Experts from Belarus catch up on questions of the energy and raw material economy

Longer than planned, the eight-men delegation from Belarus visited the Geocompetence Centre Freiberg Ass. (GKZ) in Freiberg on 9^th May 2007. In an attractive ambience of the assembly hall of the Technical University Mining Academy Freiberg, the technical and managing personnel from the Academy of Sciences, private industry and high-level state institutions exchanged intensively with the members of the GKZ.

The Republic of Belarus is just before a profound change of its energy policy and works on a rapid utilisation of its local resources. The local energy supply still relies for the most part on the extensive peat exploitation (peat briquette), but now the state also wants to start developing the large brown coal occurrences and to improve the brown coal petro-chemically.

Therefore, the half-day discussions concentrated on questions of technology and expert exchange as well as joint ventures for the evaluation and development of the brown coal occurrences, potentials of near-surface and deep geothermics, geoinformatics, resource management and waste residual investigation. The cooperation shall start already in the education and advanced education. The prorector for external relations of the Technical University Mining Academy Freiberg, Professor Breitkreuz, presented a whole number of programmes and submitted concrete offers. By the introduction of the GKZ by its managing director, Dr Reimer, finally a convincing beginning to a lasting cooperation was finally made. Dr Barth from BEAK Consultants GmbH, who sovereignly moderated the meeting translating into Russian, presented first approaches of necessary achievements.

With the help of a new working group "Belarus", the GKZ - in cooperation with the delegates as well as the embassy of the Republic of Belarus in Berlin - wants to accomplish a first interest alignment in order to bring together the specialists and in order to answer the invitation from the delegation leader Dr Lishtvan by visiting Minsk, finally.