In Louisiana, Cool Planet Energy Systems CEO Howard Janzen, flanked by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, announced the company will build three bio-refineries in Louisiana with a capital investment of $168 million. The project will consist of modular biomass-to-gasoline refineries in Alexandria, Natchitoches and a site to be determined. ...
Its not hard to see why everyone has been excited — sometimes laced with skepticism — about Cool Planet. With claimed operating costs of $1.00 to $1.15 per gallon, and adding another 13 cents or so for the capital costs (amortized over 15 years) – well, you get the picture. It’s drop-in, renewable gasoline, in prospect, for about half the price of the incumbent fossil fuels.
Now those claims were built around – to some extent, an emerging feedstock, miscanthus. That was the secret sauce in reports of 4,000 gallons per acre yields for production of renewable gasoline, Ahem, there’s been a change.
Now, Cool Planet will harvest wood waste and forest byproducts to make gasoline at its initial commercial-scale facilities in Louisiana. Each bio-refinery will be capable of producing 10 million gallons of high-octane, low-vapor pressure gasoline for strategic distribution through existing market channels and for blending at Louisiana refineries.
The Climate Spectator has a report on a company looking to exploit biochar production for carbon credits - Landfill listing.
Landfill energy and biochar specialist Pacific Pyrolysis has decided to push the go button on its backdoor listing on the ASX less than a week after the federal government got its Carbon Farming Initiative through parliament. ...
The company has developed technology that uses a process of slow pyrolysis to convert low value, non-food biomass, such as municipal green waste and industrial sludges into renewable energy and biochar, and says it has an extensive pipeline of projects with major corporations and councils. It has a demonstration plant north of Sydney and expects its business to be able to generate renewable energy certificates and also be included in the CFI, which will allow farmers and others to generate credits for carbon abatement initiatives.
PacPyro hopes to tap into the $10 billion landfill market, exploit rising landfill costs and energy prices to deliver its technology as a cheaper and more profitable option. It expects to deploy its first commercial scale plants from 2012, depending on its ability to strike commercial partnerships, and to potentially tap government funding, as well as its ability to generate renewable energy and carbon credits.
On Saturday, Labor’s announcement of a “carbon farming initiative” received a cautious reception. “A welcome boost for regional Australians,” the Climate Institute called it, but warned that a carbon price was still necessary. The ACF similarly said the benefits of better land management wouldn’t be realised unless there was a carbon price. The NFF “acknowledged” the announcement, which “recognises that carbon abatement through the agricultural sector is an opportunity that should not be ignored.”
The initiative would be facilitatory – establishing a framework (including a new, unspecified, “independent regulator”) for accrediting carbon sequestration activities such as reafforestation, fertiliser reduction and soil carbon so the permits could be sold domestically or internationally to those who wanted to buy them.
Plainly that assumes that even in the absence of an emissions trading scheme there’ll be companies that want to buy permits. The Government estimates a possible market of $500 million.
It compares to the Coalition’s “direct action” plan, which will primarily depend on paying farmers $8-10 a tonne of CO2-equivalent emissions sequestered through soil carbon activities. The actual cost per tonne, according to independent experts, will be at least 3 times that, meaning the Coalition scheme relies on farmers being willing to spend $12-30 a tonne of their own money.
Soil carbon is the Coalition’s equivalent of Labor’s fixation with CCS. Labor loves CCS because it holds out the illusory promise that we -- and a lot of union members in coal mining communities -- can continue to be dependent on coal, with its consequences for climate change wished away to the bowels of the earth. Like CCS, soil carbon is a promising but unproven suite of technologies that is being treated as a magic cure by politicians too scared to tell voters that addressing climate change will have costs and require behavioural changes. Now Labor wants in on it, too.
There are significant unresolved questions about soil carbon -- whether simpler forms like no-till farming or more complex processes like the production and distribution of biochar. Just how stable carbon is in different types of soil under different conditions is not yet clear. There are problems about measurement, although the CSIRO is working on them. There are OH&S and efficiency issues about distributing biochar, finer varieties of which are susceptible to blowing away. Most problematic of all is that soil carbon isn’t counted under the Kyoto Protocol as a tradeable an emissions offset.
Indeed, Penny Wong was quick to point that out when Malcolm Turnbull first allowed Greg Hunt to base Liberal Party climate policy on it in January 2009. Now she has been spruiking it as a great means of taking action on climate change. Ain’t hypocrisy grand.
If there was an emissions trading scheme, there’d be real demand for agricultural offsets, driving the price up and encouraging farmers to explore sequestration options. But no one has proposed to include agriculture, which in 2008 accounted for 15% of Australia’s emissions, in any trading scheme. This means that any agricultural offsets would not be net of emissions produced by the same farm. That would not even be the case for emissions produced during the creation of the offset. For example, the process of pyrolysis, which produces biochar, would produce significant emissions unless it was powered by renewable energy. A tonne of sequestered emissions might therefore require tens or hundreds of kilos of carbon-equivalent emissions, but they won’t be counted.
Labor’s policy, which doesn’t go far beyond what it agreed with Malcolm Turnbull in negotiations over the CPRS, isn’t as egregious as the Coalition’s, but we’d be wise to be sceptical about both.
The push for the inclusion of agricultural offsets under the Kyoto Protocol has come from developed countries anxious to source offsets from developing countries that they can purchase in order to continue business-as-usual levels of carbon emissions at home. Of course, economic theory says this is the most efficient way to meet a global emissions target – if the cost of offsetting emissions in this manner becomes greater than the cost of decarbonising developed economies, it will drive genuine emissions reductions in developed economies.
But the behaviour of Australian politicians suggests this is less about economic efficiency than finding plausible excuses to delay action to reduce our heavy dependence on coal as long as possible, which is why they put their faith in magic solutions like soil carbon and CCS, when renewable energy technologies are much closer to commercial viability.
TREEHUGGER: What are the major advances have you seen (in your field) during the past 40 years? What, if any, were the major failures?
JASON ARAMBURU: I think one of the greatest advancements we've seen in renewable energy recently is cost reduction. Companies like GE continue to improve the capital cost of renewables such that they may soon compete with fossil fuels on a cost/kW basis. Achieving cost parity with fossil fuels is the only way to sustainably displace them. The biofuels boom and bust has taught the industry (and the public) that subsidies are simply not an effective long-term strategy.
I think the greatest failure in the energy field has been the notion that 'bigger is better.' The United States built its national grid to distribute power generated by large, centralized fossil fuel and nuclear plants. This design was predicated on the assumption of infinite, cheap sources of fossil fuel.
In reality, a centralized model is both inefficient and incapable of responding to changes in demand or fuel prices. Brilliant thinkers like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute have long supported a more distributed system, based around a diverse portfolio of energy technologies. The advantages of a distributed model include reduced logistical costs, improved efficiency and the ability to produce power where and when it is actually needed. Unfortunately, we have come to this realization too late. Our national grid (and our local utilities) are not set up to handle distributed, intermittent generation. Now, we must spend billions to upgrade the grid.
TH: What does a bright green future look like to you? What's the utopian vison?
JA: I envision a bright green future of true self-sufficiency, where ideas from the past blend with the realities of the present. We've become very specialized and almost totally incapable of providing for ourselves. We buy our power from the grid, our food from the supermarket and have no connection whatsoever to the production or disposal of anything. If one element of this support system fails, chaos ensues.
If we hope to survive in a greenhouse and energy constrained world, we must learn to be self-sufficient. We need to form a healthy and sustainable relationship with our natural resources, while limiting waste. We can learn a lot from Amazonian tribal societies. These tribes, while primitive, have existed for thousands of years without depleting their resources.
TH: How would we realistically transition into that sort of ideal situation?
JA: We first need to realize that the main hurdle to true self-sufficiency is laziness. If we can overcome this inertia, there are three areas where we can make massive strides with existing technologies:
Food - Every American Household is fully capable of producing basic foodstuffs like eggs and vegetables. If we could provide homeowners with the tools to produce some of their own food, we would realize dramatic improvements in health and nutrition, while saving money and reducing environmental impact.
Energy - All new constructions should be required to produce at least half of their energy on-site. A myriad of mature technologies exist to produce energy locally (solar, wind, biomass etc). Local production and consumption of energy would eliminate the need for a smart grid, and would encourage efficiency and conservation.
Waste - Landfills are a strange concept--they allow consumers to discretely and shamelessly waste. At the very least, all municipalities should institute mandatory household composting and recycling. It would be interesting to require households to dispose of the remaining solid waste in transparent trashcans. The fear of public shaming can do wonders to change human behavior.
I'm a big fan of the potential of biochar to help solve some of our problems (at least when we try to follow the terra preta example), so I was disappointed to see that George Monbiot is slamming the idea - Monbiot blasts biochar (via Energy Bulletin.
The latest miracle mass fuel cure, biochar, does not stand up; yet many who should know better have been suckered into it ...
Whenever you hear the word miracle, you know there's trouble just around the corner. But no matter many times they lead to disappointment or disaster, the newspapers never tire of promoting miracle cures, miracle crops, miracle fuels and miracle financial instruments. We have a limitless ability to disregard the laws of economics, biology and thermodynamics when we encounter a simple solution to complex problems. So welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the new miracle. It's a low-carbon regime for the planet that makes the Atkins diet look healthy: woodchips with everything.
Biomass is suddenly the universal answer to our climate and energy problems. Its advocates claim that it will become the primary source of the world's heating fuel, electricity, road transport fuel (cellulosic ethanol) and aviation fuel (biokerosene). Few people stop to wonder how the planet can accommodate these demands and still produce food and preserve wild places. Now an even crazier use of woodchips is being promoted everywhere (including in the Guardian). The great green miracle works like this: we turn the planet's surface into charcoal.
Sorry, not charcoal. We don't call it that any more. Now we say biochar. The idea is that wood and crop wastes are cooked to release the volatile components (which can be used as fuel), then the residue - the charcoal - is buried in the soil. According to the magical thinkers who promote it, the new miracle stops climate breakdown, replaces gas and petroleum, improves the fertility of the soil, reduces deforestation, cuts labour, creates employment, prevents respiratory disease and ensures that when you drop your toast it always lands butter side up. (I invented the last one, but give them time).
James Lovelock has a reply in The Guardian, noting that most sensible people would agree that creating plantations in the tropics in order to create charcoal is a bad idea, but that processing some existing crop wastes and using them for carbon sequestration is an entirely sensible idea - Lovelock replies to Monbiot on biochar.
I usually agree with George Monbiot and love the way he says it but this time – with his assertion that the latest miracle mass fuel cure, biochar, does not stand up – he has got it only half right.
Yes, it is silly to rename charcoal as biochar and yes, it would be wrong to plant anything specifically to make charcoal. So I agree, George, it would be wrong to have plantations in the tropics just to make charcoal.
I said in my recent book that perhaps the only tool we had to bring carbon dioxide back to pre-industrial levels was to let the biosphere pump it from the air for us. It currently removes 550bn tons a year, about 18 times more than we emit, but 99.9% of the carbon captured this way goes back to the air as CO2 when things are eat eaten.
What we have to do is turn a portion of all the waste of agriculture into charcoal and bury it. Consider grain like wheat or rice; most of the plant mass is in the stems, stalks and roots and we only eat the seeds. So instead of just ploughing in the stalks or turning them into cardboard, make it into charcoal and bury it or sink it in the ocean. We don't need plantations or crops planted for biochar, what we need is a charcoal maker on every farm so the farmer can turn his waste into carbon. Charcoal making might even work instead of landfill for waste paper and plastic.
In Brazil’s Amazon basin, farmers have long sought out a special form of fertiliser – a locally sourced compost-like substance prized for its amazing qualities of reviving poor or exhausted soils. They buy it in sacks or dig it out of the earth from patches that are sometimes as much as 6ft deep. Spread on fields, it retains its fertile qualities for long periods.
They call it the terra preta do indio – literally, “the dark earth of the Indians”. Dense, rich and loamy, this earth forms a stark contrast with the thin, poor soils of the region. (It seems a paradox, but rainforest soils have low fertility. This is why farmers who cut down the forest for agriculture have to keep on felling – after a few years of cropping, yields collapse and they have to move on.) Patches of terra preta extend for many hectares in some places but until recently, no one really knew what the mysterious dark earth was. Some guessed it was volcanic, or the sediment of old lakes, or the residue of some long-rotted vegetation. Few imagined that it was man-made.
Terra preta, modern analysis has proved, is one of the last remaining traces of pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon basin. It was made more than 2,500 – and perhaps as long as 6,000 – years ago by people living by the river. These cultures survived and supported complex agriculture, despite poor soil, by making their own earth. They used dung, fish, animal bones and plant waste – the usual suspects. But the key ingredient in terra preta, and what gives it its dark colour, is charcoal.
“It’s wonderful stuff,” says Simon Shackley, a social science lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. “We started to get to know about it when Dutch scientists began to look at it in the 1960s. They found these dark soils in this area of very poor soil, where it was being put on fields like compost. It’s really the product of slash-and-burn agriculture, and other organic waste, incorporated into the soils over hundreds or even thousands of years – and it does appear to be fertile indefinitely, which is really a very odd thing.”
This ancient product of the Amazon is now the subject of intense scrutiny by climate change scientists. The tenacity of the charcoal of terra preta – retaining its fertilising properties over centuries – has given them an idea. Charcoal is a form of carbon, the burnt remains of plant and animal material. If it can stay intact in the earth for so long, without being released as carbon dioxide gas, why not lock up more carbon in the earth in this manner?
Scientists have begun to refer to the charcoal made from plants for the purpose of storing carbon as “biochar”. The theory is that biomass – any plant or animal material – can be turned into charcoal by heating it in the absence of oxygen. By taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, the impact on climate change could be huge.
THE COALITION'S "green carbon initiative" is a three-pronged policy that aims to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making buildings more energy efficient, having faith in clean coal and burying greenhouse pollution with a process known as biochar.
Geosequestration - the burying of greenhouse pollution underground or beneath the ocean floor - remains the great technological hope for solving climate change even though its adoption does not appear to be any time soon.
Biochar, about which researchers are optimistic, is a new hope in climate science. Biochar refers to small pellets of charcoal produced when plant waste, such as wood chips, are heated in a process called pyrolysis.
When added to the soil, the pellets help boost fertility, retain moisture better, and efficiently store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists believe biochar is stable enough to hold gases for at least 100 years, a finding that has been eagerly seized on by politicians desperate to find a technology that will mop up greenhouse gas emissions.
The Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, argues that Australia's large land mass could be its greenhouse saviour, citing research that finds a small increase in the amount of carbon stored in soil could absorb all of the nation's annual emissions.
Research projects, including one by the NSW Department of Primary Industries, are encouraging, but scientists are concerned that the technique has not yet been properly investigated.
Dr Evelyn Krull, of CSIRO Land and Water, says one of the main areas that needs further study is how different types of soil react to the addition of biochar. "From a scientist's point of view I would be hesitant to say let's apply it to all soils, because we haven't done proper studies on it," she said.
"There's no doubt [biochar] will have multiple benefits but we would like to make sure that we have advised the public best about what is safe."
Malcolm Turnbull has released the opposition's response (dubbed the "Green Carbon Initiative") to the Labor government's proposed ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme), with the plan promising extra spending on alternative energy sources, more money for "clean coal" (cough), tax breaks for green buildings and retrofitting existing building to make them more energy efficient, mass forestry plantings and, most interestingly, research into storing carbon in soil via biochar (also known as terra preta).
The measures include creation of the Green Carbon Initiative to offset greenhouse gases by capturing carbon and storing it in the soil by using improved farming practices.
He will argue that large quantities of soil carbon are lost to the atmosphere because of conventional cropping methods that leave soil exposed for long periods, and that the opportunities for carbon abatement through changes in agricultural practices are gigantic.
The Opposition Leader also wants to fast-track the development of "biochar" technology, under which green farm waste is heated in the absence of oxygen in a process called pyrolysis.
It turns half of the material into bio-fuels that can be used to generate clean electricity, and the remainder into charcoal called biochar.
"Biochar is then returned to the soil, which dramatically increases agricultural productivity," he will say. "We will invest in our own land and at the same time offer the world an example of how real, practical action can be taken in the battle against global warming in the here and now. ...
Mr Turnbull also proposes mass tree-planting to absorb emissions.
The move could upset the Nationals, who last year split with the Liberals in the Senate to oppose the creation of tax breaks for investment in forestry carbon sinks, arguing forests would consume prime agricultural land. But Mr Turnbull will assert that planting trees can assist agricultural production.
"Every wind break, tree lot or hedge planted by farmers to protect pastures, crops and livestock is both sequestering CO2 and increasing agricultural production - as (wife) Lucy and I know very well from our experience over 26 years of farming in the Hunter Valley." ...
"Carbon capture and storage is a vital technology for our nation," the speech says. "I commit that a coalition government will ensure that at least two industrial-scale CCS power stations projects will be built. We will ensure the financial support is there to make this happen.
"It will be a key objective of the Coalition government that I lead that Australia successfully deploys industrial-scale demonstration projects in solar energy, in geo-thermal energy and harnessing the energy of the ocean through tidal and wave power."
Turnbull toured Newcastle biochar company Crucible Carbon's facility before making the announcement. The announcement didn't get met with much enthusiasm from the Cattlemen's association or from coalition partners in the National party, while the government is calling the technology "unproven", which seems ridiculous given the $500 million they are spending on clean coal research (though to be fair, so is a CSIRO researcher).
THE enormous potential of biochar to capture and store carbon is being overlooked by the Federal Government, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says. Mr Turnbull yesterday toured Crucible Carbon, which is developing technology for the mass production of biochar, at Newcastle in NSW.
Biochar, a charcoal produced from biomass, has the potential to provide long-term carbon storage in soil with the offset of improving soil quality and increasing agricultural productivity.
Mr Turnbull said biochar had the potential to absorb up to 100 million tonnes of CO2 each year, close to 20 per cent of Australia's emissions. "Globally, this could be the single biggest opportunity, new opportunity, for biosequestration of CO2 after forestry, and of course, organic soil carbon," he told reporters.
"We have an enormous opportunity here in Australia to absorb millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, store it safely as carbon, and put it back into the soil and increase the productivity and the health of our own landscape. "A win-win. A win for jobs, a win for the environment, a win for agriculture." ...
He said the Crucible Carbon technology had been estimated to be able to capture and store carbon for $20 a tonne or less, but companies which wanted to use biochar to offset emissions would not get a credit for it under the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme.
This month's edition of National Geographic has a feature article on "Soil", which looks at the steady degradation of agricultural land and the problem this poses in world where the population is heading for 9+ billion people - effectively calling attention to the "peak dirt" problem (however soil is renewable, so any "peak" should be able to be reversed if sufficient time and effort is put into doing so).
The article uses an acronym I've never come across before to describe the problem faced by those trying to draw attention to the issue: MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) - a phenomenon which should be familiar to anyone who has ever talked about peak oil, global warming or any of the other "limits to growth".
This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world's soil, have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO.
One subject that features in the article is soil restoration, including a look at "terra preta" - rich, fertile artificial soils found in the Amazon. In this post I'll have a look at modern day techniques to produce terra preta (often called biochar or agrichar) which have the potential to increase soil fertility, generate energy and sequester carbon all at the same time.
The History Of Terra Preta
Terra Preta ("dark earth") was discovered by Dutch soil scientist Wim Sombroek in the 1950's, when he discovered pockets of rich, fertile soil amidst the Amazon rainforest (otherwise known for its poor, thin soils), which he documented in a 1966 book "Amazon Soils". Similar pockets have since been found in other sites in Ecuador and Peru, and also in Western Africa (Benin and Liberia) and the Savannas of South Africa. Carbon dating has shown them to date back between 1,780 and 2,260 years.
Terra preta is found only where people lived - it is an artificial, human-made soil, which originated before the arrival of Europeans in South America. The soil is rich in minerals including phosphorus, calcium, zinc, and manganese - however its most important ingredient is charcoal, the source of terra preta's color.
It isn't entirely clear if the Amazon Indians whose old settlements terra preta is found at deliberately created the soils or if they were an accidental by-product of "slash and smoulder" farming techniques, though the emerging consensus seems to be that the Indians deliberately created the material, with some early European accounts in the area noting the practice still being performed.
The key ingredient is apparently the activated carbon in the charocal. Activated carbon has a complex, spongelike molecular structure - a single gram can have a surface area of 500 to 1,500 square meters (or about the equivalent of one to three basketball courts). Having this material in the soil has several beneficial effects, including a 20% increase in water retention, increased mineral retention, increased mineral availability to plant roots, and increased microbial activity.
It has also been shown to be particularly beneficial to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which form a symbiotic relationship with plant root fibers, allowing for greater nutrient uptake by plants. There is speculation that the mycorrhizal fungi may play a part in terra preta’s ability to seemingly regenerate itself.
Pyrolysis and Eprida
Modern day producers of biochar (agrichar) take dry biomass and bake it in a kiln to produce charcoal. Biochar is the term not for what is left over after the energy is removed: a charcoal-based soil amendment - this process is called pyrolysis. Various gases and oils are driven off the material during the process and then used to generate energy. The charcoal is buried in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.
Eprida is a company founded by Danny Day, which is attempting to commercialise the idea by building systems that turn farm waste into hydrogen, biofuel, and biochar (see here for a short movie explaining their process).
The Eprida technology uses agricultural waste biomass to produce hydrogen-rich bio-fuels and a new restorative high-carbon fertilizer (ECOSS) ...In tropical or depleted soils ECOSS fertilizer sustainably improves soil fertility, water holding and plant yield far beyond what is possible with nitrogen fertilizers alone. The hydrogen produced from biomass can be used to make ethanol, or a Fischer-Troupsch gas-to-liquids diesel (BTL diesel), as well as the ammonia used to enrich the carbon to make ECOSS fertilizer.
We don't maximize for hydrogen; we don't maximize for biodisel; we don't maximize for char...By being a little bit inefficient in each, we approximate nature and get a completely efficient cycle.
The potential power of biochar lies in this closed loop production process , where agricultural practices involving biochar production see increasing returns of crop yields, energy and soil fertility over time.
Biochar also has potential to address problems such as waste disposal and rural development. A significant proportion of the world's population relies on charcoal as a cooking fuel, the production of which drives deforestation in Africa and other places.
Replacing traditional charcoal kilns with modern pyrolysis units could reduce the demand for wood from forests by increasing the efficiency of energy production and adding the ability to use any source of biomass, including agricultural waste products. This would also help to reduce respiratory diseases in the developing world, particularly amongst children.
There has also been speculation that pyrolysis could be a useful technique for dealing with the huge swathes of Canadian forests that have been killed by pine beetles recently.
Some industry participants believe that energy, rather than agriculture, will be the key driver for adopting biomass pyrolysis. Desmond Radlein of Dynamotive Energy Systems has been quoted as saying "It is wishful thinking that people will switch to renewable fuels unless it is cheaper. All of this is tied to the price of oil; as it goes up, many more things are possible."
Another company active in the pyrolysis sector is Best Energies. Technical Manager Adriana Downey recently had an interview with Beyond Zero Emissions, talking about some of the pilot programs they have been running and plans to build the first fully commercial scale pyrolysis plant in Australia.
Lukas's program with the NSW DPI (Department of Primary Industries) in Northern NSW have basically taken some of the agrichar material that we've made here at Best Energies and they've been trialling that material in different agronomic applications to see how the agrichar, when its applied, can help crop-productivity and improve the sustainability of agriculture as well as, and what you guys are more interested in, sequester carbon long-term in soils and also decrease the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide emissions from soil. ...
The agrichar when it's applied to the soil has a good effect on the general physical structure of the soil. Because the agrichar has a really high surface area, it means that there's lots of pores in the soil which can then retain moisture and act as little reservoirs for the water to be retained in the soil. As well as this, all of the surface area helps to bind nutrients in the soil and also provides a microhabitat for micro organisms in the soil which are essential for the natural processes in the soil which allow micro organisms to flourish.
Carbon Capture Potential
There is a large difference between terra preta and ordinary soils - a hectare of meter-deep terra preta can contain 250 tonnes of carbon, as opposed to 100 tonnes in unimproved soils from similar parent material, according to Bruno Glaser, of the University of Bayreuth, Germany. The difference in the carbon between these soils matches all of the carbon contained in the vegetation on top of them.
It is not yet clear what the limits are to how much biochar can be added to the soils using these techniques, however some fairly extravagant claims about biochar's capacity to capture carbon have been made. Soil scientist and author of "Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties, Management" Johannes Lehmann believes that a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year - an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions. Lehmann also notes that unlike biodiesel and corn ethanol, biochar doesn’t take land away from food production.
If true, this would be an interesting form of geoengineering to try and reverse the effects of global warming (and one far less risky than some of the alternatives proposed) but I would still question our ability to turn all the world's oil, coal and gas reserves back into rich soil via burn - atmosphere - pyrolysis loop.
* The technology to implement the process is still immature. * Scientists don’t know how much charcoal farmers should use, how they should apply it, or which feedstocks work best. * Farmers are reluctant to spread unproven products on their fields, so the few companies manufacturing biochar have struggled to find buyers. * Charcoal production can generate toxic waste if performed incorrectly. * The energy needed to produce, transport, and bury biochar could outweigh the carbon savings. * Some analysts say the economics of the process will not be acceptable until carbon markets are established, allowing farmers to earn carbon credits for applying biochar to their fields. * Some environmental activists claim that applying the process on a large scale would result in further rainforest clearing which would actually degrade soil quality and increase global warming.
Rhizome In The Amazon
Jeff Vail recently had a post on a "Rhizome Template in the Amazon ?", which looked at a paper by Mark Heckenberger suggesting that a dense civilization of networked villages once existed in the Amazon, which Jeff noted was interesting because it "appears to show a form of organization that permits density without significant hierarchy".
The paper shows that the Xingu region of the Amazon was once populated by a grid-like pattern or villages, each connected by a precisely aligned network of roadways (the Xingu river is the Amazon's second longest tributary, with the region currently experiencing tension over plans to dam the river).
Here's an alternate mode of organization--a networked "grid," "lattice," or "peer-to-peer" structure of small, minimally self-sufficient villages, or "rhizome" as proposed in my article The Hamlet Economy. The Xingu settlement structure seems to consicously model itself in the latter pattern. Heckenberger even notes that each village was surrounded by a buffer zone of "managed parkland," exactly the kind of fall-back, resiliency-enhancing production zone that I recommended for rhizome. Here's a link to a satellite image of one section fo Xingu settlement.
Did this Xingu civilization really develop a dense, ecologically sustainable civilization without hierarchal structure? Or did they simply find a new way to impose hierarchy without developing the signatures of "central places"? Was this a conscious reaction to prior abuses of hierarchy, or simply an expedient to survival in the dense forrests and poor agricultural soils of the Amazon? We don't know the answers to these questions at this time, but the research of Heckenberger and his colleagues suggests that there is still a great deal for us to learn from the past about how we can best live in the future
Heckenberger also examined the terra preta pockets in the region, which is described briefly in an interesting article by Charles Mann in The Atlantic Monthly called "1491".
Scientific American also notes the correlation between the lost cities of the Amazon and terra preta in "Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized", as does The Vermont Quarterly in "Pay Dirt".
Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."
In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.
When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh." Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.
All in all I think biochar is worth exploring further in some depth.
The earth's uncertain oil reserves and dwindling freshwater supply may get all the attention, but modern society is also overtaxing the ground itself. At the same time that a growing population and the newfound appetites of the global middle class are straining our food supply, governments all over the world are also pushing for more ethanol-generating energy crops.
To support all that production on a limited amount of arable land, scientists and farmers have long focused on technical improvements like plant breeding, bioengineering and creating new fertilizers and pesticides. But some are now asking a different question: What if we could create better dirt?
An increasing number of scientists are starting to emphasize the extent to which soil - even more than petroleum or water or air - is a limited and fragile resource. Managing it better, and even improving it, will be vital to any equation that allows the earth to support the more than nine billion people the United Nations estimates will live on the planet by mid-century.
The most dramatic research is still in the early stages, but soil specialists already have developed farming techniques that maintain and temporarily enhance the nutrient content of soil. Scientists in Australia and the United States have started making rich new earth from industrial waste, and research into the astonishing fertility of a mysterious Amazonian soil may lead to an additive that can boost the power of soil for thousands of years.
"A few decades ago, the philosophy was, 'Well, if your soil's degraded, just put some more fertilizer on, or till it another time and you can get the same crop yield,' " says David Laird, a soil scientist at the National Soil Tilth Laboratory, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Now there is growing interest in putting together systems that enhance the actual quality of the soil itself."
Dirt remains, in certain ways, a puzzle: Despite its seeming simplicity, it is a complex system whose fertility arises from the interaction of myriad physical, biological, and chemical properties. Even the most advanced current research does not claim to be able to synthesize enough of it for use on a global scale.
Nevertheless, progress in the science of soil has the potential to be truly transformative and to help solve some of the biggest problems the planet faces. By 2050, according to Rattan Lal, a professor of soil science at Ohio State University, "All the necessities of food, feed, fiber, and fuel are going to be met by less than one-tenth of an acre per person, on average. And we already have seriously degraded a lot of the available land. So unless you can restore some of it you will just run out."
Soil does not arise quickly. In nature it starts with a layer of glacial grit, or windblown sand, or cooled lava, or alluvial silt, or some other crumbled mineral matter. A few pioneer plants put down shallow roots, and living things begin to make their homes in and on the surface, enriching it with their excrement, and enriching it further when they die and rot.
The resulting organic matter feeds a whole underground ecology that aerates the soil, fixes nutrients, and makes it more hospitable for plant life, and over time the process feeds back on itself. If the soil does not wash away or get parched by drought, it very gradually thickens. It takes tens of thousands of years to make 15 centimeters of topsoil, about 6 inches' worth.
Because of all the things human beings do to it, a University of Washington geologist, David Montgomery, has calculated, the world today is losing soil 10 to 20 times faster than it is replenishing it. In some places it is happening much faster: northern China, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the American West and Australia are already seeing large tracts of arable land disappear.
In his book, "Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations," Montgomery traces the decline of numerous early societies - including ancient Greece, imperial Rome, various Pacific Island cultures and the Mayans - to poor management of their soil.
However, it has also happened that some civilizations have improved their dirt. Among the world's richer soils is terra preta, the "black earth" found in certain swaths of the Amazon basin. It is dark, loose and loamy, and unlike the pallid earth that characterizes most of the Amazon, it is strikingly fertile.
In the last few years, archaeologists have established something else intriguing about terra preta: it is man-made. It contains high concentrations of charcoal, along with organic matter such as manure and fish bones - essentially the household trash of a pre-Columbian society practicing a distinctive brand of slash-and-burn agriculture.
Researchers trying to replicate the fertility of terra preta have concluded that its secret is in the charcoal. Work by soil scientists like Laird, Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University, and Mingxin Guo of Delaware State University suggests that the benefits of supplementing soil with charcoal, which they call "biochar" to distinguish it from the fuel of backyard barbecues, could be dramatic, widespread, and durable. Biochar, they have found, enhances the retention of water and nutrients, decreases the need for fertilizer, encourages microbial growth, and allows more air to reach crop roots. It also breaks down at a far slower rate than traditional fertilizers and soil additives. Depending on how the charcoal is made and applied, estimates of its life span range from decades to millennia. Scientists believe that some Amazonian terra preta soils are at least 2,000 years old.
Tyler Hamilton has an interesting article in the Toronto Star about the damage pine beetles are doing to Canadian forests and the impact this will have in terms of increased carbon emissions unless something is done.
One company is suggesting harvesting the dead wood and using it for power generation, thus making use of the material and emitting CO2 instead of more potent methane - another idea being floated is to convert the wood to biochar (see Black Earth for more on biochar).
According to a report last week in the scientific journal Nature, the mountain pine beetle that has killed 130,000 square kilometres of coniferous forest on the west coast has also turned those trees into net emitters of greenhouse gases.
When healthy, the trees act as a carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in biomass. When dead, however, the trees no longer absorb CO2. In fact, the opposite happens. As the trees rot and decompose, they release methane and other carbon-equivalent gases.
The B.C. researchers who wrote the report found that the greenhouse gas emissions from these dead trees over a 20-year period would roughly equal all CO2 emissions from Canada's entire transportation sector over five years. "So these are very large numbers in terms of impacts to the atmosphere," said report co-author Werner Kurz, a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada.
No kidding.
But the situation isn't hopeless. When British Columbia released its provincial energy plan last February, it announced that B.C. Hydro would consider proposals for harvesting trees infested with pine beetles for energy generation.
Vancouver-based Nexterra Energy, for example, has teamed up Pristine Power of Calgary to establish a network of small gasification power plants in B.C. that could turn infested wood into 200 megawatts of electricity. Rather than let the trees rot and release methane, which is 21 times more potent than CO2, the idea is to extract usable energy out of them that would displace dirtier electricity and clear the forest for new growth.
The key is to move fast, leaving less time for the dead trees to decay. Another, and arguably more effective, approach is to harvest the trees and convert them to char, or "biochar." Using a process called pyrolysis, the wood is essentially baked in the absence of oxygen and converted into a carbon-rich char.
This char contains about 60 per cent of the carbon in the original wood and, unlike wood, the char won't decay – it remains chemically stable for hundreds of years, trapping the carbon permanently.
Another bonus is that char can be ground up and spread over topsoil to improve crop fertility and enhance nutrients and water retention in soil. Since the carbon is bound in the char, it is effectively sequestered in the soil.
Cornell University's Johannes Lehmann, a leading expert on biochar studies, said it's something the B.C. government might want to look at. "It could be that a good portion of the emissions (from the dead trees) can be avoided by conversion of the damaged biomass into biochar," he wrote in an email.
The beauty with char is that you can pack it and weigh it. You know how much carbon is locked into a kilogram of char, so calculating carbon credits is easy compared to alternatives, such as guessing how much CO2 a new forest will absorb.
Perhaps some clever entrepreneur will see the potential of selling bags of pine-beetle wood char as a way of boosting the performance of residential gardens.
Look I think we should start with the knowledge that there is 200 gigatonnes of excess carbon floating around in our atmosphere. Now that is a very large amount of carbon. I won't explain what a gigatonne is but it's a lot, and that started to accumulate at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as we burnt the coal and put the carbon into the atmosphere.
Now, it has become very clear that we have to find a way of drawing down that carbon stock in the atmospher. So we've got to not only reduce our emissions, so get rid of the burning of coal and so on and so forth, we've have to draw down the existing gas and people have been searching for ways of doing this. Some of your listeners may have heard about proposals to re-grow tropical forests for example or forestry's "I'll plant a tree and off set your emissions" and this sort of thing.
Well these Terra Preta solutions are in some ways or certainly for some purposes are a better solution, a superior solution to anything that's been brought up so far. What the process basically involves is taking any biological material, that could be crop waste or corn stalks or whatever, forestry waste, even human sewage, and partially burning it in the absence of oxygen so that you get a synthetic gas at one end of the process that you can then burn which is hydrogen rich, not so much carbon in it, but hydrogen rich, you can burn that for transport purposes or to generate electricity and at the other end of the process you get charcoal. And the great thing about charcoal is that it is a very stable form of carbon.
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