Hulbert Company's Green Machine Helps Clean Up The Coal Industry

Craig Day, News On 6

HULBERT, Oklahoma -- A home grown Oklahoma company hopes to have a big impact on the air we breathe. They're getting international interest after building a giant machine.

It can make the world cleaner and greener and may even one day bring more jobs to Green Country.

In the rolling hills south of Hulbert, you'll find some Oklahoma ingenuity in the form of a machine. What kind of machine?

"A regenerative, thermal, oxidizer," said company owner Scott Manus.

That's a technical name for something that basically takes harmful emissions like methane from manufacturers, coal mines and landfills and cleans up the dirty air. The Hulbert machine is the first one American Environmental Fabrication and Supply has made.

"We'd like the coal industry and the landfill industry to use it right away," said engineer Randy Glad.

Think of the machine as a giant version of the catalytic convertor on your car.

"That burns the dirty, harmful exhaust; this does the same thing for a factory," Manus said.

The machine takes in emissions and dilutes them with good air. It's burned off with giant heaters, and clean air gets exhausted out. 

"Being an Oklahoma guy, I think we have a lot more common sense than a lot of these people do and we really applied it in this," said Scott Manus, owner of American Environmental Fabrication and Supply.

One way: it's stackable so it can be transported easily anywhere in the world. And the machine can even power itself.

"Once we bring a unit up to temperature, our burners turn off and it uses no auxiliary fuel; it uses the methane to fuel itself," Manus said.

And burning the methane can even generate excess electricity.

"They can even profit off the emission by putting a power generation system on the back side of it," Glad said.

The company is already getting interest from U-S companies and international manufacturers facing tougher environmental standards.

"What's really nice - when you set one of these up and the birds start flying over the plant again. That's what is really nice," said engineer Randy Glad.

The way the designers see it, they're making history in the industry, in a cow pasture south of Hulbert, and hoping to make the world a much cleaner and greener place.

The cost of a unit is about $600,000, but the manufacturer says it can pay for itself over time, by companies avoiding environmental emissions fines - and because the machines can generate the excess electricity.