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A compa­ny that set out three years ago to build wood-burning biomass power plants in Scottsburg and Milltown has no­ti­fied Indiana envi­ron­mental reg­ulators that it in­tends to drop its plans.

Lib­erty Green Re­new­ables LLC, a compa­ny formed by two Harri­son County busi­ness­men with partners in Houston, asked the Indiana De­part­ment of Envi­ron­mental Man­age­ment this month to revoke two state-issued emis­sions per­mits, ef­fectively pulling the projects off the table.

While the deci­sion didn't come as a complete surprise to members of cit­i­zens groups who had waged aggressive grass­roots campaigns against the biomass plans, orga­nizers said they were re­lieved they won't have the plants in their communities.

"The effort by the concerned cit­i­zens in both counties reflected courage, intelligence, ded­ication and persis­tence and showed their will­ingness to make person­al sac­ri­fices to pro­tect the health of their chil­dren and familes," said Bloom­ington lawyer Mick Harri­son, who rep­resented plant oppo­nents in appealing the state per­mits.

"It's been a long jour­ney. ... It took so much work by so many people," said CaraBeth Jones, who led the Concerned Cit­i­zens of Crawford County, a group that feared po­tential air and wa­ter pollution as well as truck traff­ic if the plants were built.

Paula Chirhart, a spokeswoman for Macquar­ie LLC, the par­ent of Lib­erty Green, dec­lined to com­ment in an email Wednesday.

Robert Elstro, a spokesman for the state envi­ron­mental de­part­ment, said the compa­ny offered no ex­pla­nation in ask­ing for the per­mits to be revoked. The agency have an es­ti­mate of the cost as­sociated with hiring en­g­i­neering consultants to pre­pare and submit extensive technical doc­u­ments required for the air per­mit and a sep­a­rate wa­ter-quality per­mit.

Requests to pull out of a project af­ter such time and expense are un­usu­al, but not un­heard of, Elstro said.

One prob­lem for any biomass devel­op­er now is that the mar­ket de­mand for such re­new­able energy has waned in re­cent months because the price of nat­ural gas has plumme­ted and coal re­mains an inexpensive source of fu­el in the Midwest.

Lib­erty Green had proposed building $100 million, 32-megawatt power stations that would burn logging and milling waste, generating wholesale electrical power for sale to utility retail­ers in the region.

The Milltown plant was slated for a 100-acre site near the inter­section of Ind. 66 and Ind. 64, while Lib­erty Green had tak­en options on prop­erty south of Scottsburg's city lim­its bor­dering Inter­state 65.

An­oth­er biomass propos­al re­mains under review in Jasper, where of­ficials are consid­ering a con­tract with an Atlanta-based compa­ny.

Al­though Crawford cit­i­zens and some elected leaders raised questions about the project, Scottsburg Mayor Bill Graham and oth­er eco­nom­ic-devel­op­ment boost­ers were more receptive.

Last year, af­ter state of­ficials or­dered more work on per­mit applications for Lib­erty's plans to disburse wastew­a­ter on cro­p­land be­side the Milltown plant, Lib­erty's partners an­nounced they would delay the Milltown project and put Scottsburg on the front burner. The compa­ny also merged with Aus­tralia-based Macquaire, an international energy mar­keting and trading compa­ny.

It was es­ti­mated that each plant would cre­ate 20 to 30 jobs, with more indi­rect jobs com­ing from trucking loads of fu­el to the sites.

The compa­ny's spokesman at the time, Terry Naulty of Elizabeth, said then that the plants would generate thou­sands of dollars in annual payroll and prop­erty taxes and cre­ate long-term as­sets for Scott and Crawford counties.

But oppo­nents pressured local of­ficials to block the effort. They also packed public meetings, dis­tributed yard signs and convinced deep-pocketed donors to pay for TV ads to raise awareness about the projects.

The groups also had pending appeals of the two air per­mits, which they now expect to drop, said Jones, of the Crawford group.

Karyn Moskowitz, a Louisville-based envi­ron­mental activist who was part of the le­gal team, said the cit­i­zens groups did the community a big ser­vice.

"It's a huge victory for ev­eryone in the region, especially the small chil­dren who suffer from asthma and oth­er envi­ron­mental illnesses," she said.