Dr. Carlos Santamarina of Georgia Tech. presented the 2014 Terzaghi Lecture at Geo-Congress 2014 entititled ‘Energy Geotechnology: Enabling New Insights Into Soil Behavior’. From the You-Tube summary:
Energy is critical to life, and the coming decades will see worldwide population growth and associated economic development that will result in a pronounced increase in energy demand. Historically, geotechnical engineering has been crucial to projects that have sustained societal transformations. Once again, geotechnical engineering has a central role to play in the evolving energy challenge, from resource recovery and infrastructure development, to energy storage and waste management. Examples during this lecture and details in the accompanying manuscript show that the emerging field of energy geotechnology drives us to reconsider the basic tenets of geotechnical engineering (such as soil formation, index properties, and classification), to extend our understanding of geomaterials (at high pressure and temperature, long time scales, and large number of repetitions), to recognize new phenomena (most often couplings between hydraulic, thermal, chemical, biological and mechanical processes, and various forms of localization), and to advance technological innovations for characterization (in situ, sampling, and laboratory) and monitoring.
[Source: Watch the 2014 Terzaghi Lecture on YouTube!. Image: YouTube]