This is roughly the job description Keith Cooksey, professor of
microbiology at Montana State University-Bozeman, carries with
him as searches the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park this
winter.
Cooksey's on a mission, of sorts. Well, a subcontract, really.
He's part of a three-member team looking for ways of naturally
lowering carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Besides Cooksey, the threesome includes David Bayless, a
mechanical engineer at Ohio University, and researchers from Oak
Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Helping Cooksey at MSU is
postdoctoral researcher Igor Brown.
Together, the group has $1-million from the U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Cooksey and Brown's portion of the project is about $100,000 a
year for three years. Brown also has support from the MSU Thermal
Biology Institute, which similarly studies unique microbes from
Yellowstone.
While the coal-fueled power industry has reduced particulate and
sulfur emissions, it still produces high amounts of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, now believed to be
undesirably warming the planet.
Ohio University is experimenting with ways of absorbing carbon
dioxide with algae. Like other plants, algae use the gas as part
of their metabolic process called photosynthesis.
Ohio University has piloted Bayless's technology using algae from
the desert. But they believe there's a better organism out there,
and now it's Cooksey's job to look.
"If you want thermotolerant, we're in a good place to look,"
Cooksey says, referring to Yellowstone National Park. The park is
well known for heat-loving organisms that live in and around park
hot springs.
"They must be thermotolerant because the gases from these
coal-fired power plants--which are about 14 percent carbon
dioxide--are hot," Cooksey said. "The gases have been through the
scrubbers to get rid of the ash, but they still have lots of
CO2."
Is it likely he'll find what he's looking for?
"I'm sure it is," he said without hesitation.
"I suspect Keith is right," echoed Ann Deutch, research permit
coordinator for Yellowstone Park. "I have no reason to believe he
won't succeed."
After all, fewer than one percent of the park's microorganisms
have been discovered and characterized, Deutch said, meaning so
many more algae and related organisms are yet to be found. As
microbiologists continue to improve their ability to look, they
find greater layers of complexity in the microbial community, she
said.
When Cooksey finds some likely candidates, he'll isolate them and
describe them scientifically. The plan is to grow them on plastic
sanding discs in a layer of slime called biofilm. Oak Ridge
National Labs has figured out how to pipe sunlight to the algae
from roof-top solar collectors. Power-plant gases would first be
scrubbed of their flyash and sulfur, then piped through mats of
algae before going out the smokestack, Cooksey said.
"That exhaust is what we're going to remove the CO2 from," he
said. "We don't know how much CO2 we can get out of it."
Cooksey also doesn't yet know how long the algae can do their job
before having to be regrown. Harvested algae would likely be used
as fertilizer, since they would be rich in both carbon and
nitrogen.
Elsewhere, scientists are contemplating other ways of absorbing
excess carbon dioxide. One approach, which Cooksey finds
troubling, is injecting it into oceans. He'd rather hire a
microbe from Yellowstone, born and breed to handle heat, for the
hot-gas industrial assignment.
Deutch, too, likes the idea of a Yellowstone microbe finding work
as a CO2 scrubber. Sure, it would mean royalties for the park,
but turning philosophical for a moment, she said it's projects
like Cooksey's that make her glad Yellowstone National Park was
set aside for future generations.
"When the park was created in 1872, they certainly weren't
thinking of a CO2 scrubber for a coal-fired power plant," Deutch
said. "Who'd have known?"
