Clean Cities annual meeting highlights environmental successes

HOBART | Carl Lisek said his wife asked him to take her somewhere really expensive for Valentine's Day.

"I said, 'OK, I'll take you to the gas station,'" Lisek said.

Lisek, executive director of South Shore Clean Cities, addressed region leaders gathered Thursday at Avalon Manor in Hobart for the 13th annual South Shore Clean Cities annual meeting, touting successes in reducing reliance on air pollution-causing fossil fuels and foreign oil through renewable energy use.

Lisek said efforts by the group's members displaced 340,000 gallons of gasoline and reduced greenhouse gases by 4,000 pounds in 2011.

"Our goal this year, we want to quadruple that," Lisek said.

U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville, presented a message to the group via video from Washington, D.C., saying alternative fuels are necessary "to move us beyond an economy based on carbon."

Visclosky said clean energy is "all for naught," however, if the projects supporting it do not create and maintain jobs in the United States.

Mark Stoermann, project manager at Fair Oaks Dairy Farms, told the group of the renewable fuel project in use at the company, which uses methane gas produced by cow manure to fuel the operations at the dairies as well as power the fleet of delivery trucks.

The process produces three times more gas than is needed to run the dairy. Some of the excess is fed into a NIPSCO pipeline and sold to the utility and some is sent to a Clean Energy natural gas fueling station on the farm.

The fueling station is open to the public.

"We're trying to give farmers a better opportunity to have other income sources other than the dairy and the meat," Stoermann said.

The natural gas fleet has eliminated the annual equivalent of 11 million miles or 2 million gallons of diesel fuel, he said.

Kelly Carmichael, director of environmental policy and permitting at NIPSCO, said the utility is working on a host of renewable fuel projects, including retrofitting diesel vehicles in its fleet and in the community.

Carmichael said plans are in the works to retrofit NIPSCO's bucket trucks with hybrid technology so they can run on battery power when parked and reduce diesel emissions.