Spontaneous combustion | A Lewiston chemist hopes his fuel efficiency additive will take off with fleet and industrial users

It's a ritual enacted whenever gasoline prices go through the roof: Multitudes of ads for mileage-increasing unguents and gadgets suddenly appear. Columnists and reporters return fire, warning consumers against opening their wallets and fuel tanks to any such voodoo folly. "The current crop of gas-saving products have an irritating drawback," one veteran automotive journalist recently wrote. "They don't work."

There is one exception, according to Lewiston resident Frank Norman. A chemist who for years marketed various specialty compounds for the likes of Union Carbide and the oil giant ARCO, Norman believes he has concocted an elixir able to boost fuel efficiency in cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles. What's more, Norman has gathered some notable support for his claims.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reviewed and registered Norman's cocktail, called Diesel/Gas Go! There was no testing involved, nor is registration an endorsement of effectiveness, according to EPA spokesman John Millett. But the registration was a first, required step, legalizing the sale of the brew and assuring it does no extraordinary harm.

Gas Go did, however, show promising results in research conducted last year by the University of Southern Maine's Manufacturing Applications Center in Gorham. The center documented mileage increases of as much as 13.9% in the seven vehicles it tested. "In addition," the report said, "comments [from test participants] on vehicle performance ranged from no difference to smoother running with more power."

Some of those results were experienced by Steve Kline, president and owner of Mermaid Transportation in Portland. Mermaid has a fleet of 16 vehicles, most of them passenger vans, which run to Logan and Manchester airports and haul clients across the state. Last spring, Mermaid agreed to run Gas Go in four of its vans as part of the USM tests. When the results came in, Kline said he expanded use of the additive to his entire fleet. "We are averaging between two and three miles more per gallon," he said. "That may not sound like a lot, but we drive over 700,000 miles a year."

Though Norman originally pictured consumers as the target market for Gas Go, the USM and Mermaid tests prompted him to pursue fleet and industrial applications. Since mixing up his first commercial batch in the spring of 2002, he has only sold several hundred gallons of the potion. Last year's sales were less than $5,000, and Norman says he hasn't come close to recouping the $30,000 or so he has thus far invested.

But sales in the first few months of this year have already outpaced last year's total revenue. Mermaid's results are encouraging, and tests are underway that, if shown effective, could extend the Gas Go market to industrial fuel oil-fired boilers. This year, Norman has his eye on six-figure revenues, and he's just hired a president, Peter Kendrick, who has extensive experience in startups and acquisitions.

With energy costs rising and future gas and oil supplies far from secure, the inventor said thinking too hard about his product's potential triggers a touch of vertigo. "I'm standing at the edge of a cliff, or at the top of a mountain," he said, "about to roll down a snowball, and going, oh my goodness."

The BorGASm experiment
The need for mileage enhancers, maximizers and gas additives is rooted in the fact that gasoline is a grab bag of hydrocarbon molecules, all of varying length. Shorter molecules burn first and faster. Longer ones take their time and burn less hot. Too much early burn causes pre-ignition, or engine "ping." Too much late-stage burn means more unburned fuel sails out the tail pipe. In both cases, an engine is not processing all the power potential in its fuel and, therefore, generates less than optimal mileage. Maximizing that millisecond-long reaction in the cylinder is the Holy Grail of the automotive engineering set.

Chemistry, Norman claims, sets his recipe apart from other mileage enhancers on the market. Most gas additives are simply highly combustible solvents, designed to burn off every possible trace of those long-chain molecules. Some formulas aim to retard the burn of the shorter molecules, to create a more complete, efficient combustion. Norman took an alternative approach.

Tinkering in his West Milford, N.J. garage in 1994, he began experimenting with long-chain sulfonates, what normal folks call detergents (concerned with protecting his patent, Norman is intentionally vague about the actual raw material for his catalyst). What he came up with was a compound able to break down long-chain hydrocarbons using free radicals, a kind of chemical bullet. Norman's formula uses the heat created during an engine's pre-ignition, combustion stroke to trigger those bullets.

There is no hard research to document the reaction, but Norman believes that when the piston circles around again for the engine's ignition stroke, the free radicals have evened the tiny cloud of hydrocarbons into shorter molecules. Theoretically, when the spark plug ignites the compressed fuel, those molecules should fire nearer the same time and at a similar temperature, squeezing more power from each spritz of gasoline.

It took Norman less than a year to develop the initial product. He began handing it out for friends to test, and their reports came back positive. His initial, seven-month registration process with the EPA, in 1996, came off without a hitch. But a command change and new policies at the agency required all registrants to reapply through a more complex and costly process. Norman lawyered up for the chore and regained approval in 2000. (For more on additive testing, see "The additive game," p. 24.)

In the meantime, Norman had begun figuring out how to market the product. Ask him about his initial approach, guided by a sort of thumbnail market survey and a Rockaway, N.J. branding consultant, and he gives a simple reply: "Oops."

The survey, he explains, identified men 18 to 36 years old as those who spend the most on their cars, and presumed them to be the product's mostly likely audience. The consultant (who claimed to be the creator of the Viagra brand name) agreed with the survey, then whipped up an attention-grabbing acronym: BorGASm ˆ— Better Operation Response GAS and Mileage.

Labels were printed and a website was launched, but the acronym wasn't as fecund as Norman had hoped. A few Internet sales, and little else, trickled in.

He and his wife, Arlene, had been eyeing a move to Maine since visiting friends in Camden in 1998. They located a place in Lewiston and made the move in December of 2001. In the process, Norman sold a broadcast fax business he had started a few years earlier, planning to reinvest the proceeds into his new company, Future Fuel Technologies, and into bringing Gas Go to market.

Hitting the sweet spot
But the move to Maine ˆ— and an encounter with an advisor who didn't like the BorGASm moniker ˆ— caused Norman to alter his marketing strategy. "I brought a bottle down to [the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments in Auburn] to start my hunt for resources in Maine," Norman said. "I put it on this fellow's desk; he started hyperventilating [when he saw the label] and said, 'You can't sell that up here!'"

Fortunately, Norman had registered the product through the EPA as Diesel/ Gas Go! He dropped the racy label, reverted to the original name and began shopping for a local manufacturer, ultimately settling on Coastal Products Co. in Lisbon Falls. He also dove into Maine's support structure for entrepreneurs, beginning with the eight-week FastTrac program sponsored by the Veterans Corporation through USM. (Norman's tour of duty in the Army from 1967 to 1970 included two years in Vietnam where, thanks to his chemistry degree, he was handed responsibility for spraying Agent Orange around his battalion's central highlands supply depot.)

Though the FastTrac staff, Norman linked up with the Center for Environmental Entrepreneurship, a business incubator in South Portland. The CEE introduced him to the university's Manufacturing Applications Center, where Gas Go's first real testing got underway.

After assurances that the additive would cause no damage to the engines, Kline of Mermaid Transportation agreed to participate. Before long, Kline said he even began using Norman's invention in his own Toyota Camry; he said he's seen his mileage increase approximately 25% as a result.

Norman's FastTrac and CEE connections also led to a meeting last October with Michael Kuhns, director of environmental engineering at Irving Tanning Co. in Hartland.

Irving, a leather finishing operation, burns roughly a million gallons of #6 fuel oil annually to generate steam for its processing and heat for its plant. Kuhns felt any possible increase in efficiency was worth investigating, and asked Norman if Gas Go might have an effect on the company's boilers. "Frank explained that there would be a narrow range, he called it a sweet spot ˆ— the right proportions of his product with our fuel ˆ— where we're going to see a benefit," Kuhns said. "From our data, that seems to be true."

Too little Gas Go had no effect whatsoever. Too much created a drop in efficiency. "But in a couple places there was a nice increase in our efficiency," Kuhns said.

Scaling the wall of skepticism
After initial tests, Kuhns enlisted the services of Allagash Valve & Control Inc. in Medway to devise equipment and a methodology to administer more precise amounts of the product for more systematic tests. Kuhns said he has no time frame for results, but he anticipates that once the Allagash system is in place, hard data will be close at hand.

Asked about the range of benefits and applications for Gas Go in industrial settings, Kuhns said "the potential for Frank's product is pretty huge."

Norman's business plan targets $2 million in sales by October of 2005. Positive results from the tests at Irving could go a long way toward helping reach that goal. For now, Norman says he is far from needing a wheelbarrow to haul his checks to the bank.

Norman has enlisted Jim Wilfong, one of his FastTrac program instructors, to help develop a national distribution network of sales reps. He's also brought in Cumberland-based Rook Communications to facilitate a broader fleet marketing effort. And Norman himself keeps his ear to the phone, pitching the product to additional fleet owners. In the meantime, at a rate of one ounce to every ten gallons of fuel, the Mermaid fleet runs through a five-gallon drum of Gas Go ˆ— which costs Kline $480 ˆ— every four to five weeks. Over the course of a year, Kline says, his total savings should amount to $7,000-$10,000.

Despite these encouraging advances, Norman knows he must scale a wall of skepticism in order to succeed. There would be no better leg up than more broad-based, scientific research to back his claims. But proof doesn't come cheap.

Validation from commercial labs, like Southwest Research Labs in San Antonio, carries a six-figure price tag. The EPA's research facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. is less pricey, but still charges $27,000 to perform actual tests on fuel savings devices. Millett said the cost likely would be similar for an additive-type product, but documentation ˆ— such as from the USM tests and any potential findings from Irving ˆ— could play a part in catching the agency's eye.

"I wouldn't make any promises for the program," Millett said, "but I think they would look at that fairly seriously."

If more stringent testing does take place, there is certainly no guarantee the results will go Norman's way. The same goes for the boiler tests at Irving Tanning. But Norman's perfectly willing to put his brainchild on the line and let the data fall where it may.

"It's the culmination of years and years of bringing this to a point," he said. "And if one or two more things fall into place, this could be absolutely huge."