RESEARCH: Ronkonkoma company gets clean-energy grant

A Ronkonkoma research company has become the first business on Long Island to receive a grant from a new federal agency created to investigate ways of making energy cleaner.

ATK GASL, whose core business involves the use of wind tunnels to test propulsion systems used in aviation and space projects, has received a $1-million research grant from ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, to study carbon-capture technologies - ways to minimize the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from burning coal. Wind tunnels will be used in ATK GASL's research.

ARPA-E is a U.S. Energy Department spinoff of the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which studies new military technology.

The research grant was announced Tuesday by Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington), and ATK GASL executives, who spoke before many of the company's 60 employees. The grant calls for ATK GASL to develop a system for separating carbon dioxide from fossil fuel plants at lower costs than other approaches.

The grant is highly significant because of national and worldwide efforts to eliminate harmful greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming. ARPA-E was created about 18 months ago. Israel successfully advocated for $400 million in federal funding for ARPA-E. Carbon-capture technology is the centerpiece of federal fossil-energy research. ATK GASL's grant is part of a third round of funding by ARPA-E since its inception.

"This is an exciting start for us," Robert Bakos, vice president of GASL Advanced Systems, told employees.

ATK GASL will work with ACEnT Laboratories of Manorville on the project. ACEnT's president, Anthony Castrogiovanni, was president of privately held GASL when it was sold in 2003 to ATK, a $5-billion aerospace and defense company headquartered in Minneapolis. Castrogiovanni later formed ACEnT.

He said the work that comes out of the ATK GASL study could have broader applications, such as helping eliminate harmful emissions from autos.

ATK GASL will use in the new research a technology it developed to study aerospace propulsion systems. It will capture carbon dioxide by passing it through a nozzle at supersonic speeds. That will cause the gas to precipitate out from the flue gas as a solid, dry ice, which can then be scraped away.

Israel said he was "on an Olympic mission to make Long Island the technology capital of the world." The need to develop clean energy resources, he said, is as important to the United States today as the development of a defense industry was during World War II.