Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have created a bacteria that will produce a more proficient and cleaner burning coal, this news release stated.
Mow Lin, a chemist and Eugene Premuzic, a retired natural products chemist was awarded US patent no. 6,294,351 for this outstanding work with bacteria.
They claim that the bacteria can alter ordinary coal to an environmentally attractive reserve. The bacterium is able to live in ruthless environments while at the same time feeding on carbon laden materials like coal. The bacteria’s digestive system allows it to remove potentially damaging pollutants and therefore results in coal that is more proficient and burns better.
Coal is a hard black or dark brown sedimentary rock formed by the decomposition of plant material and is widely used as a fuel. It is said to be the most abundant in earth. However, as this article states, burning coal may pose some environmental problems. Coal releases sulfur and nitrogen oxides that can pollute the atmospheric air that we breathe. Once burned, coal turns into ashes that contain toxic metals. Certain experiments and studies have been previously launched to use bacteria to remove such toxic impurities in the coal, but these have not been successful. The majority of microbes are unable to survive in harsh conditions like heat, high pressure and acidity that coal usually undergoes during its processing.
These two scientists, challenged by the study, and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, which supports basic research in a variety of scientific fields, decided to start with bacteria that were able to naturally adapt to harsh conditions. Then they thought about altering the bacteria’s diet. They then separated the bacterium in locations as far as the South Pacific and North America.
Lin and Premuzic used a method called “challenge biosynthesis nutritional stressing”, wherein the bacteria is cultured in a certain medium that contains minute amounts of crude oil and enhanced with other bacterium nutrients. The “fittest” of the bacteria that survived were transferred to another type of medium with an elevated concentration of oil and lesser levels of its food. This process was repeated, transferring surviving bacteria in mediums that consistently had raised oil and diminishing nutrients. The only bacteria left were the ones able to survive in only oil. The next step for the scientists was to slowly “wean” the bacteria off oil and introduce them to coal, obliging the bacteria to use coal as the bacteria’s only food source.
The food source was not the only variable the team altered. They also experimented with the environment such as temperature, acidity and pressures. They eventually came up with strains of bacteria that were coal-adapted, such as strains from the species Leptospirillum ferrooxidans and Thiobacillus ferrooxidans, and others as well.
The bacteria works by breaking down the coal’s complex molecules into simpler ones and resultant removal of sulfur and other metal contaminants. The end result is cleaner coal, burning better than untreated coal and producing less environmentally unfriendly effects.
The scientists recommend using an amalgamation of the newly-adapted microbes for the best results. The “mixed culture” approach allowed for the specification of the microbial package. Read more