Word: otisca
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...would be easy to dismiss Smith and Keller as just a couple of upstate kooks with a harebrained scheme. But from the beginning, virtually everyone involved -- engineers and environmentalists, utility executives and officials at the Department of Energy -- has agreed that the Otisca coal/water slurry process is a solid idea. Acknowledges W. Henson Moore, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy: "This precleaning process of theirs looked very good to the experts...
Smith and Keller adopted the Iroquois word otisca, meaning "water that has gone away," as a name for their process and their company. They worked nights in a garage on a back road southeast of town, won the patent rights and sold the idea to local investors who shared their conviction that a clean-burning, coal-based fuel was potentially an economic gold mine. They interested possible customers -- big customers like Florida Power & Light, American Electric Power, General Electric, General Motors -- and they raised nearly $8 million through a sale of preferred stock...
...more than 20 years later, Otisca is essentially broke. Keller, in need of money to feed and educate his family, has returned to teaching at Syracuse. Smith still toils stoically in the all but abandoned laboratory the pair converted from an idle brewery on Butternut Street in Syracuse -- producing occasional fuel samples, testing equipment and working the phones in search of a big utility or any company that could offer him the chance to demonstrate Otisca Fuel. There is hope yet, but friends have begun to joke that Smith has raised tenacity to the height of insanity...
...know the intricacies of corporate finance, government regulation, patent protection, pricing strategy and sophisticated marketing. And even then, in the utility industry anyway, resistance to change, hardened under multiple layers of bureaucracy and regulation, is likely to stop even a great idea dead in its tracks. The tale of Otisca Industries is instructive and ultimately disturbing...