Biochar=biofuel: NO. In our research, this is the #1 criticism of the biochar concept, and unfortunately it is very misguided. It stems from the criticisms of 1st-generation biofuels– namely that they use food based feedstocks, have a low or negative energy balance and are generally unsustainable. We agree that 1st-gen biofuels are highly problematic, but to equate them with biochar and pyrolysis is simply not correct.

First of all, the majority of biochar advocates promote the use of agricultural wastes as a feedstock. Ag wastes are NOT FOOD. Instead, they are products that are typically mulched, composted or simply left in-field to rot.

Second, there are many different types of pyrolysis processes and technologies that produce varying quantities of biochar, combustible gas and bio-oil. Slow pyrolysis technologies produce primarily biochar, while fast pyrolysis technologies are designed to produce bio-oil. Bio-oil is not biodiesel nor is it ethanol. It is a hydrocarbon emulsion that can act as a low grade heating oil or bunker fuel substitute. Many groups are working on technologies to refine bio-oil into high-value chemicals or transportation fuels. In general, most fast pyrolysis plants have a parasitic load between 10 and 25%. This means that only 10-25% of the energy produced is used to power the pyrolyzer, making the process highly efficient.

How can burning wood be carbon negative? This issue has come up frequently on the blogosphere as well, and again demonstrates many of the problems that come from misinformation. The skeptics are correct: combustion of wood (burning) is carbon positive. However, biochar is NOT made by burning wood. Biochar is produced via a process called pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is a carbon negative process, meaning upwards of 90% of the CO2 that would be released through combustion is captured as biochar.

Okay but what if you burn the biofuel…. I mean bio-oil? Yes, combustion of bio-oil in an engine, boiler or turbine will release CO2. However, in general these emissions are more than offset by the carbon that is sequestered in the biochar. In addition, bio-oil combustion results in remarkably low emissions of NOx and SOx. Finally, remember that bio-oil is produced from waste which would otherwise decompose completely into CO2 and methane.

Industrial Scale Biochar Production will result in deforestation: UNLIKELY. This is the argument leveled by George Monbiot which has appeared to spark the Biochar Wars. To his credit, Monbiot is correct that industrial scale biochar production could provide an incentive for land-clearing in the developing world. If biochar were accepted under the Clean Development Mechanism as a bankable carbon offset, and if the price of carbon were high enough to justify it, farmers could be incentivized to generate as much biochar as humanly possible.

However, there is a glaring problem with Monbiot’s argument. Currently, there are a handful of companies developing pyrolysis technologies, and a slightly larger handful of scientists who support biochar. Of these two handfuls, we cannot find anyone that is advocating industrial scale biochar. Why? Because everyone in the biochar community already knows it won’t work.

The scientists know that industrial scale biochar production is simply unsustainable. The entrepreneurs know that unless the price of a carbon offset were astronomically huge, there is no way large-scale biochar production would make any economic sense. The cost of transporting a low-value, low-density product like biomass over a distance greater than a couple of kilometers is herculean. This reality is part of what has damned 1st-gen biofuels. The biochar concept works with agricultural waste on the small scale, because these are products that farmers already collect and move to a centralized location for mulching and composting. On the industrial scale, the economics simply don’t work. They never have and they never will.

If, for some reason, the price of carbon did increase 100 fold, it would also allow a host of other dubious offsets to become economically viable. Given that the price of 1 tonne of CO2 currently hovers around $20-30 in Europe, we just don’t see that happening.

Biochar is not a longterm carbon storage mechanism: VISIT THE AMAZON BASIN. There, you will find an intact layer of charcoal in the soil roughly the size of France. Biochar has been shown to be stable in soils for up to 2000 years. That is an order of magnitude longer than any other carbon storage technology.

We hope this article will clear up some of the misinformation surrounding biochar. Obviously, people are weary of any new solution to climate change after the promises of biofuels, wind and solar. Still, let’s not jump to conclusions and make biochar the next betamax. As of yet, it is the only technology that has shown any promise at reducing our concentration of atmospheric CO2. If we ever want to get back below 350 ppm, let’s give biochar a chance.

Ashoka: Innovators for the Public are hosting Tech 4 Society, a conference exploring technology, invention and social change, in Hyderabad, India, in February 2009. Find out more about the conference here. This blog post is an entry in their competition to find the official blogger to travel to and cover the event.

Technorati Tags: biochar, biochar wars, criticism, debate, truth

On June 18, Cornell Associate Professor of Soil Fertility Management/Soil Biogeochemistry and author of Biochar for Environmental Management: Science and Technology (referred to by some as the Bible of Biochar) Dr. Johannes Lehmann testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The hearing, Global Warming’s Growing Concerns: Impacts on Agriculture and Forestry, featured Dr. Lehmann as an expert on Biochar and its potential usages in staving off the effects of climate change through government legislation and sanctions.  He explained to members of the committee the basics of biochar but, what’s more, he also identified the most significant hurdles standing in the way of biochar reaching its highest potential.  Biochar has become an enormously popular.  The benefits of its usage are becoming more widely known everyday. Still, certain hurdles exist that congress can help to address.  The following is an excerpt from his testimony submitted to the committee:

“Current hurdles to implementation are: availability of pyrolysis units at sufficient maturity to allow all necessary research and development, and, as a direct consequence, a lack of demonstrated carbon trading activities; of sufficient development of best biochar practices at scale of implementation, including farm scale; and of demonstration of soil health benefits for the full spectrum of agroecosystems. The distributed nature of biochar systems and the potential for variability between systems create significant opportunities for sustainability, but also hurdles to widespread adoption, regulation, and financial viability.

“Establishment of policies at national and international levels is required to remove hurdles to implementation and support full evaluation of biochar systems. Mechanisms for carbon trading that recognize soil carbon sequestration, including biochar
sequestration, need to be put into place. Methodologies must include full life cycle accounting of emissions balances to deliver net climate benefits. The entire value chain of mitigation approaches must be recognized, to reward those activities that have multiple environmental and societal benefits. Biochar must not be an alternative to making dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions immediately, but it may be an important tool in our arsenal for combating dangerous climate change.”

Just three days prior to Lehmann’s testimony, committee member Henry Waxman (CA-30) and global warming committee chair Ed Markey (MA-7) successfully passed their clean energy bill H.R. 2454 in the House (more on H.R. 2454 later).  Although Lehmann was unable to provide testimony before the bill had been written and marked up, his words will hopefully be influential in the creation of further energy stipulations and policies released by the EPA in the coming months, as the bill does require that the Energy Secretary and the EPA take specific action to further our efforts in combating climate change.  Dr. Lehmann was clear in emphasizing that carbon sequestration through pyrolysis and biochar must be worked into the developing structure of our cap and trade system (which was just mandated in H.R. 2454 – now on its way to the senate).

Technorati Tags: biochar, Climate Change, lehmann, politics, Testimony, US Congress, Waxman

Update: There has been some confusion regarding how to vote, so we’ve added the following tutorial.

1. Click here.
2. Click ‘register’ in the “My Account” toolbar at the top of the page.
3. Enter your email address, name and a password in the following screen and click ‘register now.’ (NAU will not spam you, and you can enter any email you like. There is no email verification step.)
4. Ignore the screen called “Account Details” and press back on your browser until you return to the original screen with our grant page. You do not need to enter any additional personal information to vote.
5. Once you are back at the voting page, click the appropriate number of stars (we like 5!) and your vote will be recorded. Please feel free to vote for the other projects as well. Thanks for voting!

Portland, OR based clothing company Nau recently announced a $10,000 grant that will be awarded to an indvidual whose work is making a positive impact on the world.  Nau produces and sells sustainable men’s and women’s clothing.

Jason Aramburu, re:char founder, was nominated for his work with biochar and his commitment to environmental problems.  re:char, as readers may already know, is an effort to promote low-cost, sustainable production of biochar and pyrolysis technologies.  We are part technology company and part information source, providing up-to-date information and commentary on the nascent world of biochar.  It is our hope that integration of biochar production into existing farming and recycling infrastructures can contribute to cleaning up the world and to promoting a new outlook on the individual’s contribution in doing so.

Finalists for the grant will be chosen via online voting. If successful, re:char will use the grant funds to build four new pyrolyzers in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Friends (or acquaintances) of re:char or members of the re:char team are encouraged to vote for Jason and re:char here.  A new window should open, click on “register” at the top of the page (you only have to enter your name and email address; you won’t get spam!), and after registering click on the tab “The Collective” to vote.  We sincerely appreciate the support!

Technorati Tags: G4C, grant, NAU, re:char

The Times UK recently reported on our former Vice President’s remarks at an environmental conference in at the Smith School in Oxford.  He made several key points with regards to soil carbon:

(1) “There is three times as much carbon [sic] in the first two meters of soil than there is in all of the world’s vegetation.”
(2) “Soil is the third-largest natural store of carbon in the world after the oceans and fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.”
(3) The misuse of land through over-farming, desertification, and “the burning of peatland…is responsible for as much as 30 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, more than either deforestation, power generation or transport.”

Gore recognizes that our approach to soil carbon will be integral in curbing – and even reversing – damage to our atmosphere caused by greenhouse gas emissions.  Several members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were present at the Oxford conference. Biochar is currently on the agenda for the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. We hope that the further support from change agents and politicians such as Mr. Gore will further raise the profile of biochar as a verifiable carbon offset mechanism.

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, biochar, politics, UN

re:char recently caught up with Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at a high-profile demonstration against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining in Southern West Virginia. Dr. Hansen discussed his opinions on biochar, and the need for better agricultural practices which sequester carbon rather than release it. This brief interview was shot shortly before Dr. Hansen delivered a message to the management and staff of Massey Energy highlighting the devastating environmental impact of mountaintop removal. According to Dr. Hansen, Moutaintop Removal (MTR) involves the destruction of entire mountaintops, turning them into rubble which is deposited in nearby valleys. The process provides less than 7% of the nation’s coal, but creates irreversible environmental damage. After delivering this message, Dr. Hansen was arrested along with actress Daryl Hannah and 30 other climate activists for trespassing on Massey Energy’s property and obstructing traffic.

Technorati Tags: biochar, climate, Coal, James Hansen, Mountaintop Removal

Dr. James Lovelock, climate change visionary and originator of the Gaia Hypothesis recently spoke to KUOW in Seattle about climate change, biochar and the future of the human race. We’ve linked to the podcast of the interview below, as it provides a lovely and elegant explanation of the biochar concept, and how it can be used to turn back the clock on climate change. Fast forward to Minute 32 to listen to Lovelock’s thoughts on biochar. We’ve copied some choice quotes below.

[audio http://www.kuow.org/mp3high/mp3/WeekdayA/WeekdayA20090615.mp3]

KUOW: Today, when you travel around, you look at the world– what is your biggest fear?

Lovelock: My biggest fear is the death of most of the people I see, prematurely, before their natural time.

Lovelock: You’ve got to get the CO2 out of the atmosphere somehow. There are all sorts of schemes, like, getting coal burners to sequester the CO2 that comes out of the stacks and bury it into the ground. This is moonshine. It’s expensive and will never be done on a scale that will make a damn bit of difference to climate change.

Lovelock: You’ve got to do something that’s massive in scale– beyond human efforts. The only thing there is is to use the biosphere itself.

Lovelock: One way to do this is to take the plant products that the biosphere makes from the CO2, and instead of letting animals and us and bacteria eat them, (which would put the CO2 back into the atmosphere within the year), let’s take the plant products and turn them into charcoal. If we do this, charcoal is like gold, it’s almost indestructible… Once we’ve turned it into charcoal that CO2 is taken out of the air for good.

Lovelock: Each farm will have a charcoal generator, and each farmer will put all of the stuff that isn’t food into this charcoal generator. Each year he will have a harvest of charcoal which he will plow back into his fields. In addition to that, he would get a small byproduct of biofuel (bio-oil) which he could sell, or use to drive his tractor.

Lovelock: You don’t do daft things, like planting a forest of trees to turn it to charcoal.. that’s silly. You leave the natural ecosystems where they are alone to do their good job, but you’ve gotta grow food for farming.

Lovelock: Once we start farming the sea, and using the algae for food and fuel, then we can produce charcoal on a grand scale.

Technorati Tags: biochar, climate, geoengineering, lovelock, podcast

Democratic Republic of the Congo

re:char friends The Biochar Fund recently won a €300,000 grant from the Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF) to impliment the biochar concept in 10 villages  in the Equateur Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Biochar Fund team believes the project provides further scientific validation of the biochar concept, and will help to reduce deforestation, poverty and food scarcity in the Congo Basin. From Mongabay:

“We are very excited about our successful selection by the CBFF,” said Laurens Rademakers, managing director of Biochar Fund. “It means that the biochar concept is scientifically sound and may help alleviate multiple environmental, social and economic crises amongst the world’s absolute poorest people, while at the same time protecting a unique ecosystem that serves humanity as a whole: the rich forests of the Congo Basin. Moreover, our strategy is innovative because it does not force people out of their traditional livelihoods in the name of conservation, as some other concepts do.”

We wish The Biochar Fund team the best of luck in this venture. The biochar concept presents some of the greatest hope for improving the lives of the millions of people living far below the poverty line in the Congo Basin.

Technorati Tags: Africa, biochar, biochar fund, Congo, grant

“What we do in the next two to three
years will determine our future. This
is the defining moment.”

– Rajendra Pachauri,
director of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change

The story that defines what we might do has been
emerging from Brazil.

It’s a golden opportunity.

First, the story…

Once upon a time, way back in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana was the first European explorer to travel up the Amazon River and into the Rio Negro, a huge tributary, upriver from present-day Manaus. The exploration reached perhaps some 1500 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. For Orellana and his unfortunate companions it was a terrible trip plagued with every kind of adversity which, in the end, left him as the sole survivor to return to the Court of the King of Spain to tell the story.

But what a story it was. We might even speculate that Orellana survived the ordeal in order to complete his mission of telling of having found Eldorado — fantastic golden cities in the heart of the forest of the New World. Orellana reported something even more unbelievable than gold — there was an advanced indigenous civilization with many high density human settlements. Huge Indian populations were living along the waterways of Amazônia and, according to Orellana, at one place there was a city of continuous side-by-side houses stretching for twenty miles. His tale was both fantasic and fabulous. I doubt that the Spanish Court could really embrace the thought of a civilization more advanced than their own but they sure could imagine the gold.

Gold lust inspired many later adventures across the New World but none could find the fabled Eldorado. It was nearly a century later that missionaries came to the region explored by Orellana, but they reported finding only small nomadic bands of hunter-gathers roaming the forest. The obvious conclusion was that Orellana had fabricated a great tale to mask his own failed expedition. And, much later, a whole generation of modern scientists confirmed the implausibility of an Eldorado in the forest by noting that the nutrient poor Amazon soils could not have supported a large-scale agriculture which is the prerequisite of civilization.

But this “well etablished view” that the Amazon basin could not have contained large human populations has started to crumble. First with new research in Bolivia and, more recently, in central Amazõnia, scientists are discovering tell-tale signs of ancient large-scale populations. The indians appear to have figured out how to transform the nutrient-poor yellowish soils into deep deposits of an extremely fertile dark earth called terra preta de indio. What are these tell-tale signs? Terra preta soils are loaded with pottery sherds and charcoal. The pieces of ceramic are in the contour of large pots and vessels that could have been used only by stationary populations. And the charcoal — apparently char from cleared forest — has been ground into small pieces indicating that these soils were “made” by the local residents.

The resulting soils are amazingly fertile — sometimes producing nearly 800% more plant growth compared with nearby untreated soil — and clearly capable of supporting a large-scale agriculture. Also anthropologists have found at least one small tribe with an hierarchical cultural structure suggesting a distant past of living among large sedentary populations and not always as nomadic hunter-gathers.

Recent efforts to map the areas of terra preta soils along the Tapajos River have unearthed esquisite 2000 year-old pottery. Carbon dating of soils in some other areas suggest that they may be 2500-4000 years old — and still fully fertile which is extraordinary in the Amazon where heavy rainfall typically leaches the nutrients out of the soils rather quickly. Interestingly, the mapping efforts are revealing a close correspondence with the Eldorado areas talked about by Orellana.

So what happened to these lost civilizations? No one knows for certain. There’s little hard evidence because there is no stone in the area and the wooden structures were quickly reclaimed by the tropical forest. But the best speculation is that the first European expeditions carried in diseases — smallpox, measels, flu, even the common cold — to a population that had so harmoniously co-evolved with its niche that it had no disease … and no need for immunity. After a catastrophic die-off there were only a few survivors who had devolved back into hunter-gathers. The sole legacy of the civilization remained hidden in the soil.

Today, in some areas, terra preta is harvested and sold as potting soils. If a limited amount (about 20 cm deep) is retained and the area then left fallow it will grow back to full depth in about 20 years. Apparently — get this! – terra preta soils develop into organic communities that are capable of growing like a biotic culture as in sourdough bread or yogurt, truly a living earth.

Five years ago, England’s BBC did a special TV documentary called The Secret of Eldorado that concluded with these words: “So there is a true irony to the story of the hunt for El Dorado. There was once a great civilisation in the Amazon, one the Europeans destroyed even as they discovered it, but the Amazonians may have left us a legacy far more precious than the gold the Conquistadors were seeking. That black earth, the terra preta, may mean a better future for us all.”

A golden opportunity.

At the time of the 2002 BBC documentary, a better future was understood as gaining the ability to BOTH save the rainforest and feed more people. But, now, global warming has added an incredibibly important new dimension — the need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it somewhere. This is exactly what terra preta does because 1) plants that grow faster, also remove CO2 from the atmosphere faster and 2) if the agricultural waste (unused portions of the plants) are made into charcoal, it can be used to renew the soil and sequester carbon.

The result of such a system would mean better soil, more food, cleaner fuel, less deforestation and, if Kyoto is revised to include payment for carbon negative sequestration in the soil, developing countries like Brazil and poor farmers everywhere will be paid to save the earth, while growing both food and fuel. This is why terra preta is being called the “new black gold”.

Everyone, who thinks of Brazil, knows of its gifts of samba and soccer which are world renown. But Brazil is also the place where the gift of light emerges out of darkness. When gold was discovered in the state of Minas Gerais, it was given the name ouro preto (black gold) because the nuggets had a dark coating. Later, when a statue of the Virgin with dark skin was discovered in a river bed, it was named, Nossa Senhora Conceição de Aparecida (Our Lady of Conception who Appeared) because it appeared to have wish-granting and healing powers. And, for me, this image is one of the great symbols of the fertility and abundance of Mother Earth.

This Black Madonna became the patroness of Brazil and the center of the largest healing shrine in the world. Perhaps She is also a powerful symbol for the possibility of healing the earth.

Nowadays, we have the rediscovery of an empowering dark earth brew called terra preta, along with speculation of an ancient and highly advanced Indian civilization. Perhaps terra preta will be Brazil’s greatest gift yet to the world. Perhaps we can all spread the story about how there once was a time when large numbers of people lived in a bountiful harmony with the earth in a place called Eldorado and that, with love and care and attention, we can repeat the performance.

Here are links to more information:

Australian Broadcasting Company video (11 min) about the global terra preta movement.

GREAT BBC Documentary “The Secret of El Dorado” (49 min video)

Full transcript of BBC El Dorado documentary.

Easy to read primer on Terra Preta.

Expandable Google map of Terra Preta sites.

Pdfs of the best magazine articles.

Continuous updates of all relevant links.

How biofuels can become carbon-negative and save the planet.

US Senator introduces bio-char legislation.

Research confirms bio-char in soil increases yields.

Biopact on the IPCC bio-fuel recommendations.

UPDATE: This post has been linked in a roundup by Global Voices Online, and translated to Portuguese here.

Technorati Tags: amazon, amazonia, biochar, re:char fellows, terra preta

Our friends over at Worldchanging just posted a cartoon describing biochar and its benefits, created by cartoonist Andy Lubershane. The post alludes to some of the criticism surrounding industrialized production of biochar, and raises some interesting points of debate in the comments:

I have a belief that biochar can be employed wisely.It is up to the wall soon for all of us as these times demand answers. Lets hope the world’s scoffers provide sufficient cushion against abuse of scale ,ed P

We are glad to see blogs like worldchanging talking about biochar in a fair and biased way. Of course there will be detractors as the biochar movement grows– we in the biochar community must remember that sustainable growth is important above all.