Australian Firm Leading Mobile Biochar Technology.

Black is Green Pty. Ltd. (BiG) is an Australian companyworking to commercialise a patented fast rotary hearth process for the conversion of biomass residues to biochar and environmentally friendly fuel charcoal.

The production of biochar from plant and animal biomass residues is often the most economically viable means to deal with the disposal, greenhouse emissions, odour, and/or fire hazards posed by these materials. Biochar production provides a means to rapidly compost biomass with a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions relative to traditional composting by up to 50%.

BiG’s patented fast rotary hearth technology is mobile, feedstock flexible, high throughput, low cost and has minimal site and operational requirements.

BiG are currently in the demonstration and roll out phase of the commercialisation process and are looking for suitable projects to develop with end users in Australia.

Don Burke Joins Outback Biochar

Don Burke has teamed up with Outback Biochar to give Australian home gardeners the opportunity to experience the benefits of biochar (bio char)  first hand.  Biochar has been garnering world wide attention for its potential role as a tool to combat climate change.  Biochar is a by-product from a renewable energy production process called pyrolysis.  Organic waste that would have otherwise broken down and decomposed into harmful greenhouse gasses is cooked under high temperatures and pressures to create renewable energy and agricultural charcoal.  The charcoal, or biochar, locks the carbon from the green waste into an incredibly stable form that replenishes soils’ organic carbon levels and drastically improves water and nutrient holding capacities.  Research at CSIRO and the NSW Department of Primary Industries suggests that biochar might be the answer to revitalising much of Australia’s nutrient poor land.  Don’s new product line will be available at garden centres throughout Australia under the Burke’s Biochar label.  To learn more visit www.OutbackBiochar.com for the latest biochar information, news and research.

Geoengineering no replacement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions

To view the orginal article click “here“.

The Royal Society of London has released a major report on geoengineering titled, “the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system, in order to moderate global warming”.

Geoengineering may become the plan B if efforts to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases continue to be insufficient. These schemes include placing sunshades in space, creating artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide, making biochar (bio char) or artificially brightening clouds to reflect more of the sun’s energy away from the planet.

However, no geoengineering scheme is fully credible and none “can provide an easy or readily acceptable alternative solution to the problem of climate change”. The key recommendation from the report is that mitigation – reducing emissions of greenhouse gases – is still the top priority for reducing climate change.

Dr Phil Boyd, from NIWA in Dunedin, contributed to the report and says: “This document will be the benchmark guide for policy-makers, scientists and other interested parties as it covers a wide range of geoengineering topics from technology to ethics and governance”.

Despite the difficulties with geoengineering, the Royal Society of New Zealand considers that several schemes could become particularly important given New Zealand’s situation, and deserve further research. Afforestation is the simplest way to remove carbon from the atmosphere and has a role to play for New Zealand. Using this wood to produce biochar and biofuels could be major new industries, if it can be proven and verified that they reduce overall emissions of carbon. Ocean fertilisation, the addition of iron to help plankton grow, has been promoted optimistically and our easy access to the Southern Ocean suggests we could act as a staging point. However, the limited research done so far shows that ocean fertilisation appears to be ineffective at locking away carbon from the atmosphere, suggesting that it does not offer the potential that some claim.

A wide range of schemes propose to engineer the climate
Geoengineering proposals fall into two camps, those aiming to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and those aiming to reduce the net solar energy that heats the planet. The first type of scheme is generally lower risk but will take decades to have an effect; the second type could act much faster but are generally higher risk.

Proposals to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere include those intending to enhance the uptake and storage by: biological systems, such as afforestation or ocean fertilisation; direct capture of carbon dioxide by technological means such as artificial trees; and, enhancing the weathering of rocks that naturally removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These proposals are, in general, based on enhancing existing natural mechanisms and removing human additions to the atmosphere. As some of these schemes are little more than just enhancements of natural processes they could be considered as part of a portfolio response to reducing climate change, if they are shown to be cost-effective and safe.

Proposals to reduce the heating of the planet by blocking or reflecting the sun’s energy include placing giant sunshields in space, increasing the reflectivity of the planet through planting reflective crops, placing reflectors in deserts, whitening roofs on buildings or paving, enhancing the reflectivity of clouds by spraying seawater from specially-constructed ships, or producing sulphate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. These techniques could reduce global temperatures much more rapidly, if deployed on sufficient scale, but none are without side effects. Each would require active management and if their use was discontinued, warming would take place rapidly. As these approaches do not reduce the raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the resulting ocean acidification, these schemes could play a role as options of last resort.

No proposal is a silver bullet for climate change
A fundamental challenge in geoengineering is the planetary scale of the efforts required. Reflectors in the desert would need to cover an area as large as Canada. Sun shades in space would need to have an area similar to Australia or Brazil. At this stage it is difficult to estimate the costs of such proposals.

The Royal Society of London’s report provides a set of criteria to assess geoengineering proposals. Preferred proposals will be: cost effective; have few side effects and unintended results; effective in reducing global temperatures; will be socially acceptable, and without difficult issues of governance. Importantly, no known proposal meets all these criteria. For example, the introduction of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere is expected to be more effective and affordable than other proposals. Natural aerosols from volcanic eruptions are known to cause cooling, proving the technique is effective, and the relatively small amount of sulphate needed reduces costs. However, the risk of unintended effects is high, with potential impacts upon weather patterns such as the Indian monsoon and further reduction in stratospheric ozone. While acid rain is not expected, as the amounts of sulphate are relatively small, there remains the risk of other unforseen side effects.

Beyond the scientific and engineering challenges, the Royal Society’s report raises questions about the governance and ethics of these proposals. They suffer from the fundamental flaw that currently limits effective progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, i.e., that effort on the scale required to reduce climate change requires coordinated global action, but the costs, benefits, and risks are unevenly shared between nations. Clear governance and agreed international frameworks will be needed for even one of these proposals to make a difference to the climate.

The report also highlights our ignorance of side effects and unintended consequences, in terms of both the magnitude of their impacts and their probabilities. Geoengineering also presents a moral hazard, where the existence of geoengineering proposals may decrease efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases because of “a premature conviction that geoengineering has provided ‘insurance’ against climate change”.

But some proposals deserve further attention by New Zealand
For New Zealand, several approaches seem to have the most relevance. We are already playing a role in the research of afforestation, biochar and biofuels, and ocean fertilisation and our scientists are well linked in to international efforts in both research and informing policy.

Greatly increasing our forest cover will absorb and store carbon, and can be begun rapidly, offering the co-benefits of improvements in water regulation and quality, reduced soil erosion and potentially increased biodiversity. At a global level, afforestation is limited in the amount of carbon that can be stored, but given New Zealand’s small emissions profile, large land area, and existing forestry industry, it could play a more significant role here. However, increasing forestry will require trade-offs to be made between forestry and food production, and between rapidly-growing exotic species and slow-growing natives that support our endemic biodiversity.

The increased biomass in expanded forests could be put to use (and could generate income) as biochar or biofuels. Biofuels are carbon neutral in use but when combined with carbon sequestration, could lock away large amounts of carbon while creating usable energy. The creation of biochar involves the heating of organic material such as wood to release usable fuel gases with only limited release of the carbon from the wood. The char can then be used as a soil conditioner, locking away carbon. The potential of this approach is not yet clear; biochar and sequestered biomass are not yet eligible for carbon credits. New Zealand is supporting research in this topic, with the recent MAF funding of the biochar research centre at Massey University.

The Southern Ocean has been put forward as the key region for ocean fertilisation, the proposal to add iron to promote the growth of plankton that absorbs carbon as they grow. New Zealand has existing research strengths in the marine physics, chemistry and biology of this region required to better understand this proposed approach. The effectiveness of these schemes is far from proven and the risks of side effects uncertain. The report highlights the urgent need for global regulations that allow further research in this field, while preventing commercial developments until they are justified and effective; the Royal Society of New Zealand agrees that these are needed.

The full report can be found online at:

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=872

Biochar could enrich soils and cut greenhouse gases as well.

CHARCOAL has rather gone out of fashion. Before the industrial revolution, whole forests disappeared into the charcoal-burners’ maw to provide the carbon that ironmakers need to reduce their ore to metal. Then, an English ironmaker called Abraham Darby discovered how to do the job with coke. From that point onward, the charcoal-burners’ days were numbered. The rise of coal, from which coke is produced, began, and so did the modern rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It is a sweet irony, therefore, that the latest fashion for dealing with global warming is to bring back charcoal. It has to be rebranded for modern consumers, of course, so it is now referred to as “biochar”. But there are those who think biochar may give humanity a new tool to attack the problem of global warming, by providing a convenient way of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, burying it and improving the quality of the soil on the way.

Many of those people got together recently at the University of Colorado, to discuss the matter at the North American Biochar Conference. They looked at various ways of making biochar, the virtues of different raw materials and how big the benefits really would be.

The first inkling that putting charcoal in the ground might improve soil quality came over a century ago, when an explorer named Herbert Smith noticed that there were patches of unusually rich soils in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Most of the forest’s soil is heavily weathered and of poor quality. But the so-called “terra preta”, or “black earth”, is much more fertile.

This soil is found at the sites of ancient settlements, but it does not appear to be an accidental consequence of settlement. Rather, it looks as though the remains of burned plants have been mixed into it deliberately. And recently, some modern farmers—inspired by Wim Sombroek, a Dutch soil researcher who died in 2003—have begun to do likewise.
Char grilled

The results are impressive. According to Julie Major, of the International Biochar Initiative, a lobby group based in Maine, infusing savannah in Colombia with biochar made from corn stover (the waste left over when maize is harvested) caused crops there to tower over their char-less peers. Christoph Steiner, of the University of Georgia, reported that biochar produced from chicken litter could do the same in the sandy soil of Tifton in that state. And David Laird, of America’s Department of Agriculture, showed that biochar even helped the rich soil of America’s Midwest by reducing the leaching from it of a number of nutrients, including nitrate, phosphate and potassium.

All of which is interesting. But it is the idea of using biochar to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a semi-permanent basis that has caused people outside the field of agriculture to take notice of the stuff. Sombroek wrote about the possibility in 1992, but only now is it being taken seriously.

In the natural carbon cycle, plants absorb CO2 as they grow. When they die and decompose, this returns to the atmosphere. If, however, they are subjected instead to pyrolysis—a process of controlled burning in a low-oxygen atmosphere—the result is charcoal, a substance that is mostly elemental carbon. Although life is, in essence, a complicated form of carbon chemistry, living creatures cannot process carbon in its elemental form. Charcoal, therefore, does not decay very fast. Bury it in the soil, and it will stay there. Some of the terra preta is thousands of years old.

Moreover, soil containing biochar releases less methane and less nitrous oxide than its untreated counterparts, probably because the charcoal acts as a catalyst for the destruction of these gases. Since both of these chemicals are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, this effect, too, should help combat global warming. And the process of making biochar also creates beneficial by-products. These include heat from the partial combustion, a gaseous mixture called syngas that can be burned as fuel, and a heavy oil.

Taking all these things together—the burial of the charcoal and the substitution for fossil fuels of the heat, gas and oil produced by its manufacture—Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University and Jim Amonette of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state suggest that a reduction of between one and two gigatonnes of carbon-emission a year might be achievable. That compares with current annual emissions of some 9.7 gigatonnes. But the truth is that the computer modelling involved in making these estimates is a work in progress, as researchers do not know a lot of pertinent things accurately enough: how much material is available for conversion, for example; how much land is available for biochar to be ploughed into; how much char that land could handle. Dr Amonette’s estimate is that 50 tonnes per hectare—a figure larger than that used in most of the experiments conducted so far—could go into soils without harming productivity. Some soils could take even more.

The claims for biochar are not supported by all, however. Biofuels Watch, a British lobby group, worries that a craze for the stuff could see virgin land tilled specifically to grow crops such as switchgrass, whose only purpose was to be pyrolised and buried. That tillage would release carbon dioxide and methane. But the alternative, growing those crops on existing farmland, would encourage the clearance of more land to grow the food crops that had been displaced. Indeed, Kelli Roberts, another researcher at Cornell, told the meeting that, taking all factors into account, growing switchgrass for biochar may do more harm than good. Corn stover, garden waste such as grass clippings, and offcuts from forestry and timber production are better bets, she reckons.

And if sequestration by biochar is deemed sensible, there remains the question of how, exactly, to go about it. Making the charcoal is not a problem. Pyrolising stoves are easy to construct and available models range from the portable to industrial-scale machines costing tens of thousands of dollars. Moreover, Jock Gill of Pellet Futures, a company based in Vermont that makes grass and wood pellets for use as fuel, told the meeting that a teenage protégé of his has invented a stove that can be fed continuously, rather than processing batches of raw material. If that proves successful, it would be a breakthrough of the sort that has enabled other industries (not least ironmaking) to take off in the past.

The benefits of improving their soil should be enough to persuade some farmers to make and bury biochar. Others, though, may need more incentives—probably in the form of carbon “offsets” that compensate for emissions elsewhere. In the rich world, Europe already caps carbon-dioxide emissions, and trades permission to emit the gas. America may soon do so too. CO2-emitting industries could pay farmers to buy stoves to char and sequester farm waste. That would mean working out how much of what kind of biochar counts as a tonne of CO2 sequestered, and would also need a lot of policing.
A charcoal sketch

If the details can be nailed down, though, farmers in poor countries could get in on the act too, through the Clean Development Mechanism, a United Nations’ programme that allows rich-world emitters to buy offsets in the poor world. And Lakshman Guruswamy, of the University of Colorado, told the meeting of another advantage if poor-world farmers can be brought in. Many of them burn wood, waste and dung indoors for heating and cooking. The soot released into the air as a consequence is also a climate-changer because, being dark, it absorbs heat. Much worse, though, about 1.6m people are killed each year by inhaling it. But pyrolytic stoves produce almost no soot—the carbon is all locked into the biochar. Worldstove, a firm based in Italy, seeks to provide small and simple pyrolising stoves to poor countries.

It is all, then, an intriguing idea. It certainly will not solve the carbon-dioxide problem, but it could be what Robert Socolow of Princeton University refers to as a wedge—one of a series of slices that, added together, do solve it. And there would be a nice historical justice in the substance that was displaced by coal playing an important role in cleaning up the mess that coal has left behind.