ASHTABULA TOWNSHIP — Ashtabula County Port Authority members, elected officials and representatives of industries that depend upon the authority’s Plant C for raw water pitched their case for a $1.5 million federal grant to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Tuesday morning.

Brown visited the former FirstEnergy plant, along with Donald Kathan, area director for the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA), and Lee Shirely, the administration’s representative for Ohio and Indiana. The port authority applied for the $1.5 million grant from EDA earlier this year to address issues with the pumps and lines inside the plant and the lines used to deliver the raw water to the chemical industries.

Port Authority Chairman John Palo said the meeting came together in a matter of a week after the authority contacted Max Blachman, Brown’s Northeast Ohio regional representative. Brown has a special connection to Plant C: His wife’s father, Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, worked there.

“I understand how important it is,” said Brown, who never had been in the plant. “We love this great resource (Lake Erie). It is important we use this resource responsibly.”

Two lines, each 9 feet in diameter, draw water into the plant from Lake Erie. Yet only a small portion of the plant’s capacity, 157 million gallons per day, is being utilized. Local officials pitched the extra capacity as potentially drawing more industry to the area. The focus, however, was retaining the 800 good-paying industrial jobs that hinge on the plant’s ability to deliver about 20 million gallons of water a day reliably and consistently.

Scott Strayer, site director of the Ashtabula Cristal Global plant, said Cristal is well positioned for growth as the world’s No. 2 supplier of titanium dioxide, a fundamental industrial product. Growth at the Ashtabula location could mean “hundreds of millions of dollars” in new investment, as well as new jobs.

“We have an opportunity to grow,” Strayer said. “The question is where are we are going to get cost-effective power, reliable power and reliable water from?”

Plant C, as it stands, is not all that reliable, however. It’s infrastructure is 60 years old.

“Last year (2009), we spent $250,000 in ongoing repairs,” Palo said after the meeting. The industries that draw the water from system are footing the bill for those repairs.

Port Authority members worry that one of the 36-inch pipes that carry the water through the plant will burst and, in a worst-case scenario, flood the intake and pumping room, which is below lake level. That would shut down the plant and those industries that depend upon it: Praxair, Cristal, ASHTA Chemicals, Detrex and several others.

In 2008, these industries experienced a scaled-down version of a Plant C failure when power to the plant went down. Stayer said the incident cost Cristal more than $3 million.

“If we were to have a significant failure at this site, we’re probably going to be down in excess of a month,” he said.

Representatives of Johnson Controls also pitched that company’s plan to revitalize the plant’s power-generating capabilities using biomass fuel. Mark Havens and Keith Reller of Johnson said converting just one of the four 40-megawatt generators to run on steam generated by biomass could pump $14 million annually into the county’s agricultural community and another $10 million in logistics. Overall, the economic impact could be $70 million annually.

Tony Logan, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said legislation has been passed that would allow farmers of biomass, like switch grass, to receive a subsidy of up to 50 percent on their crops.

Johnson Controls is putting together an energy road show with the U.S. Department of Energy and elected officials for next month in hopes of landing a huge federal grant to convert Plant C to biomass fuel. The event is tentatively planned for Oct. 12.

“It could be a real change around here, there is no question about it,” Havens said of converting the plant.

Kathan, area EDA director, said the regional office is reviewing the port authority’s application for the $1.5 million grant. He said the office has exhausted its 2010 grant budget and has not received a budget for fiscal year 2011, which begins Oct. 1.

“It’s budget-driven,” Kathan said of the competitive grants. “The application is being processed in the Chicago regional office, and no decision has been made yet.”