Trees and grasses are approximately 50% carbon.

The critical question at hand is simply this: Can the carbon captured by photosynthesis and converted by pyrolysis to stable agricultural charcoal, Biochar, properly inoculated with minerals, microbes, fungi, etc, be used today to:

1. improve soil quality &  crop yields?  Are our soils at an optimum carbon content level for best yields?  Could healthier soils feed more people? It worked in the Amazon for the Amerindians.

Soil fertility is complex.  It is important to understand why carbon is essential to soil fertility. Humic substances do the same thing as biochar/Terra preta – facilitate cation exchange capacity. Biochar and humic substances have a common parent material, lignin, and form the same type of functional groups on their surfaces. If you look at a textbook rendition of their molecular structures, lignin, humic acid and char, they are similar. It’s just that biochar is much more stable, especially in tropical or semi-arid environments. Very little humus forms in tropical soils. The parent material simply rots too quickly.

2. Act to remediate water quality, esp. caused by runoffs of E. coli and Phosphorus? Phosphorus needs to be re-captured as the supply is tight and costs will be going up.  Allowing it to run off  and ‘escape’ from the fields is bad economically and environmentally.

3. Sequester carbon for 1,000s of years thus contributing to “Low Carbon Agriculture” and perhaps even carbon negative foods?  

 4. Make better use of millions of tons of agricultural residues currently simply burned in the fields?  We know this also adds carbon soot to the atmosphere which is bad for health and is a significant climate change driver.  Agricultural residues could be used in a domestic pyrolysis unit for carbon negative cooking, heating and biochar production.  The biochar could be mixed with compost, animal manures, and urines – excellent sources of minerals. This enriched mixed would then be re-cycled back to the fields.

5. Reduce the amount of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers required?

6. Be used as a forest management tool to improve forest soils etc.?

7. With Biochar’s ability to retain water, is it a useful tool for fighting desertification? Drought and general lack of rain fall is expected to be a growing problem in many areas as a consequence of climate disruption.

I refer interested parties to this paper as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

See pages 4 & 5 esp. on Biochar.

The paper is described here:

Additionally, the International Biochar Initiative [IBI] has addressed most of the issues raised about biochar in the research summaries and FAQs that are on their web site.

The Research Summaries are here and the FAQs are here. 

It should be noted that the United Nations has just issued a report that over a billion people aren’t getting enough to eat.  We can, in all likelihood, reproduce the same proven, historical, benefits of agricultural charcoal by feeding soil biota with biochar and nutrients so that growing enough food to feed large populations becomes much easier. Then, of course, we get the added bonuses, including sequestering GHGs.

In conclusion, Biochar can be very useful today, even if it is not exactly the same as Terra preta. In fact, this is not at all about recreating Terra preta.  It is truly about learning how to use stabilized carbon today to improve soils, water, forests, the atmosphere, and make use of the renewable thermal energy produced by pyrolysis.  In short, plants capture carbon via photosynthesis.  The immediate question facing us now is how can we best use that carbon, stabilized by pyrolysis, to meet as many of our current goals as possible?

The single most important take away is that biochar is expected to be very useful IMMEDIATELY in the seven [7] areas I mentioned above.

Note: I owe thanks to Paul D. McCullough , Nando M. Breiter of the The CarbonZero Project, and Kelpie Wilson of the IBI, for materials and suggestions that made this a better post.

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