HISTORY AND OVERVIEW

HISTORY

Cryogenic Rare Gas Laboratories, Inc. was founded in 1964 in the state of New Jersey. The company’s original purpose was to import and re-sell rare gases; krypton, neon, and xenon. These gases are obtained by cryogenically liquefying air in very large air separation plants and were, at the time, primarily being produced in Europe. CRGL acted as a distributor and re-packager for the European gas companies. The major use for Krypton and Xenon during the 1960’s and 1970’s was energy efficient lighting.

In 1980, the U.S. market for rare gases used in lighting applications began to grow. Two major American gas companies (who had been CRGL’s customers) expanded their production capacities in the USA to meet the need. Facing the loss of these companies as customers and gaining them as competitors, we shifted our focus toward providing rare gases to industrial gas distributors and end users of specialty gases. In addition, we began to concentrate our efforts toward developing capabilities for blending and analyzing halogen gas mixtures for use in excimer lasers. It was CRGL who developed the mixtures to make excimer lasers work.

The company moved to Charleston, South Carolina in August of 1986. In order to emphasize our emergence as a major supplier to the medical and semiconductor excimer laser markets, in November 1995, we began operating as “Nova Gas Technologies” and legally changed the company name on 10 September 2001.

We began to export our gases to the Far East in 1997 and today, the Asian export market accounts for more than 65% of sales. We moved into our new facility in January of 2002.