Biochar and Fertilization

There were lots of news stories referencing biochar while I was off-line last month, so I’m going back and looking over some of those. I’ll share a brief synopsis with you here:

Carbonscape, a New Zealand firm, is using microwave ovens to produce biochar. They are still investigating methods to recover the gasses and oils that are by-products of the process, and plan to burn the gas to produce electricity to run the microwave oven. It will be interesting to learn how energy efficient that is.

Buried in the topsoil, the charcoal can improve soil fertility, cut soil emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, reduce nitrate and phosphate leaching, increase nitrogen fixation and help soil organisms to extract more carbon from the atmosphere, Mr Gerritsen said.

The Agricultural Research Service (part of the US Department of Agriculture) is investigating ways to produce biochar (which they call ‘green coal’ — the first time I’ve seen that term for it), though the main focus of the referenced article is wet gasification, a method to convert wet manure slurry into energy-rich gases.

An article exploring the impact of the global recession on environmental legislation in Australia recommends, among other options:

Construction in wide areas of rural Australia of a biochar industry based on plantations of trees such as mallee and brigalow. This would create a large number of rural jobs, raise the productivity of farmland, generate appreciable quantities of electricity and allow carbon corresponding to a large proportion of Australia’s emissions to be sequestered.

An article on Rabble News by Myles Estey looks at the promise and potential of biochar, and states:

This, of course, is hugely important news for anyone even remotely concerned with our planet’s health. The fact that biochar can conceivably remove CO2 from the atmosphere and make an end product that has its own set of benefits is certainly compelling, to say the least, and more than worthy of the research Lehmann, Fransham and their peers advocate.