[Terrapreta] Chicken Litter Project & Potential of TP Sequestration

[Shengar at aol.com]

My News this week: 

A professor  at Virginia Tech will be  starting a pilot project at a poultry 
farm near me next month.
Please contact  me if any of you are interested in joining me on a field trip 
to Dayton VA. to  see Dr. Foster A Agblevor's chicken litter pyrolysis 
project. 
I will set a  date dependent upon the folks who contact me. 
If any need a place to stay  I've got plenty of room.
I will post more specs on Foster's project as I get  them.

I feel like Dorothy in OZ,,,,,,,,, Who knew after all my searching's that  
this would fall into my own back yard.......there IS no place like  home!

I have also made contacts and generated interest with several people at the  
Center for Innovative Science and Technology CISAT and James Madison 
University.  Primary among these people is Dr. Wayne Teel who tells me he has several  
students wanting to do projects in this area. 

Chicken litter is a  big management problem in the Shenandoah Valley and 
consequently the  Chesapeake Bay.




The reason TP has elicited such interest in the Agricultural /  horticultural 
side of it's benefits is this one static:

1 gram of  charcoal cooked to 650 C has a surface area of 400 m2, now for 
conversion  fun;

One ton of charcoal has a surface area of 400,000 Acres!! which is  equal to 
625 square miles!!

Now at a field application rate of 2 lbs/sq  ft (which equals 1000 sq ft/ton) 
or 43 tons/acre, this yields 26,000 Sq miles of  surface area per Acre. 
(Virginia is 39,594 sq. miles)

What this suggest  to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts 
of carbon just in the  soil alone, without counting the forest on top.

To take just one fairly  representative example, in the classic Rothampstead 
experiments in England where  arable land was allowed to revert to deciduous 
temperate woodland, soil organic  carbon increased 300-400% from around 20 t/ha 
to 60-80 t/ha (or about 30-40 tons  per acre) in less than a century 
(Jenkinson & Rayner 1977). The rapidity  with which organic carbon can build up in 
soils is also indicated by examples of  buried steppe soils formed during 
short-lived interstadial phases in Russia and  Ukraine. Even though such warm, 
relatively moist phases usually lasted only a  few hundred years, and started out 
from the skeletal loess desert/semi-desert  soils of glacial conditions (with 
which they are inter-leaved), these buried  steppe soils have all the rich 
organic content of a present-day chernozem soil  that has had many thousands of 
years to build up its carbon (E. Zelikson,  Russian Academy of Sciences, pers. 
comm., May 1994). _Quaternary carbon storage in global ecosystems_ 
(http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon1.html) 
 
 
Next week: 
My look into the issue of Mercury  and  Ammonia  Scrubbing technology of Coal 
fired power plant CO2 emissions.
 
Cheers,
Erich
 
Erich J.  Knight 
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar at aol.com
(540)  289-9750
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