THE MONTREAL GAZETTE....
Thursday, April 6, 2000

BUSINESS SECTION

Open hood and floss:
Engine-cleaning solution is winning acceptance

FRANÇOIS SHALOM

“We're in a category where everything is snake oil,” Matthew Price-Gallagher admitted in a recent interview.

So he has no illusions that the product and service sold by his small TerraClean Inc. research-and-development firm, a flush-and-clean rejuvenation treatment for car engines, will find immediate acceptance.

“That means we have to elevate ourselves with (accurate and verifiable) statements, because no one believes these inflated claims anymore.”

The car aftermarket abounds in “miracle” treatments: additives to gas or oil, fuel-injection solvents, special engine coatings, shampoos and all other manners of cures-in-a-bottle.

But TerraClean is different, insisted Price-Gallagher at the company's headquarters in a tidy white clapboard house just this side of the Vermont border, 160 kilometres east of Montreal.

TerraClean is a modified gasoline product that has been put through a molecular reactor, ionized (electrified) and oxygenated. At a garage, the solution is run through an injector unit hooked up to the car, and is pumped through a car's engine for about half an hour. The company recommends the treatment once a year for cars with 40,000 km or more.

“What that does is burn away all the carbon from all parts of the engine,” said former oil company executive Al Esposito, TerraClean's vice-president and chief operating officer.

Hence the claims for the cleaner-burning combustion chamber, preventative maintenance, reduced gas consumption and lower toxic emissions.

“It makes a real difference,” promised Esposito, “one that you notice when you drive away.”

Last year, the company sold 650 injector units at $1,700 apiece and an undetermined amount of the modified gasoline, for revenues of more than $1.1 million, mostly through car-parts wholesalers and distributors UAP and Uni-Select.

The task now is to strengthen the product's foothold and disseminate the TerraClean name as widely as possible. Much of that involves an education campaign with garage-retailers, which has reaped some dividends so far.

“We really have to begin educating from scratch with every garage-owner who's convinced he's seen it all before,” said Esposito.

Now some Sears auto centres, Canadian Tire service centres and Speedy garages are offering the product, as well as others.

Réjean Ruel, for example, is one of TerraClean's biggest boosters.

One night about 10 months ago, several garage-owners from the Eastern Townships, including Ruel's Octo Freins-Silencieux franchise in Sherbrooke, got together for a product presentation by TerraClean.

“We had gathered a few cars that we knew were problem cases,” said Ruel.

“They put in the stuff, and it took less than an hour to realize there really was something to it.”

He bought a unit on the spot, as did others, and several area repair shops now offer the service, as do selected auto centres in Ontario and Quebec.

Since then, Ruel has sold TerraClean to about 150 customers in 10 months, and had only praise for it. “Every report I got was excellent - not a negative comment,” he said.

TerraClean sells the $1,700-injector units to garages, and charges them about $40 per litre of the oxygenated modified gasoline.

Garages then charge $120 plus tax for the treatment, which, for Ruel, has translated into added revenues of about $18,000 in 10 months.

TerraClean's claims could be dismissed as an attempt to cash in on the sudden jump in gasoline prices.

Except that its product has been in development for at least a couple of years, the most advanced of various projects contemplated by parent company Terralogix Inc.

Since taking over Terralogix, Price-Gallagher has knocked down the former grandiose goals of its other research projects a peg or two.

The former Terralogix claim that it would develop a perfectly clean fuel has been shelved for now, concentrating its efforts on the more modest TerraClean goal.

Price-Gallagher acquired the company from the previous management team of Marc Campagna and Richard Colt when they ran aground financially, and a loan was called in.

Colt, a physicist, was a good friend of Price-Gallagher's relative, Philip Webster, a Montreal architect and financier.

Price-Gallagher was fresh out of an MBA program in Boston and looking to buy in the area - anything, from a stretch- wrapping factory to a bra manufacturer ("who wanted way too much money'').

He settled on simply revolutionizing the automobile engine.

In the last 18 months, TerraClean has gained a measure of acceptance from strong believers, some of them pretty tough nuts.

Like Robert Rivard and his mechanics, for instance.

Rivard, the Sears auto centre manager at Carrefour Laval, said that “I'm biased because we sell their product here.”

“But I had it done on my own car (a Jeep Cherokee) and I definitely saw the difference myself. The idle is much smoother, the ping the engine made before is gone and the car's performing much better in general.”

But he stopped short of endorsing the claim of improved gas mileage.

“I didn't do a precise (consumption) test, so maybe it is better, but I wouldn't go as far as that,” added Rivard.

Robert Emond is also a satisfied customer. He also said that he could not properly gauge the assertion of improved gas consumption, since he's a retiree and doesn't have a set daily drive to compare gas mileage.

But the 69-year-old Bellefeuille man has no doubts that his 1990 6-cylinder Taurus has pepped up since December, when he paid the $120 plus tax - $137.80, total - for the flush-job.

“I see a big difference, you sense the engine is clean and runs more softly, yet with more power,” said Emond.

McGill University chemistry professor Joe Schwarcz agreed that anything that burns the carbon build-up from an engine is a good thing, restoring some of its vigour and capacity.

Schwarcz added, however, that it's impossible from a scientific point of view to evaluate TerraClean's claims without extensive testing and comprehensive and precise data.

“But the oxygenation thing may be meaningful,” he said.

Larry Lessard, a McGill professor of mechanical engineering, added that “yes, you want to remove all the carbon you possibly can - as long as it removes the carbon and doesn't remove anything else.”

Price-Gallagher said the product was developed in secrecy, and revealing its exact composition would give a leg up to competitors - despite the patent obtained on TerraClean by Terralogix.

But he stressed that “it's a very, very clean burning fuel we inject. We've stripped out the major polluters, the aromatics.”

“And it's not a solvent, as are many of the treatments on the market. The problem with those chemicals is that they transfer the carbon and other residues from the least expensive components of the engine to the most expensive - the (oxygen) sensors and the catalytic converter. They're your most important and expensive engine parts.”

“Also, those chemicals are contaminants in themselves” and leave their own residue, said Price-Gallagher, a 31-year-old scion of the well-to-do Webster family.

“Our product causes a chemical change without adding anything. Think of it like flossing.”

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