The alternative fuel industry is heating up. It is a very exciting time to be in the energy business, especially when it comes to transportation. Celebrating of the milestone 75th Clean Cities coalition and kick off of the new Federal Alternative Fuel Vehicle (AFV) USER Program is occurring in cities across the country. Clean Energy for the 21st Century and the events that are happening during Energy Awareness Month are covered in this issue. Spotlighted are niche markets; several airports across the country are successfully incorporating alternative fuels into their daily routines.

Auxein Corporation is demonstrating for commercial use an organic acid phytochelate, derived from what would otherwise be a discarded portion of sugar cane, that could increase the domestic sugar industry's profit margin from near zero to 7%. Along with helping a struggling industry, the phytochelate will bring substantial improvements to crop and tree production and greatly reduce the environmental threat posed by nitrogen-based fertilizers. Currently, the amount of fertilizer used produces harmful levels of run-off that contaminates ground water with unwanted nitrogen. By utilizing organic acid phytochelates, which assist plant growth by unlocking minerals stored in soil, fertilizer use can be dramatically reduced. This would improve crop yields, remove environmental threats to ground water, and cut fertilizer costs by as much as 50%.

Reynolds Metals Company (RMC), with assistance from a NICE{sup 3} grant, is developing for commercialization a closed-loop control process that greatly reduces chlorine emissions and increases plant efficiency while maintaining metal quality. The process still utilizes chlorine to remove impurities during aluminum processing, but is more effective than current methods. With the new technology chlorine in the stack is monitored and input chlorine is adjusted continuously. This optimization of chlorine use results in substantially less waste because less chlorine has to be bought or produced by aluminum manufacturers. This innovation is a significant improvement over conventional aluminum treatments, in which chlorine is injected in a more costly and wasteful manner. By the year 2010, the new technology has the potential to reduce the energy it takes to create chlorine by 8.4 billion Btu per year and to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 1,377 tons per year.

Fact sheet on curing aluminum can coatings written for the NICE3 Program. Coors Brewing Company has been using ultraviolet (UV) light curing technology on its aluminum beverage cans for 25 years. The company is now looking to share its cost-saving technology with other aluminum can producers. Traditional curing methods for creating external decorations on cans rely on convective-heat ovens to cure ink and over-varnish coatings. These thermal-curing methods require large amounts of energy and money, and can have unintended environmental impacts. Coors' technique uses coating materials that cure when exposed to UV light, thereby eliminating the expensive heat treatments used by conventional coating methods. Additionally, the UV-coating process creates much lower emissions and a smaller pollution waste stream than rival thermal processes because it requires much less solvent than thermal processes. This technology can be used not only in the aluminum can industry, but in the automotive, airline, wood, paper, and plastics industries, as well.

Fact sheet on manufacturing filler during paper manufacturing written for the NICE3 Program. With its new fiber loading process, Voith Sulzer, Inc., is greatly improving the efficiency of paper production and recycling. Fiber loading produces precipitated calcium carbonate (PCC) filler in the pulp recycling process at costs below conventional means. Fiber loading allows papermakers to use as much filler, like PCC, as possible because it costs 80% less than fiber. In addition, increased filler and fines retention due to fiber loading reduces the quantity of greenhouse gas emissions, deinking sludge, and other waste while substantially lowering energy costs. Currently, the most efficient way to produce PCC as filler is to make it in a satellite plant adjacent to a paper mill. Satellite plants exist near large scale paper mills (producing 700 tons per day) because the demand at large mills justifies building a costly ($15 million, average) satellite plant. This new fiber loading process combines the PCC manufacturing technology used in a satellite plant with the pulp processing operations of a paper mill. It is 33% less expensive to augment an existing paper mill with fiber loading technology than to build a satellite plant for the same purpose. This technology …

Fact sheet on an analysis system for dyebath processes in the carpet manufacturing industry written for the NICE3 Program. The Georgia Institute of Technology (G.I.T.) has developed an effective automated dyebath analysis and reuse system that improves the energy, environmental, and economic performance of dyehouse batch operations. The new system enables dyeing solutions to be accurately monitored and adjusted for reuse. According to industry estimates, 160 pounds of water are used to produce each pound of textile product. The current wasteful batch dyeing process requires all water and residual chemicals, as well as the energy required to heat the mixture for dyeing, to be dumped after one application. Spent dyebaths can only be reused after they are sampled, analyzed, and reconstituted, a process requiring labor and expertise that are unavailable in the dyehouses. Therefore, successful commercial reuse depends on an automated analysis system that precisely analyzes dyebath samples in real-time and provides for reconstitution and reuse. If fully implemented throughout the carpet industry, this innovation is expected to reduce energy consumption by 3.6 trillion Btu/year. Waste and cost savings will also be substantial. Though this project was developed for nylon carpet dyeing, the technology holds promise for widespread implementation in …

Energy Concepts has developed an absorption-augmented system as a cost-effective means of achieving more cooling capacity with a substantial reduction in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for industrial refrigeration. It cuts fuel consumption by 30% by combining an internal combustion engine with a mechanical compression refrigeration system and an absorption refrigeration system. The absorption system is powered by engine waste heat. Conventional industrial refrigeration uses mechanical vapor compression, powered by electric motors, which results in higher energy costs. By the year 2010, the new system could cut fuel consumption by 19 trillion Btu and greenhouse emissions by more than 1 million tons per year.

NICE3 and the Philip Services Corporation are cost-sharing a demonstration project to decoat metal using indirect-fired controlled-atmosphere (IDEX) kilns, which can both process solid organics such as rubber and plastics, and minimize dust formation and emission of volatile organic compounds. The publication explains how this cost-effective, two-step system operates.

In another Office of Industrial Technologies Motor Challenge Success Story, Alcoa (formerly Alumax) aluminum reduced annual energy consumption by 12% and reduced both maintenance and noise levels. Order this fact sheet now to learn how your company can both increase energy efficiency and decrease pollution.

As this NICE3 publication details, the objective of this project is to commercialize the process technology to eliminate all landfill waste associated with black dross and saltcake generated from aluminum recycling in the United States.

This fact sheet reveals how the use of reflective aluminum chips on rooftops cuts down significantly on heat absorption, thus decreasing the need for air conditioning. The benefits, including energy savings that could reach the equivalent of 1.3 million barrels of oil annually for approximately 100,000 warehouses, are substantial.

A new energy- and cost-efficient process has been developed to recycle thermoplastic foams and films. Order the fact sheet to read about this exciting new technology.

By combining an integrated system with a gas turbine, coal-fired air turbine cycle technology can produce energy at an efficiency rate of over 40%, with capital and operating costs below those of competing conventional systems. Read this fact sheet to discover the additional benefits of this exciting new technology.

The new acoustic sensor, designed as a humidity-control system for the paper and textile industries, can both eliminate overdrying and improve product quality by measuring humidity precisely. This new fact sheet explains how the process works.

Order this fact sheet now to learn how replacing the ''closed drum'' debarking technology method used in the forest industry with the ''open drum'' method saves time and production costs, and increases the economic value of wood products by inflicting less damage on logs so that they can be used for high-value economic products.

Order this fact sheet to read about the innovative new system, which can be used in a variety of industries in addition to forest products, including agriculture, chemical processing, brewing and distilling, animal products, and horticulture.

With the help of the U.S. Department of Energy's Inventions and Innovations Program, industry is developing a revolutionary new process for drying paper that could save as much as nine million barrels of crude oil annually in the United States. Read this informative new fact sheet to learn more about this money-saving invention.

As detailed in the fact sheet, this new glass fiber-producing process can yield fibers that are more uniform in diameter, break less easily, and be produced more economically.

Compared to conventional gas-fired furnaces, the new rotary electric furnace will increase energy efficiency while significantly reducing air emissions, product turnaround time, and labor costs. As this informative new fact sheet explains, the thousand different types of glass optical blanks produced for the photonics industry are used for lasers, telescopes, cameras, lights, and many other products.

This fact sheet provides the details of the operation of wet thermal oxidation, which can handle waste destined for landfills in a continuous, enclosed process with much lower pollution and higher efficiency than conventional ''mass burn'' incinerators. As the fact sheet explains, the process has the potential to both reduce the $30 billion per year cost of landfilling MSW, and save a million barrels of oil per day in the bargain.

As this fact sheet explains, there are several potential uses for this new process to recover and reuse sulfur dioxide for metalcasting operations. Employing this process will reduce energy consumption, eliminate the need for caustic effluent, and pay back in less than one year.

Decreased energy requirements, air emissions, production time, and operating costs are some of the benefits that will accrue to the metalcasting industry as result of this new die casting technique. This fact sheet provides the details of this exciting new process for fabricating copper motor rotors.

A more efficient method has been created to filter cast molten metal for impurities. Read about the resulting energy and money savings that can accrue to many different industries from the use of this exciting new technology.

By eliminating the need to process coal through a conventional wet slurry removal process, these innovative vibrating beds save energy and time. This invention was developed to used in coal and minerals processing sectors of mining. However, it has potential applications to many other processing steps where fluidized beds are used, such as in food processing and energy production