On second thought . . .

Over the past years Biopact has been instrumental in getting a simple message across: if biofuels are going to produced, it would be interesting to take the potential of the Global South into account. . .

In order to help small farmers in Africa - which has always been our prime goal - there are perhaps more elegant and straightforward strategies. . .

There is a new land use strategy that could make more sense. It is based on biochar - charcoal obtained from the pyrolysis of biomass - used as a soil amendment. Biochar cures unhealthy soils and makes them fertile. This way, slash-and-burn farmers can halt deforestation, and grow more food and biomass. Biochar also doubles as a carbon sink for which credits are available. . .

The Biopact sees an interesting opportunity in the concept. This is why it has created the Biochar Fund, a small social profit organisation aimed at rethinking ways to tackle the interrelated issues of hunger, deforestation, energy poverty and climate change. . .

With the launch of the Biochar Fund, the small group of dedicated people behind the Biopact has a new mission and lots of work to do. For this reason, this website will no longer be updated.

That's better. Sequestering carbon in the soil with char is a far more effective way to address atmospheric carbon concerns than biofuels, and it has many other direct benefits to land managers.

It may be useful to begin to be a bit more precise about the benefits of char: it's an overstatement to say that it "cures unhealthy soils and makes them fertile". It amends all soils in ways that can, with other balanced amendments, get more benefit from the fertility locked in the soil as well as from the newly added amendments. It's not, as some say, a fertilizer, but it does help plants get more benefit from the fertilizers otherwise provided. They know this, but speak as if char does it all, perhaps to simplify the ideas for broad consumption. I do the same sort of compression sometimes, but it seems vaguely wrong headed, something I should correct.

These folks are focused on Africa, so the theoretical benefits of char need to be appropriate for their target audience.

The Biochar Fund is developing efficient, village-scale pyrolysis plants that are optimised for biochar and electricity generation. The small plants allow for flexible production choices, which is why they are called Flexi-Pyrolysis plants. . . Depending on the residence time and the temperature, three main products result from pyrolysis in varying ratios: synthesis gas, tars and high-carbon char. . . The syngas gas be utilized for the production of reliable, cost-effective and renewable electricity, whereas the biochar is added to acidic and nutrient-poor problem soils. . .

the Biochar Fund understands that there is a need for optimised pyrolysis plants that allow rural communities to generate electricity and biochar fractions in a flexible and easy way. This flexibility guarantees the capability of farmers to adapt their pyrolysis choices to prevailing market conditions: depending on carbon prices, they can decide to turn more of the biomass into biochar for sequestration into soils by increasing its production, without being forced to produce more electricity than needed. This flexibility thus enhances the overall efficiency of the system and allows for optimal production planning.

The Biochar Fund's Flexi-Pyrolysis plants have a micro-scale (<25kW) capacity and are adapted to village conditions (small electricity demand, biomass capacity, ease of use, servicing).

It's interesting to watch the advocacy community slowly twig to the possibilities of gasification. Blowing up biomass with relatively gentle heat, and recombining the gases into a variety of valuable materials, puts a different perspective on all of those materials. Biomass is fuel, it's nitrogen fertilizer, it's hydrogen, and more. It all depends on how the gases released are processed.

It's also interesting to watch them twig to the possibilities of the heat involved. Many systems use the heat of pyrolysis to dry and condition feedstocks for subsequent pyrolysis. Some make steam to drive electric generators. I read another article today, but lost the link, where somebody was noodling about the possibilities of thermoelectrics (something I've advocated) due to recent materials advances that hugely improve ZT.

Most interesting to me is that many of these systems are targeted to small scale and remote applications. That means farm-scale systems to me, even though the do-gooders are thinking of villages in developing countries.

Such systems need to be low cost and have intrinsic worth. They must actually produce things of value. One of the things that most worries me is the rent-seeking, the pursuit of government subsidies and corporate extortion for carbon credits. It gives new meaning to the term "blackmail". Politicized revenues come and go on a whim, leaving practitioners to sort through the rubble created. But these systems are of value without rents. They have real worth even if the politics reverses and we stop whingeing about CO2.

H.T. John for the heads-up.

Update:

A practical explanation for the cautions about fertility and char discussed above:

Do not put fresh charcoal into the soil!
If you put fresh charcoal into soil the fertility might actually decrease. In addition, we have noticed charcoal has a hydrophobic property that needs to be biodegraded before water borne nutrients can be transmitted into the internal structure of what was once the vascular system of the plant. In the conditioning process, the large inner surface of charcoal causes nutrients to adhere making them temporarily unavailable until the charcoal is saturated. Once saturated the charcoal becomes attractive to plant roots and soil microbes. Because of the inorganic nature of this substrate the charcoal will serve as an enrichment culture for nitrogen fixing and mycorrhizial partners.

How to do it –
Think about composting with manure, urine, wood chips and /or nitrogen fixed by legume crops before or after use. We have been working on this approach as have others. Our local group has found that several months in these conditions, kept in aerobic conditions the charcoal is water saturated and completely involved with fungi and macroscopic invertebrates. Our best results thus far are with charcoal treated in this way.

If you are thinking about making agricultural charcoal you should know there is additional components of this conversion that benefits plants, this is smoke (pyroligneous acid) and burned soil. See Christoph Steiner’s dissertation, pages 35 to 42. This is the chapter on current indigenous gardening methods. Terra Queimada - burned soil and Terra Cheirosa - smelling soil (pyroligneous acid) as well as the volatile materials that accompany fresh charcoal stimulate microbial activity. TPp or Terra Preta (prehistoric) is in anthropogenic deposits dated 500 to 2500 years old and has a different respiration response profile than the newly created TPn or Terra Preta Nova. You cannot expect to make TP overnight. It will always be a work in progress.

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