BOISE, Idaho — Kapolei-based Hoku Scientific Inc. said it will share hot water from its planned Idaho polysilicon plant with a neighboring malt house to help both companies save money — and please customers, who are demanding more efficiently made products.

Hoku, building a $390 million polysilicon plant near Pocatello, said the closed-loop, pressurized system connecting its operation with the Great Western Malting Co. will provide a lower-cost option to cool and recycle water.

When the system is complete in 2 1/2 years, it's also expected to reduce Vancouver, Wash.-based Great Western's natural gas costs and slash emissions, the companies said.

Great Western's director of North American business development, Jay Hamachek, said his company is trying to save more than just money with the deal. Beer brewers large and small that buy the company's barley and wheat malts increasingly want to know that what they are buying has been produced as efficiently as possible, he said.

"This isn't just about the cost of energy," Hamachek told the Associated Press. "We're getting more and more requests from customers wanting to reduce their carbon footprint."

The water Great Western will get from Hoku will be about 290 degrees Fahrenheit. The malt house will use the indirect heat from the water to process and dry the barley malt. The water will likely be 40 to 50 degrees cooler when it's sent back to Hoku.

"We're acting as the cooling tower," Hamachek said.

The Hoku plant, which shares a property line with Great Western on Idaho's Snake River plain, is expected to be finished in 2009. Crews are at work laying foundations for the plant's vent gas recovery and reactor buildings, and putting up steel framing for the administration and warehouse buildings.

Preliminary engineering has just started on the pressurized pipe system that will transfer hot water from Hoku to Great Western, then send the cooled water back to Hoku for reuse.

Water use and conservation have increasingly become issues in that part of eastern Idaho, where the Lake Erie-sized aquifer has been depleted by drought and more than 50 years of groundwater irrigation.

Dustin Shindo, chief executive of Kapolei, Hawai'i-based Hoku, said the deal helps both companies.

"The agreement is mutually beneficial because it offers Hoku an opportunity to reduce our in-house cooling requirements while fulfilling an essential need for Great Western," Shindo said in a news release.