By TERRI ADAMS, The Prairie StarThursday, May 6, 2010 6:10 PM MDT
Biochar is a new buzz word in agriculture but, exactly, what is biochar?
Biochar is a soil amendment made by converting manure, crop residue and other bio-waste materials, including sawdust, into charcoal by using pyrolysis, which is heat without oxygen.
“It is made in the exact same way as charcoal. You heat the material above a certain temperature without letting any oxygen in,” said Catherine (Catie) Brewer, a PhD student in chemistry and graduate research assistant at Iowa State Univer-sity. “This is different from burning or combustion in which you add oxygen. Without oxygen you get biochar.”
Biochars are attracting a lot of interest for both commercial and agricultural applications, and for small scale use. According to Brewer, chars have shown the ability to increase soil fertility, im-prove water retention, lower soil acidity and density, and increase microbial activity.
Biochars also help with the carbon level of the soil.
While some forms of carbon, like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon particulates, are harmful to humans and animals when in the atmosphere, carbon is very beneficial in the soil.
It acts as a home to beneficial microorganisms and as a sponge to hold nutrients where plants can use them, resulting in higher plant yields with lower input costs.
Biochars also help the soil hold just the right amount of water, retaining water during periods of drought and improving drainage during wet seasons which helps reduce flooding, mudslides and other problems associated with excess moisture.
The longer the carbon can remain in the soil, the longer the soil and plants can benefit from its presence.
Brewer explained that all bio-matter has two types of carbon in it - a carbon that is immediately available and decomposes quickly and a more stable carbon that breaks down in the soil over a long time.
The majority of biomass releases its carbon quickly and the benefits rapidly deplete.
For example, corn stover left in the field one year disappears within a few years. In biochar the majority of the available carbon is the more stable, slowly decomposing variety that can benefit the soil of years.
“Producers would put biochar on one part of their field and then not have to reapply it again for a couple of decades,” said Brewer.
Decades? Decades, affirmed Brewer. “If you make the char right and if you apply it in accurate quantities the first time,” she said. Brewer said researchers can see the effects of char in the soil for hundreds, even thousands of years. Some of the richest, blackest soils in the world are loaded with biochar materials that have been in the soil for centuries.
“Some producers are worried about tilling bichoar in because they use no-till or reduced-till methods; but with biochar they may only have to add it once with a lasting benefit,” she said.
Brewer explained how the biochar process might work for producers. After harvest, a corn producer would gather all the stover off his field and take it to a pyrolysis facility that can heat the biomass to the proper temperature without oxygen. After the farmer offloads his stover, he would then drive around to the back of the factory and pick up a load of char, take it back to his farm and spread it on his fields for long-term fertilization benefits.
Biochar is not the only usable product of pyrolysis. “Whenever you burn something you get three byproducts,” explained Brewer, a gas, a charred solid, and a liquid. Relating it to cooking, Brewer said that when you burn something on the stove or in the oven there is a release of gas from the product, charred remains left behind, and a sticky, oily residue or tar.
In Brewer's research group they are focusing on processes that favor the liquid product, known as bio-oil. This bio-oil can be collected and upgraded so that it can be shipped for processing in existing refineries.
Even the gas from the pyrolosis process can be captured and used to produce heat or electricity, said Brewer. The different products and the amounts would vary by the biomass used and the method. It could be tailored to fit different needs. For agriculture producers, it would be a way of turning their bio-wastes, from crop resi-due to manure, into valuable, long-acting fertilizers, improve the soil on their land, and increase their yields.
Currently the biochar industry is small and limited to small facilities, but it is growing.
“We have a chicken before the egg problem when it comes to larger-scale implementation,” Brewer said. While big industry might be interested in building biochar facilities, they want to make sure they will have a market for the char. That market will grow as research continues to test its viability and validity in small research plots.
Already there are some companies looking at producing small biochar facilities that can be used in backyards or moved from field to field in the agriculture sector.
“You could make char yourself at home, in 55-gallon metal drum. You just start a fire and when it gets going you put the lid on the drum and let it burn without oxygen,” she said. Making char that way is very inefficient and provides low yields. “It's also dirty in regards to air pollution.”
Brewer stated that there are other, more efficient ways, and the more efficient the method the cleaner the output. She would eventually like to see co-op-sized facilities used by several farmers or small communities for the benefit of the community.
She said that they are even developing small biochar stoves that would use biomass as a fuel and produce char for returning back into gardens and yards.
Developing countries are especially in-terested in the stove aspect.
For more information, check out the International Biochar Initiative's Web site at www.biochar-international.org
Biochar Education: Cops, Cookies and Biochar
FRESH FOOD: This is a basic example of creating a backyard oasis using the techniques of permaculture. (Photo: Cicadas/Flickr)
A large containment dome is being sent to the leak site 50 miles off the US coast to try and contain the 5000 barrels of crude oil still spewing into the fragile Gulf of Mexico.
The 100-ton dome will be loaded onto the transport ship the Joe Griffin and will face a 12-hour journey from Port Fourchon on the Louisiana coast to the epicentre of the disaster some 50 miles offshore.
BP has been trying to contain the spill since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig over two weeks ago, and has used several methods including containing and burning the surface oil to trying to disperse the oil with dispersants. They have also began drilling a relief well to stem the flow, but this could take two to three months.
In the last day or so, workers have managed to plug one of the gushing leaks on the underground pipeline, but experts have confirmed that this has made no impact on the amount of oil entering the Gulf every day, which still remains at around 5000 barrels.
The dome is now seen as the best chance to stop more oil entering the water, causing damage to the fragile eco-system within the Gulf and affecting both the wildlife and America's southern coastlines.
Once the dome has arrived at the spill site, BP chief operating officer, Doug Suttles confirmed in a briefing that it will take up to five days to position the dome in a position to contain the spill. This could be just enough time, as gentler winds are projected off the south coast, meaning the oil spill will not expand to shore.
Possible disaster
However there are concerns that the 100-ton dome could rupture the already leaking pipeline if it is placed incorrectly, and cause an oil catastrophe on a scale unseen on Earth before.
The dome has never been tested before at the depths required in the Gulf, about 5000 feet below the surface, and placing such a massive structure is not without risk.
"We are all hoping that this... will work, but I want to remind everybody that this containment system is the first of its kind deployed in 5000 feet of water," says Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry.
Environmental impact of more leaking oil
There are more than 6000 animal species threatened in the Gulf of Mexico, and Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries says that the threats affect some 445 species of fish, 134 birds, 45 mammals, and 32 reptiles and amphibians.
The threat is not just confined to sea animals like bottle-nose dolphins, manatees and various whales, as the Brown Pelican is under threat due to contaminated nesting sites and fish and coyotes, raccoons and foxes could also see their habitat affected.
38 turtles were discovered from Alabama to the Louisiana delta since April 30, the majority of them the endangered Kemp's Ridley turtle, although NOAA scientists have suggested there is no evidence to link the turtles with the spill.
Related articles:
Gulf oil spill latest: Containing the spill | Oil and Gas News | US oil rig sinks and causes oil spill off US coast | Back chat: The lessons learned from hurricane Katrina
Here at re:char, we are often bombarded with requests for proprietary information about our technology. “Can you please provide schematic diagrams for your pyrolyzer systems?” “Can you provide the details of your bio-oil upgrading processes?” Although we believe in the open-source model, it’s exceedingly difficult to have a completely transparent tech development process while remaining a competitive, for-profit enterprise. That said, we would like to provide the public with a better sense of how we generate ideas, and broadly what we see as the future of biochar and carbon-negative energy.
Bill McKibben
(May 3) -- If you think that slick of oil spreading across the Gulf of Mexico is a nasty sight ... well, it is. And so we'll probably do something about it. Within hours of the crude reaching the coast, an aide to President Barack Obama said new offshore drilling would be put on hold.
But here's the problem: An even bigger slick -- this one of acid -- is spreading across the entire ocean. It's doing damage far more profound than even the oil. But since you can't see it, nothing's happened.
Other Views:
Halting new offshore oil and gas development because of this one isolated incident would be an even worse disaster, says H. Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis.
The catastrophe in the Gulf shows the need for clean energy alternatives, says Frances Beinecke, president of Natural Resources Defense Council.
The day after the gulf rig blew out, the National Research Council quietly issued a report on what exactly carbon dioxide, which is warming the atmosphere, is doing to seawater. As the oceans absorb some of the carbon our factories and engines pour into the atmosphere, the "chemistry of the ocean is changing at an unprecedented rate and magnitude," the report said. "The rate of change exceeds any known to have occurred for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years."
Already fishermen report that oysters aren't reproducing, and biologists are saying that coral reefs may not survive the century. "This increase in [ocean] acidity threatens to decimate entire species, including those that are at the foundation of the marine food chain," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.
Lautenberg, by the way, gets serious points for presciently standing up to President Obama in late March, when the administration ended a longstanding ban on offshore drilling. "Giving Big Oil more access to our nation's waters is really a 'Kill, Baby, Kill' policy," he said at the time. "It threatens to kill jobs, kill marine life and kill coastal economies that generate billions of dollars."
At a conference in spring 2009, Nancy Knowlton, an American researcher, described what's at stake with refreshing bluntness: "Coral reefs will cease to exist as physical structures by 2100, perhaps 2050." She's far from alone in her view. "We are overwhelming the system," says Richard Zeebe, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii. "It's pretty outrageous what we've done."
Pretty outrageous, sure. But here's the thing: Doing anything about it would mean confronting fossil fuel. Not telling BP to put better blowout preventers on its rigs -- that's easy. We'll definitely do that. But facing up, really facing up to our addiction to fossil fuel, that's hard. British Petroleum pretended to do it in the 1990s, when with great fanfare it changed its name to Beyond Petroleum. But it didn't mean it.
Let's say we were serious about saving the ocean from crude oil, and from the acidification of carbon. We'd have to stop using oil, not to mention coal and gas. We'd have to take the steps urgently to move the world off fossil fuel and on to renewable energy. Those steps aren't impossible, but they do require a resource we're short on: political will.
The energy legislation that Obama and Senate Democrats are ready to push is about as weak as possible. The oil companies were allowed to "suggest" the teensy fees they'd add to the price of their products. Lindsey Graham, the one Republican senator even considering signing on to the bill, described its merits as follows: "It's all about business." As late as Thursday, somewhat unbelievably, he was touting the idea that it would allow more offshore drilling.
So far Obama has done too little to deliver on his promises to move us past fossil fuel. Now, sadly, that rig in the Atlantic is giving him a defining moment. Will he make cosmetic changes around the edges? Or will he stand up and tell the truth: As long as we're addicted to fossil fuel, there's no way to make the sea safe. Even when it's blue it's dying.
Bill McKibben is the author of "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet" and more than a dozen other books. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes for Harper's, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books and other publications, and is founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.
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