BlueInGreen Hooks Into Solution for Oklahoma’s Trout

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Engineers install BlueInGreen’s SDOX system near Tenkiller Dam

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – BlueInGreen LLC, a company affiliated with the University of Arkansas, is helping the “Trout Capital of Oklahoma” keep its title.

The water-quality management firm, in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Southwest Power Administration and the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, installed a supersaturated dissolved oxygen system (SDOX) this summer at Tenkiller Dam in Gore, Okla.

The SDOX machine is injecting dissolved oxygen into the lower half of the Illinois River below the dam to keep the prized trout there healthy and thriving. Trout are cold-water fish, but when the weather is hot and dry in the summer, warm water is released through the dam into the river, making it difficult for the trout to survive.

Clay Thompson, senior engineer for BlueInGreen, said that at certain times of the year, dissolved oxygen in the water is critical for the trout fisheries below dams in the southeast.

“It happens in Arkansas, as well,” Thompson said. “So the Corps of Engineers, at lakes where they have these artificial trout streams below their dams, have tried to come up with various ways of putting dissolved oxygen in the river so they don’t kill the fish.”

The University of Arkansas System’s statewide Division of Agriculture holds the patent on the SDOX system. Nearly a decade ago, the division issued an exclusive license to BlueInGreen to commercialize the SDOX technology.

BlueInGreen, located at the Arkansas Research and Technology Park, was founded in 2004 by U of A professors Scott Osborn and Marty Matlock, who hold appointments in the Division of Agriculture, the College of Engineering and Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural Food and Life Sciences.

Osborn said, “I am amazed at how BlueInGreen has grown from an idea to the research and development stage in University of Arkansas labs to a company that is solving water-quality problems across the country. At the ribbon-cutting event for the new SDOX unit at Tenkiller Dam, one of the speakers was the mayor of Gore. He said that Gore is known as the ‘Trout Capital of Oklahoma’ and that he believed that the SDOX project was saving his town. That is real impact on real people.”

BlueInGreen had demonstrated its SDOX technology for Southwest Power and the Corps of Engineers at the North Fork of the White River below Norfork Dam in north Arkansas, Thompson said. At Tenkiller, Southwest Power purchased the system and the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife and Conservation is going to operate and maintain it.