ATHENS, Ga – The Energy and Carbon Utilization Symposium will be held at the University of Georgia June 10-11 at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. Bringing together energy producers and policy makers with agricultural ecologists, soil scientists, engineers and private-sector companies from around the world, the symposium will be a platform to present and discuss findings on sustainable energy and soil amendments with carbon utilization based on the anthropogenic Amazonian dark earths, known as Terra Preta.
By the end of the 19th century, the existence of dark earths in the Amazon, distinguished by their dark color and high fertility, had been widely reported. While their origins were not entirely clear, with speculation ranging from fallout from volcanoes to sedimentation in tertiary lakes, it is now widely accepted that these soils were not only used by the local population but were a product of indigenous soil management.
As the global carbon cycle has gained wider attention because of its importance for the global climate, the pendulum has swung toward methods to release or sequester carbon into the soil, and hence to the ancient practice that utilized carbon for its benefits to agriculture. UGA is the site of the major effort to sequester carbon as a soil amendment in the United States, with the biomass-pyrolysis biorefinery at the Bioconversion Research and Education Center, and so was the natural choice as a site for this conference. The pilot-scale biorefinery produces char that will sequester carbon lasting thousands of years as a byproduct from biomass refining.
“One of the objectives of the conference is to look at the market for carbon,” said Tom Adams, director of the UGA Engineering Outreach Service. “The science behind Terra Preta and introduction of the whole idea of using char versus other forms of carbon in agriculture is revolutionary in concept,” he said. Tours of the biorefinery will be part of the conference’s second-day activities.
Sponsored by the UGA Faculty of Engineering, the Georgia Industrial Technology Partnership and Eprida, a private-sector partner in the UGA biorefinery, the conference is focused on biomass technology for soil improvement that results in a sustainable means of producing renewable energy. Scientists from the United States, Asia and Europe will present papers on many various aspects of carbon utilization, from exploration of pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes to the latest findings in soil microbial fertility.
Christoph Steiner, a doctoral student in soil science from the University of Beyreuth, Germany, has studied nutrient and water fluxes near Manaus, Brazil, and will present his results at the conference. “We established a number of experiments recreating Terra Preta, testing char as soil conditioner,” Steiner said. “With significant increases in yield and shorter fallow periods, Terra Preta has great potential to reduce deforestation, nitrogen pollution of ground and surface water and global warming.”
For more information and to register for the conference, visit www.Georgiaitp.org/carbon.