[Gasification] Carbon disposal in soils

[Art Krenzel]

I thought I might add a little "carbon fuel" to the debate of carbon's long term effect on soils.

Art Krenzel



Carbon Dioxide Scrubbing Technology. A Solution to Global Warming?
<http://altenergytechnology.com/>
Monday, August 07, 2006

It's not often you run into a technology that could literally change 
the world, but this week I may have during my visit to the Georgia 
Bioenergy Conference in Tifton GA. A small research company in Athens 
Georgia may have come up with a solution to the global warming 
problem and also the problem of food production. The company known as 
EPRIDA had a small table at the conference showing a technology they 
developed that can scrub coal fired plants of the majority of carbon 
dioxide as well as the sulfur and NOx in the flue gases. The 
byproduct of this scrubbing process is a carbon based fertilizer that 
they have proven is more effective then our current nitrogen based 
fertilizers. Danny Day the President of EPRIDA told me that they have 
shown this scrubbing technology to many people including Georgia 
Power (Southern Company). Southern Company and other coal based power 
utilities all over the world could definitely use the technology to 
significantly lower their CO2 emissions. Apparently they have shown 
in their lab that they can reduce CO2 flue emissions from a coal 
fired plant by as much as 60% with their carbon scrubber technology. 
No CO2 sequestration would be necessary as CO2 is converted to 
straight carbon that can be used as a fertilizer or simply buried 
without any concern of further leakage.

Coal plants are the largest source of CO2 emissions and being able to 
scrub the flue gases of coal plants for CO2 would be a huge 
breakthrough in the fight against global warming. But that's not all 
of it. The fertilizer that they produce from the process has been 
shown to turn infertile land into very fertile farmland. They have 
found that adding carbon to the soil in the form of charcoal, which 
is the byproduct of this process, works wonders and lasts almost 
indefinitely since the carbon absorbs nutrients keeping the soil 
continuously fertile.

<http://www.eprida.com/images/Eprida_soiltest4.jpg>
A test of EPRIDA's Charcoal Based Fertilizer Byproduct

I originally come from Winnipeg Canada and I've always been struck 
how Winnipeg's soil was so black and how fast things grew there even 
though the growing season is quite short. Robert Hawkins, EPRIDA's 
research scientist told me that this is because black soil has a much 
higher percentage of carbon then most soils. This carbon absorbs the 
various nutrients and keeps them in the soil. I guess it is like a 
carbon water filter absorbs impurities in water. They have done 
studies of fertility of high carbon black soil around the world and 
found this to be true. By adding carbon to the soil we can 
artificially increase the fertility. Unlike nitrogen based 
fertilizers the effect is long lasting and can last for 1000s of 
years.

So it appears with this technology we can take something bad, CO2 
pumped into the air, and turn it into something good, highly fertile 
soil, to help solve the global food problems. Hawkins told me that 
with this carbon fertilizer we can turn land unsuitable for farming 
into highly fertile farmland.

If that wasn't enough their system also produces biodiesel and 
hydrogen from biomass sources. Since the carbon has been removed from 
biomass to be used as the feedstock for the scrubbing process, the 
fuel produced has a negative carbon effect. Here is a link to a flash 
animation on EPRIDA's web site that explains the process. EPRIDA 
Process <http://www.eprida.com/eprida_flash.html>

So why doesn't everyone know about this? I'm not sure, but the world 
needs to know. I plan to write more about the technical aspects of 
the technology as I get more familiar with it in future postings on 
my website. I hope everyone that reads this will pass the information 
along to other people so we can help EPRIDA bring this technology 
into the mainstream.

This could be one of the biggest solutions we have to global warming 
and governments, industry and the public need to know about it.