Mark Nygard, a former mayor of Hazen and maintenance supervisor at Antelope Valley Station near Beulah, will take over a new construction project starting March 5.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative picked Nygard to supervise construction of two pollution control projects at its coal-fired Leland Olds power station at Stanton.

Nygard will manage construction of two scrubbers that will remove most of the sulfur dioxide emitted by both Leland Olds' units I and II.

The '60s- and '70s-era units were never scrubbed of SO2 because they were constructed before such controls were required by law.

However, pending air quality regulations require that SO2 pollution be cleaned up by 2013 to reduce what's called "regional haze."

After more than a year of planning, Basin's board of directors decided last month to spend more than $400 million on wet scrubber technology that uses limestone to capture the SO2 for pit disposal. The limestone will be supplied by a Basin subsidiary company in Montana.

Basin's spokesman Daryl Hill said construction should start this summer. Unit II's scrubber should be in operation by 2009 and Unit I's scrubber should be in operation by 2010.

The mammoth scrubber units will require hundreds of specialized laborers. They will start by building foundations and chimney substructure to support the specialized scrubber equipment that should capture 90 percent of the units' SO2 output of 50,000 tons a year.

Nygard is a native of Williston and worked at the Antelope Valley Station since 1980, during its construction, and since it went into commercial operation in 1984.

He graduated from Western Technical College, Denver, with a degree in electro-mechanical design. Prior to joining Basin, he was involved in construction management on power plant construction projects in Virginia, Colorado and North Dakota, including the second unit at Leland Olds.Station.