On October 10, artists and engineers at All Power Labs, an artist work space in an industrial area of Berkeley, California, built and tested wood-chip-powered gasifiers and biochar makers as part of the Global Work Party sponsored by 350.org to take actions aimed at knocking the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere back down to 350 ppm.
The artists at All Power Labs took a skillset for building large kinetic sculptures for the Burning Man celebration and converted it to producing independent, low carbon power. While the rest of society may be content to wait for the oil to run out before they start thinking about alternatives, All Power Labs kicked into gear when the city cut off their electricity for building code violations ten years ago. Spark plug Jim Mason responded by jumping into gasifier development and construction, chipping up old shipping pallets and construction waste to keep the lights on and the artists working.
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Interesting
Incredible!
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Using 21st century desktop manufacturing technologies like a computer guided plasma cutter, they perform what Mason calls "DIY power hacking." Computer modeling of combustion processes remains such a complex problem, that it is faster and easier to just cut new parts out of metal and try them in fast build and test cycles. The design advances quickly because all the information is open source, and anyone can participate and offer improvements. People can be authors of their own power systems similar to the way that desktop publishing and the Internet created the information revolution.
All Power Labs now sells what it calls the "Gasifier Experimenters Kit" or GEK. They also offer a Biochar Experimenters Kit -- biochar is a natural byproduct of gasification. On 10-10-10, about 50 GEK and BEK customers were on hand for a workshop to gain hands-on experience in construction, testing and modification of the machines. One part of the crew had stayed up until 2:30am the night before making two kinds of biochar that would be tested in a nearby community garden.
Biochar is a charcoal-based soil amendment that can dramatically increase plant growth. Biochar also sequesters carbon because plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. If you burn a plant or let it rot or compost, all the CO2 returns to the atmosphere. But if you bake it and burn only the gas that comes out of it, you are left with charcoal that lasts for hundreds to thousands of years without breaking down, effectively sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.
Jim Fournier, CEO of Biochar Engineering Corporation, told the 10-10-10 work party that biochar is one of the only ways we have to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere and soon we are going to feel a lot of urgency to do that. Events like the floods in Pakistan, fires in Russian and the recent extreme heat in Los Angeles are just a taste of what's in store for us. Historically, our atmosphere has had less than 300ppm of CO2. We may go to 450ppm or higher before we are able to get off of coal and oil. Because it takes about 100 years for natural processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, we have to find ways to help nature along. Biochar is one of those ways.
Fournier said that one ppm of atmospheric CO2 is roughly equivalent to 3 gigatons (Gt) of carbon and that biochar could remove at most 2 Gt per year. So even with help from biochar, we can only remove about a half of a ppm of CO2 from our atmosphere annually. We have dug ourselves into a very deep hole. It is past time to grab shovels and start digging ourselves back out.
On the morning of 10-10-10 we delivered two barrels of biochar to the community garden. I described my own experiments with biochar and cautioned the gardeners that because fresh biochar can act like raw compost, in the first year after adding biochar to soil it is important to add plenty of nitrogen as well -- urine being my preferred source. Immediately someone produced a stack of drink cups, and we all trooped off to the bathroom to fill the cups with liquid gold in true DIY spirit.
Kelpie Wilson works as the Communications Editor for the International Biochar Initiative, a non-profit organization that supports the community of people working to implement biochar systems.
Follow Kelpie Wilson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@kelpiew
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"biochar is one of the only ways we have to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere and soon we are going to feel a lot of urgency to do that. Events like the floods in Pakistan, fires in Russian and the recent extreme heat in Los Angeles are just a taste of what's in store for us."
Excuse me, but floods in Pakistan have every thing to do with deforestation. Some of the highest deforestation rates in that particular region are where those floods came from!
Also fires in Russia were primarily fueled by local climatic change due to draining of vast peat bogs and other wetlands in order to grow millions of hectares of highly flammable tree farms.
And 200 years ago the mountains around the LA Basin were surrounded by vast pine and fir forests, oak woodlands too... Through evapotranspiration and other processes these vast forests not only limited the burn off of the marine layer / fog, they also created their own precipitation. Of course it's not tree that do all that right, it's biochar?
A global charcoal trade for cooking fuel is turning arid forest all over the world into deserts, especially Africa. And now Biochar wants to increase competition for these rapidly depleting resources? Really?
Also it seems to me that skipping the biochar process entirely and simply mixing organic matter into the soil does the eq...uivalent as biochar does but with far less CO2 production?
I don't understand why biochar is purported to be "sequestering carbon from the air" when in truth the process of Gassification process burns fuel that in turn puts CO2 into the air. Some say that Gassification burns far dirtier than natural gas....
Lastly, green growing things absorb carbon and biochar, or that which is manufactured from once green growing things does not
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N45/yost.html
My candidate for this is bamboo. There is a species of bamboo which grows so fast that you can almost see it grow, and you can actually HEAR it grow.
To really use biochar well for carbon sequestration and as a new fuel source, we need as much plant matter as we can possible get. So to me the answer is to use the fastest growing plant on the planet- Bamboo.
You've been misinformed. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that has had a measurable, significant impact on our climate. It's easy to detect reliably; how do you think your local gas station detects the carbon emissions from your car when you get it smogged?
More CO2 does not necessarily mean a greener planet, any more than being force fed five pounds of food every hour means you will live a long healthy life.
Sustainable biochar mitigate global climate change
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v1/n5/full/ncomms1053.html
Not talked about in this otherwise comprehensive study are the whole ecological implications of new , higher value, char applications
The in situ remediation of a vast variety of toxic agents in soils and sediments.
Biochar Sorption of Contaminants;
http://www.biorenew.iastate.edu/events/biochar2010/conference-agenda/agenda-overview/breakout-session-5/agriculture-forestry-soil-science-and-environment.html
The uses as a feed ration for livestock to reduce GHG emissions and increase disease resistance.
Recent work showing a 52% reduction of NH3 loss when char is used as a composting accelerator. This will have profound value added consequences for the commercial composting industry
Every 1 ton of Biomass yields 1/3 ton Charcoal for soil Sequestration (= to 1 Ton CO2e) + Bio-Gas & Bio-oil fuels = to 1MWh exported electricity, so is a totally virtuous, carbon negative energy cycle.
Biochar viewed as soil Infrastructure; The old saw;
Feed the Soil Not the Plants becomes;
Feed, Cloth and House the Soil, utilities included .
Free Carbon Condominiums with carboxyl group fats in the pantry and hydroxyl alcohol in the mini bar.
Build it and the Wee-Beasties will come.
Microbes like to sit down when they eat.
By setting this table we expand husbandry to whole new orders & Kingdoms of life
US BiocharConference, at ISU
http://www.biorenew.iastate.edu/events/biochar2010/conference-agenda/agenda-overview.html
The trouble is that production farmers will need a more substantial source of nitrogen fertilizer than can be supplied by their own urine. Although syngas can be used to manufacture urea via the Bosch-Meiser process, I doubt that this will ever be economical on a sufficiently small scale.
The most efficient practical method for farmers to produce nitrogen fertilizer from their waste biomass is via worm bins. Like any other composting process, the majority of the carbon content in the waste biomass will be released back into the atmosphere.
In order to biochar the majority of our waste biomass without increasing our dependence on fossil fuels for nitrogen fixation, the gas generators have to be integrated with Haber-Bosch reactors, and therefore small private units are less appropriate than larger municipal facilities.
Finally, if the biochar systems are developed at the municipal scale, then thermal depolymerization is a more attractive solution. It can handle sewage, plastics, and other municipal wastes, and it is more easily tuned to produce liquid fuels in addition to gases and biochar.