I’m don’t mean these are cooling towers, but these could be “main steam” atmosphereic vent stacks. Power plants will occasionly dump “main steam” into the air (instead of the power turbine) to quickly cool the plant (which means they are shutting it done from some reason).

The reason I inclined to believe it’s steam (near my home) is because it’s white and it totally dissipates within a few hundred feet from the stack, whereas smoke (at least this thick) would travel quite a bit until it dissipates. Unless this picture was taken in China or Russia, no coal or oil power plant wouldn’t be allowed to operate with this much smoke coming from it (one because the surrounding population wouldn’t stand for it and, two, coal plants normally burn so hot, very little smoke is made, and then scrubbers gets much that is left).