By Rick Jaworski, altenergytechnology.com
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.
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.
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.
Not the kind of news I would normally approve for the main page but I agree with Rick, this is important for the public to know. Vlad
