A Charred Life 
The Old Man and the Secret
An eccentric Texas inventor discovered a magic formula he believed could save the earth. Fifteen years after his death, scientists and entrepreneurs are betting he was right.
Joe says: i heard they working a new type deal on the BP oil spill. Not sure if it is synthetic or organic. Anybody know what it is? DoctorPeppe@gmailcom (October 17th, 2010 at 3:30pm)
June 2010: More than 21 years ago, on March 24, 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska, permanently fouling the once-pristine Prince William Sound with more than 10 million gallons of crude oil. Senior executive editor Paul Burka suggested that I find out what could be done to clean up the next big oil spill, since virtually nothing tried in Alaska seemed to have worked. And thus began an initially frustrating but ultimately exhilarating year-long odyssey. Eventually, I got a tip about a little Texas company that had oil-eating microbes they asserted could digest the Valdez’s oily mess.
The bugs had been collected from across the globe by a University of Texas professor of microbiology and marine science since 1969. The Texas company claimed to have something else, a mysterious “biocatalyst” that could cause the microbes to rapidly multiply exponentially. If true, this would overcome the major problem facing those wanting to use microbes to clean up pollution—boosting the “biomass” so that clean-ups could be accomplished in weeks and months instead of months and years.
I discovered a few facts about the unnamed inventor—“the old man”—and these were sufficient to lead me to his name, his obituary, and his role co-founding another company, still extant, that produced a “soil activator” that appeared to work with soil microbes, much as the professor’s did for ocean-dwelling microbes. Eventually I found a handful of small companies in Texas alone with links to the old man that produced similar biocatalysts, commonly known as enzymes, that were used in agriculture, bioremediation of polluted sites, and sewage treatment. All seemed to have another property: They were said to produce a sequestered and highly reactive form of oxygen in prodigious amounts.
Is it possible that the answer to remediating BP’s Deepwater Horizon continuous oil spill has been hiding in plain sight in the pages of TEXAS MONTHLY for the past two decades? I think it is not only possible but also probable. On May 25, 2010, almost twenty years to the day after my story was published, Scientific American released a feature story online echoing the scientific consensus with this headline: “Slick Solution: How Microbes Will Clean Up the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.”
The experts’ conclusion: The microorganisms would operate very slowly, because the scientists quoted knew of no way to get the naturally occurring bugs to multiply faster and thus to do their work more rapidly. And they certainly didn't know about the “secret” Texas enzymatic biocatalyst that seemingly supercharged microbes to vastly increase their numbers and their apparent ability do to in months what might otherwise take years.
For more than sixty years, a handful of small Texas businesses have safely and effectively used the enzyme-producing, microbe-sparking process described in “The Old Man and the Secret” to cause naturally occurring microbes to multiply rapidly and do a variety of disagreeable jobs, including cleaning up oil-polluted water. Many pioneers of this process have died over the past twenty years since I wrote my piece. This remarkable knowledge of a relatively simple, cheap, and easy “silver bullet” that may yet undo much of the damage we have done to our planet is in danger of being lost.
If you want to get involved, consider writing a letter, or sending a copy of this story, to President Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and your members of Congress, and ask them to give this remarkable technology a prompt and rigorous scientific study.—Tom Curtis, June 8, 2010
No one seems to know for sure just where or when the old man discovered the secret of life, but my guess is that it was in El Paso, sometime between 1950 and 1953. James Francis Martin was already well into his fifties back then and had come back to live for a few years in the town where he was born. An archetypal American inventor in the tradition of Thomas Edison, he was a self-taught chemist, metallurgist, and naturalist who got no further in school than the fourth grade. Though he made his living traveling through the desert Southwest as a railroad fireman, Jim Martin’s lifelong passion was figuring out how to make things, things he often put together from ingredients he found in the natural world—a natural insect repellent for plants, a patented pollution-reducing muffler, a way to preserve fruit for years, a procedure for making synthetic opals, and an array of alloys.
But Jim Martin’s crowning achievement—an invention he often said was fifty years ahead of its time—was not fully accepted during his lifetime. From the early fifties to 1975, when he died in a small town in Central Texas, he worked relentlessly to bring his discovery to the world’s attention.
It was a colorless, odorless liquid he sometimes called “the living water.” It was derived from seawater, cow manure and yeast—simple ingredients that were transformed by a fermentation process into a substance with remarkable qualities. It could stimulate microbes that exist in nature to multiply rapidly and cleanse polluted water and soils, neutralize dangerous chemicals, eat sewage sludge, even make the desert bloom. Starting nearly forty years ago, Jim Martin demonstrated virtually all these uses, but he was ignored at the time. People just couldn’t believe that his innocuous-looking water was the environmental panacea he believed it to be.
Today at least Texas six companies are quietly peddling variations of Martin’s seminal breakthrough, even everywhere from the Middle East to your local garden shop. These substances only recently have come to be studied seriously by scientists impressed by their phenomenal abilities. Horticultural specialists and farmers have been struck by the power of these products, confirmed in controlled tests, to dramatically increase crop production and to stanch soil erosion. Others have noted their capacity to reclaim salt-stressed soils and allow crops to thrive with salt-water irrigation. Studies commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy have verified that microbes treated with a version of Martin’s water can boost oil production.
All of these products can be traced back to Martin, and some of the people making them knew Martin personally. One acquaintance refers to him simply as “the old man.” Over the years Martin’s name faded away, and so did claims that the substance could work near-miracles. Instead, the companies tailored Martin’s discovery for specific uses, mostly in agriculture and sewage treatment. And they stopped talking about Jim Martin all together.
Ultimately, though, several people who had worked with the old man did talk frankly. One of them, now in his eighties, told me about Martin’s conceptions of the secret of life—or, more precisely, the secret of how life as we know it arose on our planet. Billions of years ago when the Earth was new, when methane and ammonia and water surrounded the planet, something extraordinary happened to send oxygen rushing into the atmosphere. Martin believed his greatest breakthrough was figuring out that process and duplicating it in a remarkably simple invention that had profound implications.
Though several entrepreneurs told me that Martin’s process couldn’t be patented, Martin did in fact patent it. Then, as now, it was often relatively easy to make, and it incorporated astonishingly cheap and abundant raw materials. Scientists remain mystified about exactly how it works, but there is growing evidence that a backyard Texas inventor produced a wondrous elixir that may undo much of the damage man has done to his planet.
The Professor’s Problem
Carl Oppenheimer has been trying to perfect a way to use microbes to clean up oil spills since 1969, when President Nixon named him to the panel studying the disastrous Chevron blowout off Santa Barbara, California. A 68-year-old, two-time Fulbright fellow, Oppenheimer holds professorships in marine science and microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin. For much of his career, he has studied single-cell ocean-dwelling organisms that eat oil and have been doing so for eons. These bugs, which Oppenheimer carefully culls from petroleum-polluted areas around the world, gobble up the oil and leave behind harmless byproducts, including carbon dioxide and fatty acids.
The problem is that they take a very long time to do their job, if left to their own devices. Indeed, the main technological hurdle facing those who hope to profit by using biological means to clean up pollution—the new field called bioremediation—is this: how do you cheaply generate enough “biomass” of microbes to accomplish in months what would normally take nature years?
Oppenheimer learned the answer to that question back in 1984, following a West Texas hunting trip with William Blakemore, a Midland oilman-rancher who for many years was the commissioner of the Texas Department of Public Safety. One evening after the hunt, Oppenheimer mentioned his interest in using microbes to get hard-to-recover oils out of the ground and described the problems he had keeping them alive in the inhospitable brines down-hole.
Perhaps, Blakemore suggested tentatively, Oppenheimer might be interested in a remarkable biological catalyst he and some associates had been experimenting with since the early seventies. It seemed to help freshwater plants and fish tolerate salt water. It also helped some polluted areas cleanse themselves.
Blakemore had learned about the catalyst from a longtime friend, a Washington lobbyist and former Republican congressman from Memphis named Dan Kuykendall, whose late brother Tom had owned a Western Auto store in Hondo, a pleasant agriculture hub of six thousand people an hour west of San Antonio. Tom had heard about it directly from Jim Martin, who had moved to Hondo around 1960 and had died there in 1975. About 1970 Martin had begun telling Tom Kuykendall about his remarkable cleansing water, trying to get him involved in developing it commercially.
The Kuykendalls, Blakemore, and Martin had all been shareholders in a company called CLEW, which had paid Martin a modest retainer and, like several companies before it, had attempted to market Martin’s process. CLEW was formed in 1971, around the time Martin helped Tom Kuykendall set up a fermentation tank capable of supplying the living water to a seven-acre lagoon along Nonconnah Creek in Memphis, which had been fouled for thirty years by oily runoff from the Louisville and Nashville railyard. According to Dan Kuykendall, they returned the lagoon to health in just seven weeks. In 1972, the former congressman said, another tank that had been set up at the waste lagoon of the Frosty Morn Packing Company in Clarksville, Tennessee, eliminated a layer of grease and solids a foot and a half thick. But as had happened so often before, observers refused to believe that the watery catalyst had been responsible.
When Blakemore introduced Oppenheimer to Dan Kuykendall, now a Washington lobbyist, Kuykendall was wary. Kuykendall had been down this road with scientists many times before, and the talks always had come to nothing. Bluntly he asked: would Oppenheimer be willing to suspend disbelief and test some of this substance without knowing what it was or why it worked? “Don’t try to understand it,” Kuykendall cautioned. “Just use it.”
In early April 1984, Tom Kuykendall showed up in Austin and put a quart jar of what looked like water in Oppenheimer’s hands. For six weeks the professor performed a series of experiments in a make-shift garage lab. The test confirmed that the catalyst caused microbes to reproduce at about one thousand times the normal rate. Other tests showed that with help from the special liquid, freshwater microbes could survive in waters three and a half times saltier than the ocean.
Oppenheimer was elated. He recognized that the catalyst would make it economically feasible to cultivate enough of his own carefully selected bacteria to recover petroleum in played-out wells and fields. But he also saw myriad other uses, including getting the bugs to eat oil spills, sewage, and more intractable organic pollutants like PCBs. “The potential,” he told me, “is essentially unlimited.” Today Oppenheimer and Alpha are trying to persuade the federal government to employ microbes treated with Martin’s water, which Oppenheimer calls a biocatalyst, to digest what’s left of the Alaska oil spill. Oppenheimer joined with Blakemore and associates to form Alpha in 1985. By 1986 Alpha had already won the first of what would total nearly $800,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy after UT-Austin joined as a subcontractor. In effect, the funds subsidized research and development of one aspect of Alpha’s work-projects to demonstrate the effectiveness of Alpha’s catalyst-activated bacteria in boosting oil production, a field known in petroleum-industry jargon as MEOR (for Microbially Enhanced Oil Recovery).
Like some other oil-service companies, Alpha uses microbes in place of expensive “hot-oil” treatments to liquefy the paraffin that commonly gums up drilling pipe. But farther down-hole, the high salt and low oxygen concentration in the brine found in many formations inhibit the bugs’ growth.
Jim Martin’s catalyst lets the bacteria thrive under these tough conditions. Oppenheimer hypothesizes that somehow it produces atomic oxygen and gets it to the microorganisms—thus allowing oxygen-using bugs to operate in hostile environments where free oxygen is reduced or absent. It seems to do for the microbes more or less what a scuba tank does for a diver. Thus fortified, the bugs injected deep in oil formations position themselves at the interface between the rock wall and the oil, Oppenheimer believes, forcing the oil loose both by producing natural detergents and carbon dioxide and simply by growing between the rock wall and the oil.
Today, Alpha and its licensees are treating more than 2,500 wells in the U.S. and Canada with the company’s catalyst-fortified bugs. The bacteria, Oppenheimer says, boost yields an average of 30 to 40 percent; in some cases the increased oil flow is as high as 300 percent. Assuming that this still-experimental technique proves usable in enough wells, the potential market is huge. According to a 1987 report of the National Petroleum Council, 210 billion barrels of oil remaining in the ground of the United States can’t be removed by conventional secondary recovery techniques. That compares with 136 billion barrels that have been extracted over the past century. And that’s just in the U.S. Currently Alpha has an interest in a company that is negotiating with the Soviet Union to launch an enterprise to use its microbial process there. Essential to that process is Alpha’s biocatalyst. But even within Alpha little is known about the biocatalyst’s creator.
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