Bio-char: Black is the new Green

The inspiration for today's post comes from this past weekend's Financial Times article, Can You Dig It ? (Subscription might be needed - contact me - oduorb[at]newenergista.com - if you need me to forward it to you).

What is Bio-char?
Charcoal made from plants for the sake of storing land. The paradox of soil as a carbon capturing medium is that the carbon gets released as soon as one ploughs the ground.

So what is so attractive about Biochar?

• Carbon stored in Biochar can be stored for hundreds of years.
• By-products from char production have many uses: 1/3 could go to create char, 1/3 to produce syngas that could be used to generate electricity and the other 1/3 to create a crude product substitute (Plastic is still here to stay :-))
• Biochar is actually fertilizer and so could reduce the use of nitrogen based fertilizers that
  

There is an excess of 4bn tonnes of carbon each year so there needs to be a method to help in absorbing some of that carbon. To quote the article:

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions have to peak in the period 2015 to 2020 if we are to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. On present projections, that will be impossible - unless a way can be found to make available cheap, easy methods of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and of generating clean electricity in ways that can be adopted around the world much more quickly than current renewable technologies.

According to Johannes Lehman of Cornell University, Biochar could reduce between 5.5bn and 9.5bn tonnes of carbon from the air each year. But this is assuming that there is the ability to produce so much biochar from the world's land resources.

Another issue is as quoted from the article:

The problem is twofold: developing a model for biochar production that reliably reduces greenhouse gases but is easily replicable in small farms in poor countries; and in the developed world, changing the business model of large farms so that collecting and cooking their waste is a better option than not. The huge US agribusinesses may be good candidates to start using their waste to make char but they are likely to need financial incentives before they begin to see the point. The poor farmers of the developing world might be glad of the husbandry advice and techniques that would help them revitalise their own soils with biochar, but how to reach them all? That may prove impossible.

But the thing is that this might be an actually viable technology and I think that communication and rolling it out, especially to poor farmers in the third world should be tackled.