PORTLAND (AP) – A fund founded in 1996 by a University of Southern Maine professor has turned less than $13,000 into holdings now valued at more than $100,000, but those profits will never be realized.

Rather than play the market to make money, the Acid Rain Retirement Fund has a loftier goal: cut emissions of sulfur dioxide, a gas that creates acid rain that kills Maine fish and forests.

Michael Hamilton’s nonprofit environmental group buys emissions permits at the annual federal auction. It uses donated money, never more than $3,000 to $4,000 in a single year.

Congress established the market in 1993 as a way to limit pollution. Each year, the government hands out pollution permits to power plants, and the Environmental Protection Agency sells at auction an additional 125,000 permits for the right to emit 1 ton of the odorless, colorless gas. Clean plants sell permits to recoup some of their spending on antipollution devices.

Dirty power plants buy the permits at auction through the Chicago Board of Trade or on the commodity market, which sells permits throughout the year.

Small purchasers, such as the fund, are not able to buy permits on the open market because sellers want to deal in blocks of 4,000 or 5,000 permits, rather than one or two. The auction is their only access.

The fund’s bylaws prohibit it from transferring the permits to anyone who might use them. The fund is one of the small number of investors nationwide that buy permits so they can be retired unused.

Over the years, the Portland-based fund has kept 321 tons of sulfur dioxide out of the air, about half of what a small coal-fired plant in Ohio emits annually. Overall, private groups and individuals have kept 7,829 tons out of the environment, said Hamilton, an associate professor of political science at USM and secretary-treasurer of the fund.

AP-ES-02-20-04 0217EST