BioChar 6: Paul Livingstone of R&D Magazine (created 8-28-09, typos fixed 8-29-09)

Earlier today, Paul Livingstone, editor of the R&D magazine, posted an interesting blog pointing out similarities between the government involvement in pushing ethanol and the soon to come government involvement in carbon sequestration. He pointed out some of the flaws of the ethanol movement, ("competition with food crops, low energy per square acre for corn-based production") and suggested that the flaw of carbon sequestration is "there is no direct economic impact of storing carbon (it won’t actually produce anything useful, unless we find a way to use porous rock filled with CO2)". Paul's entire blog can be viewed at http://www.rdmag.com/Community/Blogs/RDBlog/Carbon-sequestration--the-ethanol-of-the-next-decade-/

I posted the following as a comment to his blog.

Actually we have a use for something even better than porous rocks filled with CO2, it's called biochar. And it's a natural or man-made product. In the spring when farmers burn off the dead grass in the road side ditches, the black residue is not ash. Ash is grey. The black residue is biochar, charcoal made from biological material.

On the great plains of North America, the natural grass wildfires left this biochar and it accumulated over thousands of years, helping to create some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. If not pyrolyzed, the grass litter is acted on by microbes and nearly 100% of the carbon is returned to the atmosphere in 5 years. If pyrolyzed during the grass fire, about 25% of the carbon removed from the atmosphere during the photosynthesis remains as biochar.

Biochar is chemically stable in the soil for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. It has been effectively returned to the lithosphere.

This natural process can be part of modern agriculture. Agricultural waste can be pyrolyzed producing biochar. The biochar when mixed with compost and added to forest or farmland dramatically increases the fertility the soils. The biochar acts as reservoir for both water and fertilizer. The soil tolerates droughts better and less fertilizer needs to be added which means less fertilizer leaches past the root zone to contaminate ground water.

The process of pyrolyzation is exothermic. This released heat can be used for heating and perhaps for the generation of electricity.So agriculture can be done in a carbon-negative fashion. This isn’t just carbon-neutral, but actually carbon-negative. More carbon is stored as charcoal in the soil than was released to grow the food. This can create a new product for farmers to sell, the biochar. It might allow farmers to generate and sell clean electricity.

On August 9 – 12, 2009, in Boulder, CO, there was the first North American Biochar Conference. The Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, spoke at it. He summed up the potential of biochar nicely. It can provide a new source of income for rural areas. It can help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It can help ecologically dispose of our agricultural waste. It can make help rebuild the topsoil of our farmlands. And it can remove carbon which is already in the atmosphere (carbon-negative), not just remove carbon we are currently putting into the atmosphere (carbon-neutral).

Perhaps the recent trends in climate are not human caused global warming. Perhaps it is all normal changes we just aren’t clever enough to predict. Maybe the expansion of the great deserts and the melting of the ice caps are all natural. After all, we still don’t have consensus on what caused the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age. But wouldn’t it be nice if we were clever enough to find economical ways to control climate (even if it was a natural cycle) and we could prevent the wars and epidemics and extinctions that come with climate change (human or naturally caused).

We are that clever, and it is in the production of biochar. But the success of biochar depends on research and also on the energy bill that congress will pass this year. Congress controls too much money to be able to do the research needed in the timeframe needed without their help. Instead of another government dole out, this can be a win/win/win situation. And we need all the help we can get to help Congress pass a bill which allows this to happen. Perhaps you can help. For more information, I recommend starting at http://www.biochar-international.org/. Let me know if I can be of any other help to you.Posted by: Doug at 8/28/2009 11:25 PM