Made Local, Made Right: How glycol recycling and 3D printing contribute to Alaska's value-added picture.

• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Position: MANUFACTURING

Natural resource extraction has acted as a foundation for Alaska's economic activity since before ground even broke for the Trans Alaska Pipeline System and remains a vital part of Alaska's economic makeup. But tying state funding primarily to commodity-driven industries has (and will again) put Alaska in a tight spot. It's widely acknowledged that Alaska lacks a robust field of value-added businesses, which create local jobs, provide valuable materials at high quality and often lower cost, and keep Alaska money in Alaska.

Two businesses--in wildly different ways--have set their sights on making cost-effective, high-quality, local products: NRC Alaska and ImagineltAlaska.

Glycol Recycling

In 2014 NRC, an international provider of environmental, industrial, and emergency response solutions, purchased Emerald Alaska, which specialized in environmental and emergency response services for the oil and gas industry in Alaska. Today NRC Alaska is still a leader in its field, offering spill response, waste management, oil tank cleaning, and other environmental services.

But N RC Alaska also offers products that complement their cleaning, waste management, and cleanup service lines, and they're pioneering a path for responsible manufacturing in Alaska: in July 2017 the company finished constructing a glycol distillation plant at their Anchorage location. "We can take used glycol generated from the automotive, aviation, mechanical, and HVAC industries, and we can run it through a series of treatment processes, distilling the glycol back to its virgin equivalent state for re-blending," says Michael Rose, account manager of product sales for NRC Alaska.

"It's the only [glycol recycling plant] of its kind located in Alaska," he says.

The process to distill the glycol takes about four days and happens in 4,000-gallon batches. NRC Alaska collects used glycol such as antifreeze, which contains ethylene glycol, and stores it in storage tanks at their Anchorage facility.

The first step of the distillation process is to remove as much of the solid contaminants as possible. The glycol is placed in treatment tanks and, through a series of chemical treatment and filtration, those solids are removed and packaged for disposal. Once this process is complete, the glycol is transferred to the distillation plant, where it is circulated through a closed loop system under heat and vacuum pressure. The glycol is continually circulated through various stages of heat until all contaminants are removed.

"Because that product is still mixed with water, the first step is to strip off the water using heat. The removed water is collected in a storage tank. After you get all the water stripped off, we increase the heat, which begins the distillation process: that heat, under a vacuum, starts to remove all the impurities," Rose explains. Once extracted the impurities are stored in another tank, and what's left is high-quality, clean-as-can-be glycol, which is stored until it's ready for blending. "It's a big process, for sure--but it works fantastically," Rose says.

NRC Alaska blends the clean glycol to produce various antifreeze and heat transfer fluid products. "Ethylene glycol is the base product for antifreeze, but another big part of antifreeze are the corrosion inhibitors... that protect the metals and the seals in your engine." Corrosion inhibitors are a part of additive packs, which NRC Alaska sources from a national manufacturer in the Lower 48.

Different additive packs produce different types of antifreeze, which is necessary since car manufacturers build engines in...