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Clean-Burning Vehicles | Partners for a Cleaner Environment

Clean Air Counts

Since November 2005, Nicor Gas has been a partner in Clean Air Counts, an initiative to reduce ground-level ozone, or smog, and support economic development in northeastern Illinois. A collaborative effort among the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, City of Chicago, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5, and Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air Counts seeks to achieve significant reductions in targeted ozone-forming pollutants and a major reduction in energy consumption in the region.

Clean Air Counts partners include corporations, municipalities and institutions which voluntarily commit to implement clean air strategies that have the potential to reduce operating costs as well as smog-forming emissions. By tracking the success of individual participants, Clean Air Counts is monitoring the region's progress in improving air quality in northeastern Illinois.

Nicor Gas was one of 12 exemplary businesses chosen to be the focus of a new advertising campaign (see posters above and below) that ran through the 2008 summer ozone season.

Since 2005, Nicor Gas has demonstrated that Clean Air Counts by:

• Restoring native landscaping – We planted almost 10 acres of native prairie landscaping at three locations – our Naperville headquarters, a transmission right-of-way in North Aurora, and our Elgin reporting station.
  
  
• Installing energy-efficient lighting – Nicor Gas is replacing standard T-12, incandescent and metal halide light bulbs in company buildings with energy-efficient T-8 and T-5 bulbs. In 2008, this program earned Nicor Gas the Southern Gas Association's Environmental Excellence Technology Award.
  
  According to Clean Air Counts, retrofitting buildings with energy-efficient lighting reduces emissions of nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the environment. It also improves electrical system reliability and lowers maintenance costs, reduces electrical and cooling loads, and lowers electricity costs by roughly 10% to 15%. Nicor Gas' lighting retrofit program has reduced emissions equivalent to one of the following:
  • Removing 158 passenger cars from the road for one year
  • Saving 1,693 barrels of oil
  • Growing 18,633 seedlings for 10 years
  • 607 acres of pine forest storing carbon for one year

• Reducing emissions from on-site electric generation – Since the early 1990s, a natural gas-powered cogeneration plant has provided electric power as well as chilled water for cooling and hot water for heating to Nicor Gas' Naperville, Ill., office campus. The cogeneration plant provides most of the electricity needed by our offices; supplemental power is purchased from the city of Naperville's electric department as needed.

  In an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in 2007 the state of Illinois reduced nitrogen oxide emission limits on small reciprocating turbine engines to one-half to one-fourth of the previous limits. To comply with the revised regulations and reduce our annual electric bill, Nicor Gas replaced one of the cogeneration plant's generators with a more fuel-efficient unit that by itself meets the energy needs of our entire office campus. This single generator does the work previously done by four units, while consuming nearly the same amount of natural gas and significantly reducing nitrogen oxide emissions by 95 percent or more.

For more information about Clean Air Counts and clean-air strategies you can use in your home or business, please visit www.CleanAirCounts.org.