Could Coal Burn Bright & Clean & Corning ReVive Itself Yet Again

Kishor Gadkaree puts samples of a honeycomb-shaped filter into a miniature gas chamber that simulates the insides of a coal-burning smokestack.

this filter — which is designed to neutralize the poisonous mercury spewed by the world's coal-fired power plants — will be the next big hit for a nearly 160-year-old company that recently survived a brush with extinction.

Corning Inc. is betting tens of millions of dollars that tougher environmental regulations, plus a few more years of experiments, will turn the mercury trap into something that can generate at least $500 million to $1 billion in annual sales.

"We are going over those hurdles one by one," Gadkaree said as he showed off his shelf-top mini-flue at Sullivan Park, a hilltop campus outside this rural town of 10,000 that gave the company its name. "We can show it works. Now we're trying to find out how much customers will pay for it."

"We have set ourselves up to be patient," said Mark Newhouse, who oversees Corning's development of new technologies. "We talk about how many businesses we will create in a decade, not in a couple of years."

But while Corning amassed a decade-after-decade array of breakthroughs ranging from ovenproof Pyrex dishes and cathode-ray tubes to auto-pollution filters and space-telescope mirrors, the company has had to endure multiple reincarnations.

Lopsided investments in fiber optics almost capsized Corning: Its stock tumbled from $113 in September 2000 to a mere $1.10 in October 2002 as annual revenue shrank to $3.2 billion from $7.1 billion.

Corning quickly retooled itself as the world's biggest maker of liquid-crystal-display glass for flat-screen televisions and computers. The ultra-thin monitors delivered 90 percent of Corning's $2.2 billion profit in 2007.

Known to some as "Dark Angel" for his 1980s moves to shelve slow-growth Corning businesses, upon his return James Houghton mothballed fiber plants and slashed the work force from 43,000 to 22,500. He offloaded the once-stellar photonics business, which made the optical switches and other exotica that manage the rapid flow of light signals through optical fiber.

The patriarch and his chosen successor, Wendell Weeks, also turned back the clock. They championed wider exploration of arenas in which Corning boasts expertise, a more freewheeling philosophy once associated with Bell Laboratories and other high-tech powerhouses.

One key difference: While ensuring an unusually high 10 percent of revenue is allocated to research, Corning's management imposed a more rigorous, companywide system for nurturing the best ideas along step by step.

Gadkaree, who has 67 patents in 25 years at Corning, is one of 15 active research fellows who are given more leeway to explore projects of special interest.

In the 1990s, he developed a water-purification filter that was shelved because the market wasn't deemed big enough. But because it was also capable of capturing metals, the filter got another look in 2004 when signs resurfaced that a long-anticipated federal law eventually could impose a 90 percent reduction on mercury emissions.

Burning coal sends an estimated 300 tons of mercury into the air annually, with U.S. plants alone accounting for nearly 50 tons. As many as 630,000 children born each year in the U.S. are at risk of learning disabilities and physical ailments related to the neurotoxin, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Laws in New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts already require coal plants to snare at least 85 percent of mercury emissions, and more than a dozen other states led by Maryland and Pennsylvania are imposing their own stringent restrictions beginning in 2010.

The new filter employs a ceramic honeycomb that was invented by Corning in the early 1970s and sits at the heart of the smog-busting catalytic converter in automobiles. The filter contains hundreds of tiny passages impregnated with chemicals that stabilize and corral mercury particles.

The big question is whether the filter will be able to capture 90 percent of mercury "as we make the filter larger and run ever longer periods," Gadkaree said. "Back in 2004, I would have said the probability (of success) is about 10 percent. Now I'd say maybe 50 percent."

"Getting a paycheck, everybody can do that, right?" he said. "But `you did something good' — at the end of my career, I want to be able to say that."