Mobile 'biochar' machine to work the fields
An ancient technique to fertilize soil by creating charcoal from plant waste is being revived to tackle some of today's environmental problems.
The latest company to pursue manmade charcoal, called biochar, is Biochar Systems, which has developed a biochar-making machine that can be pulled by a pickup truck. Two customers--a North Carolina farm and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management--will be begin testing the units this fall.
The unit, called the Biochar 1000, is designed to convert woody biomass, such as agricultural or forestry waste, into biochar, a black, porous, and fine-grained charcoal that can be used as a fertilizer. It uses pyrolysis--slowly burning biomass in a low-oxygen chamber--to treat 1,000 pounds of biomass per hour, yielding 250 pounds of biochar.
The Biochar 1000 converts agricultural wastes to charcoal, which is then added to soil, a process that enriches soil and removes carbon from air.
(Credit: EcoTechnologies Group)There still isn't a well established market for selling biochar, but there's growing interest among researchers in the process as a way to cut greenhouse gas concentrations. The United Nations has proposed classifying biochar as a carbon credit for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
When forestry or agricultural waste are converted into biochar and put into the soil, the carbon that would have been released through decomposition is held in the soil for hundreds or potentially thousands of years, say proponents.
A number of companies have formed to either create fertilizer or use modified machines to convert biomass into a liquid fuel such as methanol. The first U.S. biochar conference was held in Boulder, Colorado, two weeks ago, organized by the International Biochar Initiative industry group.
Tons of green waste
Biochar Systems, a joint venture created by BioChar Engineering and EcoTechnologies Group, has developed a mobile machine targeted at landowners or other organizations that generate a lot of "green waste," such as agricultural producers, nurseries, or land managers. The biochar can be used on-site as a soil amendment or moved and sold as a fertilizer, according to Fernando Migliassi, chief corporate development officer at EcoTechnologies Group.
The Bureau of Land Management will use one unit, which weighs 4,000 pounds and is 12 feet long, seven feet high, and five feet wide, to improve soil that has been damaged by mining, according to Biochar Systems. The North Carolina Farm Center for Innovation & Sustainability will use test a unit as well to see how agricultural waste can be converted into fertilizer.
The Biochar Systems Biochar 1000 costs $100,000 and is capable of turning out 1,000 tons of biochar a year.
Another unit will be tested by the Colorado State Forest Service to thin forests and treat the tons of wood infested by pine beetle into a soil amendment. Thinning forests manually is very expensive but the biochar machine could be a cheaper route.
"If this is feasible, it would allow us to manage a greater portion of forested lands that right now aren't cost effective," Joseph Duda, forest management supervisor for the Colorado State Forest Service told ClimateWire.
The U.S. produces 368 million tons of forest product waste a year and another 60 million tons a year of wood infested by the pine beetle, according to BioChar Engineering. Having a mobile unit reduces overall pollution as biomass doesn't need to be hauled for treatment at a centralized plant, according to the company.
But although it has potential to mitigate climate change, some people have warned against relying heavily on biochar as a carbon offset. The impact of biochar on land may have changed since the time thousands of years ago when people in Amazon region created charcoal, called terra preta.
"But despite its astounding potential, caution is warranted in implementing biochar on any sizeable scale. Though re-creating terra preta sounds simple, recent research suggests that modern-day soils may respond less well to the treatment and that the carbon may escape sooner than anticipated. On these questions alone, all of the evidence is not in," according to a recent editorial in the journal Nature Reports Climate Change.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
Biomass needs to be used to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Capturing carbon is great but eliminating new carbon release at the source is better.
Biotic Carbon, the carbon transformed by life, should never be combusted, oxidized and destroyed. It deserves more respect, reverence even, and understanding to use it back to the soil where 2/3 of excess atmospheric carbon originally came from.
Our farming for over 10,000 years has been responsible for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. This soil carbon, converted to carbon dioxide, Methane & Nitrous oxide began a slow stable warming that now accelerates with burning of fossil fuel. Agriculture allowed our cultural accent and Agriculture will now prevent our descent.
Wise Land management; Organic farming and afforestation can build back our soil carbon,
Biochar allows the soil food web to build much more recalcitrant organic carbon, ( living biomass & Glomalins) in addition to the carbon in the biochar.
Biochar, the modern version of an ancient Amazonian agricultural practice called Terra Preta (black earth, TP), is gaining widespread credibility as a way to address world hunger, climate change, rural poverty, deforestation, and energy shortages? SIMULTANEOUSLY!
Every 1 ton of Biomass yields 1/3 ton Charcoal for soil Sequestration (= to 1 Ton CO2e) + Bio-Gas & Bio-oil fuels = to 1MWh exported electricity, so is a totally virtuous, carbon negative energy cycle.
Biochar viewed as soil Infrastructure; The old saw;
"Feed the Soil Not the Plants" becomes;
"Feed, Cloth and House the Soil, utilities included !".
Free Carbon Condominiums with carboxyl group fats in the pantry and hydroxyl alcohol in the mini bar.
Build it and the Wee-Beasties will come.
Microbes like to sit down when they eat.
By setting this table we expand husbandry to whole new orders & Kingdoms of life.
Unlike CCS which only reduces emissions, biochar systems draw down CO2 every energy cycle, closing a circle back to support the soil food web. The "capture" collectors are up and running, the "storage" sink is in operation under our feet. Pyrolysis conversion plants are the only infrastructure we need to build out.
Another significant aspect of bichar and aerosols are the low cost ($3) Biomass cook stoves that produce char but no respiratory disease. http://terrapretapot.org/ and village level systems http://biocharfund.org/ with the Congo Basin Forest
Fund (CBFF). The Biochar Fund recently won $300K for these systems citing these priorities;
(1) Hunger amongst the world's poorest people, the subsistence farmers of Sub-Saharan Africa,
(2) Deforestation resulting from a reliance on slash-and-burn farming,
(3) Energy poverty and a lack of access to clean, renewable energy, and
(4) Climate change.
Soil Carbon Sequestration Standards Committee. Hosted by Monsanto, this group of diverse interests has been hammering out issues of definition, validation and protocol. The past week, this group have been pressing soil sequestration's roll for climate legislation to congress.
http://www.novecta.com/documents/Carbon-Standard.pdf
Along these lines internationally, the work of the IBI fostering the application by 20 countries for UN recognition of soil carbon as a sink with biochar as a clean development mechanism will open the door for programs across the globe.
http://www.biochar-international.org/biocharpolicy.html.
Reports:
This new Congressional Research Service report (by analyst Kelsi Bracmort) is the best short summary I have seen so far - both technical and policy oriented.
http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/R40186_20090203.pdf .
This is the single most comprehensive report to date, covering more of the Asian and Australian work;
http://www.csiro.au/files/files/poei.pdf
Biochar data base;
TP-REPP
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node
Given the current "Crisis" atmosphere concerning energy, soil sustainability, food vs. Biofuels, and Climate Change what other subject addresses them all?
Carbon to the Soil, the only ubiquitous and economic place to put it.
Cheers,
Erich
The first North American Biochar Conference, at CU in Boulder ,
Keynote speakers were Secretary Tom Vilsack & Dr. Susan Solomon (NOAA's head atmospheric scientist)
http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=684390
There is real magic coming out of the Asian Biochar conference.
15 ear per stalk corn with 250% yield increase,
Sacred Trees and chickens raised from near death
Multiple confirmations of 80% - 90% reduction of soil GHG emissions
The abstracts of the conference are at
http://www.anzbiochar.org/AP%20BioChar%20Conference-may09.pdf
I'd like to send you some info on agave as a cheap, renewable, reliable, low cost and very productive feedstock for biofuels production, and hear your comments.
One hectare of our enhanced agave variety annually produces from 300 to 500+ tonnes of biomass, with very high cellulose and sugars content.
Please email me at: agaveproject2@gmail.com Arturo
We are producing biochar here, and not some high precision pyrolysis or distillate products! Someone will surely build cheaper and more practical devices than this. For example, I have friends who made batch-operated gasifiers that produces fuel and biochar, but these gasifiers are made from recycled oil drums, doesn't cost more than $500 to build in countries like India and China.
If biochar enhances soil health so it absorbs even more carbon, or enhances plant growth better than energy-intensive fertilizer, then it could be better to bury than to burn. I haven't heard in news results of biochar productivity enhancement from scientifically controlled studies in peer reviewed journals-- just almost wild anecdotal claims. Where are the grants for study of biochar?
The biochar 1000 makes about 1000 kg (one tonne) of char from an 8 hour operation-- say $30/day if CO2 were $30/tonne, probably not enough to pay for the machine. A biochar plant is pretty expensive sequestration, if that is it's only value.
The other potential value is selling the biochar as fertilizer. Obviously, you can't find biochar as a soil amendment at gardening stores now but the hope is there will be a market for it.
!ton Biochar = 3.67 tons CO2,
It is a long-lasting soil amendment and in fact biochar doesn't degrade nor taken up (traps carbon in the soil almost forever), proof of which are the more than 5,000 year old Amazonian dark soils.
Research has shown biochar has a ph of 7.6. Most plants prefer it to be much closer to 6.0. If the soil has a ph of less than 6.0, biochar will make the soil more productive for most plants. It also has minerals good for plants.
Biochar must produce heat and other outputs, those should be captured and used.
It is better to continuously plow back the biochar to improve our soil than to completely burn it to ashes in order to get more energy from biomass. When you improve the soil, your farming costs goes way down, and your need to apply other pesticides and nematicides can be minimized. You are practically leaving better soils for the future generations instead of damaging the farmland with today's heavy input conventional farming techniques. The net carbon entrapment is just a side benefit.
An integrated system for export of heat / gas / oil energy will be the next iteration, external combustion engine gen-sets looks like the best route.
Remember , Pyrolysis, once started is an exothermic reaction so the gas / oil energy is all for export.
There are some people who make their own biochar in their garden on a very small scale. As I do this myself, I would be a lot happier if there was some where for me to purchase it instead. It's a bit like the chicken and the egg. Do you manufacture and then try to sell, or try to sell something not yet manufactured? The major problem here is that there is a need to tell people about it and how it works. I have only spoken to one person who had some vague knowledge of it, and needless to say I have now been spreading the word. People just cannot believe that it will work, and to make it more difficult it is impossible to purchase biochar so that they can be encouraged to try it themselves.
Neet looking machine, no better than a char Heep covered with earth if the energy released in pyrolysis is not harvested some way. We need the energy.
nor is biochar a fertilizer.
This is important to get right.
- by Agavelez August 30, 2009 1:07 PM PDT
- Hi all,
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(19 Comments)Just to let you know that agave is the ideal feedstock for biofuels production. One hectare of our enhanced agave annually yields from three to five hundred tonnes of biomass, with a higher cellulose content than any tree.
One hectare of our enhanced Agave varieties yield 3X more sugars than sugarcane in Brazil, 4X more cellulose than fast-growing eucalyptus and 5X more dry-bone biomass than the GMO poplar tree. Agave is the ideal feedstock for a biorefinery where electricity, and tens of biofuels and bioproducts are produced.
Our agave varieties thrive on marginal land -even on salty or acidic soils and steep hills- in all semiarid and temperate regions of the world (2/3 of the Earth's inhabitable land). Agave needs no watering (190mm of rain a year will sufice) nor agrochemicals, is easy to cultivate, very prolific (up to one million new plants per individual) and its cost of production can be as low as two US dollars per tonne.
I am interested in discussing a possible partnership to develop an agave-based biochar and biocoal business in India.
Best regards,
Arturo
agaveproject2@gmail.com