Biochar story published In Good Tilth

[John]

The following text was published in the Sept/Oct issue of In Good
Tilth-- Oregon Tilth (http://www.tilth.org/ ) administers education
programs, supports sustainable agriculture research and policy, and
offers organic certification to producers and food handlers throughout
the Americas.


John M.

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Biochar believers


By Andrew Rodman

Word is that one of Cortez’s grunts stumbled onto a civilization deep
in the jungles of Amazona. The mythic metropolis supported by “black
soil,” Terra Preta in Portuguese.

El Dorado had been found.

Modern scientists found that a few tropical ancient societies created
Terra Preta soil by incorporating charcoal, manure and household
wastes into it, “biochar,” creating a host of benefits that are still
active after thousands of years.

Can this traditional practice be wed with modern innovations, and help
with our strained soils of the Northwest and beyond? Can the promise
of biochar be applied to remediate some of the most pressing concerns
of the planet and agriculture at large?

Biochar offers wedge solutions for an array of problems including
reducing wildfire fuel loads, countering nutrient loss in soils,
building tilth and adding water retention. These are benefits we need
right now!

The platitudes about the possibilities got my attention.



Location location

Up near the Hanford Reach, where tumbleweeds drift in the Columbia
River past the town of Richland, Wash., lies the sprawling Pacific NW
National Lab. The PNNL, is a high-security science campus focusing on
microbial and cellular biology, environmental, analytic and
interfacial sciences. Its denizens sport multiple security badges, and
walk over manicured lawns tended by leaf vacuumers. This is where I
ended up, mid-May after a wrong turn into the Umatilla Weapons Depot,
and a cruise past Richland’s Hanford High.

What I found was over 75 biochar enthusiasts from a host of
backgrounds and regions- agronomists, scientists, venture capitalists,
Forest Service rangers, deep ecologists, activists, composters,
gardeners and urban scavengers; all gathered together to work out a
process that would proliferate the pyrolysis of biomass and pepper our
fields with carbonized black gold.

The PNW Biochar Group meeting - organized in part by PNNL’s Dr. Jim
Amonette, John Miedema from Corvallis and Max DeRungs from Canby, Ore
- was a major effort to unlock the biochar movement socially,
systemically and scientifically.



Bio what?

Biochar is the baking of woody biomass, to create charcoal that is
ground up and added to the soil. The biomass is cooked in an oxygen-
starved kiln, (a pyrolysis process) where the volatile hydrocarbons
are burned or driven off. These vapors can fuel the incineration
process.

The charcoal is a carbon-enriched black solid with a structure that
resists chemical and microbial degradation. It is then ground up, and
applied to the soil, creating edge-effects for micro-organisms, and
adding porosity and water retention to the soil. This in part, is how
char becomes biochar.



Mass to gas

Excess biomass, such as slash piles on timberlands, tree prunings from
orchards and yard waste from urban areas could all be turned into a
biomass feed for biochar production. Biochar production processes can
potentially utilize virtually any agricultural or forestry waste
biomass, including wood chips, corn stover, rice or peanut hulls, tree
bark, papermill sludge, or animal manure, adding to the attraction.

The heat capture from pyrolysis can be used to cook, to heat spaces,
or for power generation.

Integrating the kiln onto an already heat requiring industry (paper
mills, dairies, etc.), can provide much (if not all) of the required
thermal drive of the given process, while yielding biochar as a co-
product. Design integration of kilns into industrial or even
residential architecture offers unbounded opportunities.

Biochar International notes on their website that “Energy and biochar
can be co-produced from biomass using thermal processes. The energy
produced from the remainder of the biomass is used to heat the
pyrolysis unit and/or provide energy for on-farm use, such as heat and
electricity for lighting, fans, refrigerators, etc.”

The co-production of biochar from a portion of the biomass feedstock
will reduce the total amount of energy that can be produced, but basic
soil science research indicates that even at today’s energy and
fertilizer prices the net gain in soil productivity is worth more than
the value of the energy that would otherwise have been derived from
that charcoal.

Once the cost of carbon emissions starts to rise and the value of CO2
extraction from the atmosphere is also considered, the balance will
become overwhelmingly attractive.



Questions of scale

At what scale would the practice need to manifest in order for it to
achieve its glory?

The answer comes in many sizes. Art Donnelly co-founder of SeaChar.Org
(Seattle Biochar Working Group) and his partner Don Hennick
demonstrated a small, almost free, biochar producing “stove,”
fabricated from street scrap and found objects. A personal, portable,
pyrolysis unit. These rust-punk prototypes will soon be adapted by
SeaChar for widespread developing world collaboration, application and
distribution. The goal is millions of these household energy systems,
proliferating over the world’s soil starved landscape, making charcoal
that can heal the land, one plot at a time.

Kelpie Wilson, who came to biochar with a love of ecological systems
and engineering, was inspired to build a more substantial backyard
kiln in her yard in Takilma, Ore. Constructed out of cinderblocks and
rebar, her kiln was expanded to a pizza oven. She demonstrated how the
captured heat can ultimately warm greenhouses, homes and schools, and
how community-level incentives for labor, forest land and fuel loads
could all dance together systemically.

On the other end of the spectrum, Tom Miles of T R Miles Technical
Consultants, gave a dizzying presentation on “The Economics of Biochar
Production” concluding that large-scale pyrolysis systems can be
economically and environmentally viable.

Deep ecology reality checks came from Gloria Flora of Sustainable
Obtainable Solutions, who reminded us that a potential woody biomass
bonanza has implications for wildlife habitat and forest health, given
the U.S. Forest Service’s focus on getting the cut out on public
lands.

Occasionally, the piercing whistles of MaryAnn Simonds (of
EcoTechnologies Group) kept us on track, moderating the discussions.
Though looking like a cowgirl, MaryAnn gave an inspired dinner keynote
at the Siam Thai Restaurant on her approach to listening to nature,
and her days as a rattlesnake hugger.



Farming in the black

Agriculture has a huge carbon-positive footprint. Six to 20 calories
of energy are needed to deliver one calorie of food to an American
kitchen. All over the Earth, soils—disturbed by deforestation and
plowing, sterile from chemical fertilizers, pesticides and acid rain—
are losing carbon and life, leaking fertility into air and water.

Yet, agriculture can be a huge net carbon sink to absorb vast volumes
of carbon out of the atmosphere and store it as stable carbon in soil.

One benefit of biochar is as a carbon sink. Its ability to sequester
atmospheric carbon and attract and hold on to nitrous oxide and
methane in the soil, could potentially be a wedge in countering
greenhouse gasses. If the practice was widespread across major
geographic regions, it could potentially become a player in the
complex world of carbon trading.

Peter Weisberg from The Climate Trust noted that they might support
biochar projects financially by buying the carbon that is sequestered
in biochar, instead of released as CO2 to the atmosphere; monetizing
the climate change benefits of biochar projects.

Peter notes that, “There is a tradeoff between producing energy and
producing sequestered carbon. Energy can be sold, but without a carbon
market, sequestered carbon cannot. Offsets provide an avenue to sell
this benefit.”

Yet, substantial carbon sequestering would need vast regions of
biochar application, requiring char on the order of gigatons.

So much infrastructure to build, while simultaneously building a
market for the biochar product itself. Part of that puzzle is in
research.

Biochar is one of a handful of new, high-priority research and
extension areas identified in the Research Title of the 2008 Farm
Bill.

This is how we came to meet USDA researcher Hal Collins, on a tour of
the WSU research farm in Prosser, Wash., near the Horse Heaven hills.
testing how 10 tons of biochar per acre can help grow his corn.

This USDA ARS Biochar/ Pyrolysis Initiative Field Trial, using char
from Dynamotive, is one of only five USDA test sites for biochar
domestically, far shy for a whole assessment of how biochar will react
in the wide variety of soil regions.

Hal noted that biochar is quite expensive to truck in, being
classified as a combustible material. Meanwhile, down the hill from
the test plot, a whole pile of wood slash sat, awaiting a likely fate
in a burn pile. This reinforced how biochar processing onsite - on a
farm-by-farm basis, with a colony of mobile kilns - could offer some
localized solutions.



Getting respect

Biochar is getting some positive attention. It is mentioned in
negotiations for use as a mitigation strategy during the second Kyoto
Protocol commitment period, which begins in 2013.

Biochar is allowed for use in organic crop production, with some
restrictions.*

On the whole, I saw a hunger, a passion for positive solutions,
tempered with the humility that ancient technologies can be the best
way to deal with the cumulative impacts of mankind.

So fitting that this Hanford company town of Richland should host a
summit of radical ancient ag - that the most powerful tools of science
at PNNL are analyzing biochar’s properties, and that a celebration of
Terra Preta happens in the midst all this arid scrub rangeland, so in
need of some black tilth and moisture retention itself.

There is so little time to actualize the wholesale solutions that
biochar represents on a meaningful scale. So much infrastructure to
build, so much work to do.

All these possibilities were making my brain carbonize.

This is what I love about all the biochar enthusiasts that I met. With
all the sense of global urgency, and biochar’s promise, with all the
drive and passion and selflessness, there was such a yearning to vet
the science, to foster cross-discipline solutions, to seek reality
checks.

John Miedema summed it up nicely saying, “How can we make sure we’re
not such true believers that we end up drinking the Kool-Aid?”

So much work to do, before we can create the next El Dorado.



*If wood is burned and then mixed with non-human manure, it could be
allowed in organic production, but restricted to the pre-harvest
interval. Biochar made with sewage sludge of any kind, used in any way
is not allowed. Burnt manure is not allowed in organic production.



Sources

•www.ehponline.org

•www.biochar-international.org/policyintheus.html

•www.greenyourhead.com/

•www.ars.usda.gov/pwa/prosser

• http://groups.google.com/group/
pnw-biochar