What A Gas!

Ever wished someone would come up with an insurance policy against running out of gas ... maybe a nonflammable fuel alternative? That's just what Mark B. Gordon and Richard W. Jones have done, marketing the first patented, nonflammable fuel alternative, appropriately named Spare Tank. Based in Baltimore, Emergency Fuel LLC purchased the exclusive worldwide rights to Spare Tank in September 1998.

Spare Tank is a unique blend of environmentally safe, organic and synthetic compounds that meet all the qualifications of the Department of Transportation and the National Fire Prevention Agency. "If you take a match and put it over our product [or] drop it in the fluid, nothing will happen-actually, the match will go out," Jones explains. "It would have to be well over 450 degrees before it would even think about self-combusting."

Gordon, 53, and Jones, 56, commissioned Harvard MBA engineer William Hubbard to create the product's unique formula. Spare Tank has already found shelf space in Baltimore regional stores and in Kmarts nationwide.

Recently, the partners announced their newest product, a nonflammable, self-sufficient emergency kit. It contains a quart of Spare Tank, a nonflammable tire inflator, a battery start-up product and a glow stick. "You may only use the product once a year or once every two years," says Jones, "but every time that fuel light comes on, that worry goes away."

Contact Source

• Emergency Fuel LLC, (877) SPARE-TANK, efueljones@aol.com

This article was originally published in the December 2000 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: What A Gas!.