri River.

The company has to remove the pollutant to meet federal air quality standards that will be enforced by 2012. Neither unit is scrubbed now and was grandfathered in when newer plants were required to scrub out SO2.

Company representatives have been meeting with Mercer County officials this month to keep them up to speed on the work force that will be pulling into the county and the area.

Curt Pearson, who manages Basin's construction projects, said about 75 workers will be on the job site this summer, when subsurface foundation and structural support work get going.

That number will take a sharp upswing next summer, when 300 to 400 workers will be called in for full-bore construction.

That's a lot of workers in the area. However, it's not more than come in for plant maintenance outages, rotated among the six power plants in Coal Country to ensure enough workers and generally scheduled in the spring and fall when power needs drop off. Outages last from four to six weeks, generally.

What's different for this work is the duration, Pearson said.

The scrubber construction will extend into 2010.

Plans are to bring the Unit II scrubber on line in 2009 and the Unit I - smaller and older unit - on line in 2010.

Pearson said the work will require a full complement of skilled workers from welders to steel workers. He expects many will already live in Coal Country or will commute from Minot and Bismarck.

Pearson said Basin has a union labor agreement with the local building trades for the work directly related to this project, but both union and nonunion contractors can bid on indirect construction activities.

Beulah City Planner John Phillips said news of such a massive construction project is always positive.

Phillips said he expects workers to look for housing in the communities because the price of gas would discourage commuting and because an increasing number of trade workers who come now for other plant work are from out of state.

He said Beulah's rental units generally run about 90 to 95 percent occupancy and even the RV park in town is filling up.

Besides construction workers, Pearson said the project will eventually result in an additional 20 more permanent employees at Leland Olds to operate the scrubbers.

One of the more dramatic pieces of the project will be a new 600-foot chimney with a double flue - one from each unit - that will be 100 feet higher than the stack on site.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)