What is this picture all about?  Read the whole Char-B-Que story and find out.

Author:  Jock Gill

Yesterday, I took a novel approach to converting short cycle organic carbon, a product of photosynthesis, into long cycle elemental carbon, biochar, with a one quart retort.  It gave a very clean result with the retort clean as a whistle at the end.  No tarry residues on the inside of the lid or any place else.  The retort was loaded with about 1 quart of wood pellets and yielded about 16 oz of char — by volume.

To read how this becomes “Everyman’s gas well in a can, a distributed solution”, please follow the link below:

Everyman’s gas well in a can, a distributed solution .pdf

The illustrations and text in the PDF will allow you to make your own gas well in a can easily, quickly, and safely. It’s a fun project that you will enjoy. I hope you will do this experiment and then post comments about your experiences for other readers to learn from.

If you use this in a science class, please let me know.

Note: For a good resource on biochar, I recommend the Biochar Farms site.  Be sure to scroll down their top page to see their excellent “Schematic of Biochar Solutions“.

Note 2: ZeroPoint Clean Tech is well on the way to commercializing the use of “Manufactured Gas” made from biomass — NOT coal.

Note 3: Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on  the key role “Manufactured Gas” played in economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Author: Jock Gill

Marissa, a newly minted 2canologist at Shelburne Farms, has just lit about 4 pounds of softwood pellets in the TLUD [Top Lit Up Draft] stove she has just built. In about 75 minutes, this will turn into about 1 pound of biochar suitable for experimenting with.

For more on 2canology at Shelburne Farms, please see this item in inFARMation.

For illustrated documentation and directions for becoming a certified 2canologist yourself — it is easy, fun and very entertaining — you will find Dr. Hugh McLaughlin’s instructions here. 2canology is Dr. McLaughlin’s ingenious and creative gift to the world of biochar.

Biochar is now entering the mainstream media — as evidenced by this front page story in USA Today.

Photos courtesy of Marshall Webb of Shelburne Farms.

It also called on Federal Agencies to create portals, in the form, http://www.agency.gov/open and http://www.whitehouse.gov/open is up as an example.

Wednesday, I received a press release from the Department of Justice about their Fiscal Year 2008 Freedom of Information Act Requests which talked a little bit about their efforts to be more open.

I downloaded the spreadsheet detailing data about the Department of Education’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) processing. The Education Department has the equivalent of about 33 people working full time on FOIA requests. FOIA processing requests are about $1.9 million, with an additional $100,000 in legal fees. 2,236 requests were processed and the average time to process a simple request was 111 days. There were 67 requests for expedited processing, of which ten were granted. There were 326 requests for fee waiver, of which only 4 were granted.

Processing FIOA requests are expensive and cost money, and this is something that people need to keep in mind during the discussions about the future of journalism. Us volunteer, citizen journalists and bloggers are unlikely to fork out of our own pockets the money it takes to get big FOIA requests processed.

On the other hand, making more information available for free on the Internet could significantly cut down the amount of FOIA requests. It will be interesting to see a long-term analysis of the trend in FOIA requests following the implementation of the Open Government Directive.

I sent off a quick email to a friend at the Department of Justice with my suggestion about something that could make the Federal Judiciary much more open. Court records and documents for the U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy Courts are available in a system called Pacer. Currently, reporters and bloggers wishing to get access to these records must pay eight cents per page to access the data online. I can understand why you might charge eight cents a page for something that needs to be photocopied, but data distributed over the Internet shouldn’t cost eight cents a page.

In terms of the timeliness of information, the FCC and FTC are pretty good about making comments that they’ve received available online in a timely basis. They have systems in place to facilitate that. They may not be as easy to navigate as I would like, but they are a great starting point. Other governmental agencies do not have this ability.

This was driven home to me yesterday when the Connecticut General Assembly Appropriations Committee held a public hearing on the latest proposed budget cuts.

Over 350 people came to testify, which means over 350 documents needing to be scanned in and made available as part of the public record. This is likely to take a week or two of time from the overburdened staffers of the committee. In addition, numerous other people submitted testimony via email. The technology is not in place for those emails to be made automatically available online or forwarded to interested parties, so they will be included with the over 350 documents waiting to be scanned.

If more of this information could be made available immediately, the way the FCC and FTC do, or perhaps even made available in such a way that they could be loaded into an online system where people could rate, tag, and comment on the documents, a richer and more nuanced discussion of how best to allocated limited resources could take place.

The Federal Open Government Directive is a great starting point in making government more efficient and more responsive. It will be great to see how it gets implemented over the coming months. It will be even greater if state and local governments and even nonprofits adopt similar directives.

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

What, then, is the soil, the essential foundation, of our economy and Western culture? Perhaps it is entrepreneurial start ups, small business and enterprises on Main Street. These have historically been the largest generators of jobs. If this economic soil, like the soils of our forests and fields, has been over-mined and voraciously exploited by the industrial model, then is it any wonder we have a jobless recovery? After all, the government’s economic soil amendments have, so far, gone to the largest and most predatory businesses in America, especially to the too-big-to-fail banks and car companies. What do we call banks that will not loan Main Street and small businesses our very own tax dollars? Our money that they are now handing out as bonuses to the already rich? Is this any way to restore the soils that support our very economic well being?

Properly inoculated biochar is, in many ways, all about restoring the carbon content as well as the health and vitality of the living soils of our forests and fields — as well as many other environmental benefits. What is the biochar analog we need to apply to the economic soils that nurture and support entrepreneurial start ups, small businesses, and Main Street? If we want to have a recovery that provides plentiful jobs, we had better find that analog and start applying it as soon as possible.

Update:

“Jane D’Arista is an economist with the Financial Markets Center in Philomont, VA. She is a Research Associate with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and author of the masterful study of U.S. financial regulation, The Evolution of U.S. Finance. For more than thirty years, Jane D’Arista has been one of the country’s most insightful analysts of financial markets and regulation.”

D’Arista was interviewed by The RealNews Network to create “Anatomy of casino capitalism”. The interview is presented in 8 parts. Please be sure to watch all 8 parts. If you do, you will have some pretty good ideas about what needs to be done to start rebuilding our economic soils and preserving some vestige of Economic Sovereignty.

Watch all 8 episodes here.

Read her Oct. 29th testimony before the US House’s Committee on Financial Services here.

Grown in Cape Cod’s Sandy Soil, Amended with Biochar

This shows that we can extend the range of options for the carbon in
grass biomass to include carbon negative solutions such as those based on biochar.

Al Gore recognizes the advantages of carbon sequestration via biochar in his new book “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis”

Please click here for more on TLUD stoves.

What do you think of adding Google’s Friend Connect to this site?

Also, for those readers who have Google Wave accounts, should we start a Greater Democracy Wave as well? How would that compliment the blog?

Lastly, what role, if any, does Google Voice have to play on Greater Democracy? Could all three find a home on an Android cell phone?

Curious,

Jock

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.

After much expansion and refinement, the final copy (Version 2) of the “All Biochars…” paper has been released back to the NABC (NorthAmerica Biochars Conference, Boulder Colorado, August 2009) for inclusion in their proceedings.

As such, the final version of this document, provided in two formats. One is in MS Word ( .doc ) and allows readers to access the underlying spreadsheets – it emails at about 3.5 megs. The other version is All-Biochars–Version2–Oct2009.pdf- much smaller at about 1.5 megs.

The document has 36 pages including 17 figures and three main conclusions. The contents are a blend of technical topics and basic/common sense comments, including some “do-it-yourself” methods about making and analyzing biochars. It is a “contribution,” but is not intended to be all encompassing about biochar characteristics.

This document in either or both formats may be distributed to colleagues and (without alterations) may be placed onto Websites to facilitate distribution.

This was a group effort by co-authors McLaughlin, Anderson, Shields and Reed who welcome further discussion but who do not intend to alter this document. Instead, we encourage others to present additional documents that give further progress to specific issues of interest.

On behalf of the co-authors,

Paul
–Paul S Anderson, Ph.D. — aka Dr. TLUD (“Dr. Tee-lud”)
Biomass Energy Consultant with BEF, & Partner in Chip Energy.
Specialist in micro-gasification. Office & Res: 309-452-7072
www.chipenergy.com
www.bioenergylists.org/andersontludconstruction