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

On November 14th, I was able to run a batch of year old grass tablets
made in a BHS Energy Slugger through a TLUD stove designed by Paul S.
Anderson [Dr. TLUD] and assembled in India.

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.

Friends,

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

Here is a PDF of a six page article with a section on Biochar:

Reducing abrupt climate change risk using the Montreal Protocol and other regulatory actions to complement cuts in CO2 emissions

Edited by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, United Kingdom, and approved August 31, 2009 (received for review March 9, 2009)

Here is the Biochar section in its entirety:

Biochar Production.

Like other biosequestration strategies, biochar technology captures CO2 through plant photosynthesis. The captured carbon is then converted into a stable charcoal-like substance called ‘‘biochar,’’ with estimates of characteristic storage time varying from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of years (61). The process is pyrolysis, that is, high temperature decomposition in an oxygen-deprived environment (61). In addition to its potential to replenish long-term carbon sinks, biochar can be a beneficial soil amendment, as noted by a recent review of published literature by Sohi et al. (61). These authors report that although biochar is increasingly being promoted by climate policy makers, relatively few studies provide a quantitative assessment of biochar soil management scenarios, and some of the fundamental mechanisms of the interaction of biochar with the soil require further research (61).

Pyrolysis also produces bio-gas and bio-oil that can displace fossil fuel use (62, 63), making it a potential ‘‘carbon negative’’ source of energy (64). Feedstocks for biochar production are widely available (61, 62), and the technology exists for rapid biochar deployment, including mobile or stationary units for use at local or regional levels (64). At household level, fuel-efficient cookstoves can produce biochar and reduce emissions of BC (65).

The International Biochar Initiative estimates that biochar production has the potential to provide 1 Gt carbon per year in climate mitigation by 2040, or 3.67 Gt CO2 per year, using only waste biomass (66). Hansen et al. (5) estimate that if slash-and-char agriculture replaced slash-and-burn practices, and if agricultural and forestry wastes were used for biochar production, it would be possible to drawdown CO2 concentrations by approximately 8 ppm or more within half a century, or 62.5 Gt CO2.

According to Sohi et al. (61), the global potential for annual sequestration of CO2 may be ‘‘at the billion-ton scale’’ within 30 years, although they note that the published evidence is largely from small-scale studies and cannot be generalized to all locations and types of biochar. Under an aggressive scenario, where all projected demand for renewable biomass fuel is met through pyrolysis, Lehmann et al. (62) estimate that biochar may be able to sequester 5.5–9.5 Gt C per year, or 20–35 Gt CO2, per year by 2100. Lenton and Vaughan (67) suggest that the capture of atmospheric CO2 by plants to provide bio-energy followed by carbon capture and storage, combined with afforestation and biochar production, may have the potential to remove 100 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere under the most optimistic scenarios and reduce radiative forcing by 1.3 Wm2. However, this may conflict with food production and ecosystem protection (67).

Biosequestration through biochar production may be able to be deployed rapidly and relatively cheaply on a decadal time scale (68) using both regulatory and market-based approaches at national, regional, and global levels. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification has proposed including biochar in the UNFCCC climate negotiations (69). The island countries include biosequestration as a fast-action strategy in the work program proposed in the UNFCCC negotiations (70).

Forests are being discussed in the negotiations for the post-2012 climate treaty (71). Given the size and relative speed of the potential mitigation available from the forestry sector, protecting and expanding forests appears to be an important fast-action climate mitigation strategy for reducing DAI, although the absence of a robust international or regional governance structure makes this challenging.

References 61-71 are:

61. Sohi S, Lopez-Capel E, Krull E, Bol R (2009) Biochar’s roles in soil and climate change: A review of research needs (CSIRO, Clayton, Australia).

62. Lehmann J, Gaunt J, Rondon M (2006) Bio-char sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems — a review. Mitigation Adaptation Strategies Global Change 11:403-427.

63. Scherr SJ, Sthapit S (2009) Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet, in State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World, ed Starke L (Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC), pp 30–49.

64. The International Biochar Initiative (2008) Biochar: A soil amendment that combats global warming and improves agricultural sustainability and environmental impacts. Available at http://www.carbon-negative.us/docs/IBI_BiocharWhitePaper.pdf.

65. Flanagan R, Joseph S (2008) Mobilising rural households to store carbon, reduce harmful emissions and improve soil fertility: Introduction of third generation stoves. Available at http://www.unccd.int/publicinfo/poznanclimatetalks/docs/Natural%20Draft%20Stove.pdf.

66. International Biochar Initiative (2008) How much carbon can biochar systems offset – and when? Available at http://www.biochar-international.org/images/final
carbon
wpver2.0.pdf.

67. Lenton TM, Vaughan NE (2009) The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options. Atmos Chem Phys Disc 9:2559–2608.

68. Caldeira K, et al. (2004) A portfolio of carbon management options, in The Global Carbon Cycle. Integrating Humans, Climate, and the Natural World, eds Field CB, Raupach MR (Island Press, Washington, DC), pp 103–129.

69. UN Convention to Combat Desertification (2008) Submission containing ideas and proposals on Paragraph 1 of the Bali Action Plan (UNFCCC, Bonn, Germany).

70. The Federated States of Micronesia (2009) Decision on a Programme of Work on Opportunities for Rapid Climate Mitigation to Complement Long-Term Climate Mitigation and Stabilization (UNFCCC, Bonn, Germany), FCCC/AWGLCA/2009/MISC. 4 (Pt II).

71. Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, UNFCCC (2008) Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries: Approaches to Stimulate Action (UNFCCC, Bonn, Germany).

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.

Dear Friends,

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

The news about the H1N1 flu pandemic is turning out to be very interesting in unexpected ways.

It is critical to understand that, starting in 1980 with Pres. Reagan, our public health infrastructure has been eviscerated. After all, if the government can do no good and is by definition “the problem”, why pay for a public health infrastructure?

The real problem is that now we are facing a sharp peak, an exponential rate of growth, in the H1N1 pandemic. This peak will range from about October 15 – November 21. A consequence of Pres. Reagan’s political philosophy, and resultant under-funding of public health, is that, now that we need all of the benefits of a public health infrastructure to inform, guide and help us weather this storm, we have to ask if we actually have what we need. Do we know what is happening in enough detail in time to make the best decisions in a timely and effective manner?

H1N1 may yet again prove the fallacy of the the notion that only the private sector can solve our problems and the public sector can never be the answer. The spike in absenteeism caused by H1N1, for example, is apt to have a measurable impact on 4th quarter GDP. Will this have political consequences in the mid-term elections? Will the fruits of the Reagan era, and all of their unintended negative consequences, be blamed on the current Administration?

A key test is whether the government, despite the Reagan/Bush heritage, will have enough information to be able to offer sufficiently accurate information and appropriate timely responses to maintain public trust. This remains to be seen. There is already evidence of institutions in Washington sending employees home when a co-worker develops H1N1 but swearing the employees to secrecy. This intellectually dishonest ‘cover up’ denies the public health services the very data they must have to maintain the public’s trust. How long will this be tolerated?

So far we have seen the disastrous results of the Reagan/Bush philosophy of the government and its regulations as always being the problem, and never right, in the current economic and housing turmoil we are suffering through. We are seeing the same terrible consequences of the view that the private sector is the only and best answer when it comes to the bloated cost of our fragmented healthcare system that still leaves 10s of millions of American uninsured or under-insured. H1N1 may show us another tragic consequence of the blighted and simplistically one sided views of the market fundamentalist.

The question everyone should be asking is: What can the private sector in the US get right at all? Not Wall Street. Not automobiles. Not healthcare for all. Not secure home ownership you can believe in. Not a stable and secure environment that gets better from generation to generation. Not soils that have increasing carbon content and biological vitality. Not a diet that does not promote diabetes and other costly health problems. Not secure employment with a retirement plan to you can trust to be there when you need it. And the list goes on. Not even a job for everyone who wants one.

The answer is simply that neither the private sector nor the public sector is sufficient. Both are limited by imperfect knowledge and constrained by the seven deadly sins, human nature. It is clearly necessary for both the private and public sectors to work together to overcome these endless limitations as best they can.

America will not regain its vitality until the private and public sectors, working together, instead of against one another, form a synergy that is greater than the sum of the parts. This will require the re-establishment of the separation of State, Church, and the Private Sector. This would truly be Change We Can Believe In.

Perhaps we need to confront an old myth:

Myth X: The market functions well enough today because it’s pricing function is accurate.

My thesis is that the pricing function we have today is actually pathological and is based on playing with crooked dice and marked cards. We want the answer to be “cheap” — so we lie to ourselves, cheat, and rig our pricing function to get the answer we want.

When I ask people if they want a healthy atmosphere, healthy soils and clean water, they all say yes. If I ask what the value of these three conditions is, they have a very hard time ‘pricing’ them. Nor can they price the cost of NOT doing anything to keep our natural world clean and safe.

On the other hand, many people understand that the price of a soda pop, for example, should include all of its end-to-end costs with no externalities allowed. Include the cost of filling up the land fill, of causing obesity & diabetes, of bad nutrition, of the carbon foot print of trucking sugar water anywhere, perhaps even include the energy ‘wasted’ making a non essential ‘food’., etc. etc. etc.

Now, if we apply end-to-end pricing to fossil fuels, a much more accurate pricing function, then what happens, for example, to the price,of coal when its price includes ALL of the environmental damage it does [air, water, soils, landscape], the health hazards it creates, etc? If we do the same with fossil fuels from insecure and vulnerable off shore sources, then we must also include the military costs of defending them. What then becomes the honest price of Oil? Natural gas? Atomic power?

In general, we profess that we do not want to dictate people’s choices. We want to be free to inflict damages on our neighbors. But should we expect to pay for the damages of our choices up front? Most states require people to take reasonable steps to reduce the burden of emergency healthcare: seat belts and bike safety helmets come to mind. What about the damages people’s energy choices can inflict? Should we impose at least a $1.00 per gallon carbon tax on fossil transportation fuels? Or would it be more honest and market oriented to require end-to-end energy pricing, with no externalities?

Now, if we had an honest and all inclusive end-to-end pricing function, could we then eliminate ALL subsidies for all energy? Which would be more honest: Removing all subsidies and tax loopholes from fossil transportation fuels or layering on a $1.00 tax? Which choice would actually do the most to improve the health of the atmosphere, the soils and our water, while also improving the health of the market economy?

How would these two policy choices change the playing field? Can we model this?

On a related topic, David Yarrow led a small team of dedicated biochar supporters and had a great day at Shelburne Farms yesterday. One thing that became very clear is that it much more powerful to give people a positive story to be for, than it is to give them a negative story to be against.

For example, I would share my vision of hundreds of homes in a local community heating with carbon negative pyrolysis systems and selling or trading their resultant biochar back to their local Community Supported Agriculture farms. This creates a virtuous cycle where their CSAs could, completing the loop, start providing them with Nutrient-Dense Carbon-Negative foods. As people heated their homes, instead of feeling guilty, they would be looking forward to more nutritious and healthier foods in the coming summer and forever afterwards for generations to come. Further, as the biochar in the fields builds up, carbon negative pyrolysis heating will also help keep the waters clean by mitigating run off contamination.

The people I shared this vision with understood and were amazed at the possibility of even thinking that we could tie our heating systems and our food systems together in a new configuration that would help improve the health of the atmosphere, our soils and our water. They were excited to BE FOR this idea that warmth, food and cleaner water could be integrated into something greater than the sum of its parts. Liberating people from silo thinking, feeling guilty, and hopeless can be very energizing.

It is simply not good enough, not effective, to only offer guilty choices of bad or less bad, high carbon vs low carbon solutions. Our challenge is to invent solutions that can be embraced, will be embraced, because they are positively good for you and your future generations. We need solutions people want to embrace and feel good about embracing. Solutions that offer an enhanced view of the future, not a diminished one. We will do best to go beyond solutions that only offer people the option of feeling less guilty. This is the most likely way to create a positive feed-back loop that may be able to take these new approaches ‘viral’.

Of course, another alternative is for things to go way wrong and create situations where the governments are reduced to imposing rationing and other controls in response to chaos induced by climate disruption.

Additional Biochar resources:

1. Biomass Magazine

2. The Economist

3. Biochar Conference at UMass Amherst, Nov. 13, 2009

4. Introduction to Biochar: Six Posters from IBI

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Is it even remotely possible that Jefferson and his co-signers had even a shred of intent that the Declaration apply also to corporations? Are corporations, in fact, the product of the same extraterrestrial “Creator” who, by creating man, ‘endowed’ him with ‘certain unalienable rights’? I find the argument that a creating God also created corporations, thus endowing them with the same unalienable rights as human beings, to be completely incomprehensible and utterly unimaginable. Ridiculous, even.

In that the Revolutionary war was fought, in part, to establish independence from the monopoly powers of The East India Company, the first multi-national corporation, it seems unlikely that it would have even crossed Jefferson’s mind that his words would apply to anyone other than human beings.

It is perhaps revealing that the notion of corporate personhood was the fiction of a railroad man, then clerk of the Supreme Court, invented to further the profits of the 19th century railroads. This fiction realized President Lincoln’s fears concerning the unintended consequences of his dealings with railroads in support of his efforts to win the Civil War.

Jefferson, the product of his education and readings, is well known as a champion of the values of The Age of Enlightenment, especially science, freedom of religion with separation of church and state, and the primacy of the human spirit. Jefferson’s Enlightenment view of the world was eloquently captured in his Declaration of Independence, as is well spelled out in the popular Ken Burns production on the life of Jefferson.

How Jefferson must be spinning in his grave as contemporary America has rejected his vision of America’s future and, instead, gone down an anti-Enlightenment path: the rejection of science, the co-mingling of church and state, with the primacy of the multi-national corporate world view.

Take science. Jefferson would have embraced the study of global warming, and would have been disappointed by the anti-science deniers. Jefferson would have been fascinated by a biographical film on the life of Charles Darwin. He would have been shocked that only in post-enlightenment, neo-religious America is such a film without distribution. But this is the sad reality of today’s post-enlightenment America.

Change We Can Believe In

It is perfectly clear today, that, if we are to re-invigorate the American experiment in self governance, we must re-assert the primacy of the core values of The Enlightenment as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The American experiment only exists as an affirmation of these values. If we reject these “self evident truths”, as we appear to be currently doing, we also, in fact, reject Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence.

From Jefferson’s perspective, “Change We Can Believe In” can mean only one thing, the re-affirmation and restoration of the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the foundation the American Experiment rests so precariously on today. Can President Obama rise to this challenge? Does he have the courage and the political will to disrupt the status quo of the last 130 years? If not, will he be content to preside over the failure of the American Experiment?