Word: otisca
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...dream had not yet come true. Otisca began to feel the constraints of a business that had grown complicated as it sought to serve many masters. Several dozen employees, burgeoning paperwork, outside investors with varying and not always complementary interests, government requirements -- all conspired to drain the fun out of it. More troubling were the shifts in market forces beyond the company's control. By the spring of 1986, world oil prices had dropped below $15 per bbl. The impetus to seek out alternative fuels withered. Florida Power & Light cut a deal with surrounding Southern utilities to buy inexpensive power...
Then, in 1988, Otisca won a Clean Coal matching grant from doe -- $7.1 million, provided that a third of the money come from the private sector. The grant was to pay for the reconfiguration of several Syracuse-area boilers to use Otisca Fuel...
...status quo in the utility business is tough to shake. "A lot of people don't want to be the first to get their toes in the water," observes William Speicher, a Zurn executive who sits on Otisca's board. Concurs Ted Rosiak, a project manager with Duke Fluor Daniels: "Utilities tend to be very conservative and try not to take a lot of risks." In fact, risk aversion in the utility business is not just a tendency, it has been a way of life. Since 1935 most of the power suppliers in the U.S. had operated a gridwork...
...When Otisca's preferred stockholders, the five companies that had invested $8 million in the company, were asked to pony up the private portion of the doe matching grant, they bailed out. GE, the largest and most influential of the five, was more interested in the locomotive business, not in fixed boilers, which were the concern of the particular Energy Department office in Pittsburgh that sponsored the Otisca application. At Norfolk Southern, the two top corporate executives who had supported Otisca had retired and their successors were focusing on near-term marketing projects. Only one of the five, Zurn Industries...
Amid all this disappointment came yet another prospect for survival. CSX Corp., parent of the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad, took an interest in Otisca as a possible source of fuel for a pilot cogeneration plant it was planning at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. As the nation's largest transporter of coal, CSX had an interest in promoting its use and export. Engineer Mack Shelor, an executive with CSX's energy resources and logistics division, learned through some contacts that Otisca was the only firm capable of producing a coal-based liquid fuel that would meet the specifications...