BioChar 3: (created 8-9-09)

Today is Sunday and the first day of the North American Biochar Conference-2009. It's appropriate that a group of people all hoping to save the planet would start work on a Sunday.

Today we toured the production facilities of Biochar Engineering in Golden, Colorado and they demonstrated the making of biochar from woodchips. They are a startup company and their first system ships tomorrow. It is capable of turning 1000 lbs. of wood chips into 200 lbs. of biochar every hour.

I met people from all over the world. There is Mike from southern California. He was a dry dairy farmer and got out of farming because he couldn't stomach the practices the farmers have to do to make a living; specifically, the over application of dairy farm manure to farm fields. He has been trying to make a biochar system to turn dairy manure into biochar which wouldn't have the over application problem.

J. Steven B. works for a company looking for the biomass problem of sugar cane production. Before sugar cane is harvested, the top 1/3 of the plant is cut off and left on the ground. It is mostly leaves with little sugar. The rest of the plant is harvested and brought to the processing facility to extract the sugar. The third of the plant left on the ground is just open burned on the ground to ash. And there are growing air quality concerns with this practice. The rest of the plant is processed by squeezing out the sugar containing liquid. The left over dried stalk material is called bagasse and there is a lot of it. They can burn it for the heat to run the sugar cane mill. Some companies are using it to make disposable food storage boxes, to replace Styrofoam boxes restaurants put your leftovers in. Steven is checking out if biochar would be a good product to make from the bagasse.

There was a demonstration of TLUD stoves. TLUD is Top Lit UpDraft stoves. These are simple devices being promoted for the third world to create a relatively clean burn of scraps of organic matter to both release heat for cooking and to create biochar which either be sold as charcoal, or worked into their garden soil. They are also being targeted in this country for campstoves.

Most of today was spent giving us time to learn a little about each other. Every conference I've ever been to before we were giving about 30 minutes. Today, we had 8 hours. It was excellent. I'm excited for more.

Bye for now, Doug