Biochar!!!! A year ago I hadn’t even heard the word. Now for over a half year, I spend every spare hour learning more about it.
Every day we are putting approximately 19 million more tons of CO2e into the atmosphere than is taken out. CO2, as we know, is the main green house gas causing global warming. The strong possibility of runaway global warming scares the crap out of me. About 99 percent of the scientists say that, at the rate we are going,we have very few years left, unless we make radical changes.
A big cause of CO2 is the coal that we burn to make electricity. There is talk about capturing the CO2 that is produced when coal is burnt, but to date no good method has been found. Even the questionable methods proposed, like catching the CO2 and pumping it into old oil wells, would be prohibitively expensive. No practical method of sequestering carbon or CO2 has been found.
Until maybe now. Along comes biochar. Biochar could be a big part of the solution along with other efforts such as wind, solar, and geothermal which don’t bury carbon, but reduce the output of carbon needed for energy.
Quoting and paraphrasing from Gores’s book: Biochar is a form of fine grained porous charcoal that is highly resilient to decomposition in most soil environments. It occurs naturally, but can be manufactured cheaply in large quantities by burning wood, switchgrass, manure, or other forms of biomass in an oxygen free or low oxygen environment that transforms the biomass into what is more than 80% pure carbon.
The process by which bio char is made can also be designed to produce gas or liquid fuel that can be used to make electricity and can serve as an energy source for the making of more biochar.
Burying biochar in the soil protects important soil microbes and helps the soil retain nutrients and water. It also reduces the accumulation of greenhouse gas pollution by reducing the release that would occur from the rotting of biomass on the surface by sequestering the CO2 contained in the biochar and by assisting the process by which plants growing in the soil pull CO2 out of the air with photosynthesis.
It also increases the organic health of the soil. David Shirer, a biochar entrepreneur, who has studied the science extensively, says “if you put biochar in the soil, it literally has a residence time on the order of centuries to millennia.”
It is a carbon lattice. It creates a habitat for fungi and bacteria, a habitat that creates a great deal of conductivity for CEC [cation exchange capacity]–for the chemists among us.
In recent decades, soil scientists discovered that the Amazonian Indians were using biochar 1000 years ago to create fertile black soil’s that are still far more productive than the soils around them, even though the biochar was buried a millennia ago. Extensive research has been done on these soils.
These “terra preta” soils provide a unique way of assessing the longevity of benefits conferred on soils by using biochar.
Moreover it appears that these rich soils retain the ability to regenerate themselves.
James Lovelock who has consistently been the most pessimistic expert on the future course of the climate crisis said in 2009, “there is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste which contain carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering, into non-biodegradable charcoal and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull CO2 down quite fast. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it.”
In an open letter in 2008, Tim Flannery wrote: “biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future. The biochar approach provides a uniquely powerful solution, for it allows us to address food security, the fuel crisis, and the climate problem, and all in an immensely practical matter. biochar is both extremely ancient concept and a very new one to our thinking. He described the biochar strategy as the “most important engine of atmospheric cleansing that we possess”.
If you’ve stuck with up until here, thanks. I won’t push my luck any further with this blog.
If anyone is interested, in the future, I’ll blog about what I’ve been doing to push for more studies leading to more action. To me it’s exciting–contacting people in California’s agricultural schools, writing possible legislation, and exploring possibilities of grants for this purpose.
The more I read, the more unanswered questions come up. More studies and research are needed–the sooner the better. That’s what I’m pushing for–trying to contribute my grain of sand.
If you’d like to learn more, the best place to start, I think, is the International Biochar Inititative website.
If I find any interest at all, I’ll use future blogs to keep you updated on my progress.
Dan Hemesath's Blog 