The International Biochar Initiative estimates that biochar
production has the potential to provide 1 Gt carbon per year in
climate mitigation by 2040, or 3.67 Gt CO2 per year, using only
waste biomass (66). Hansen et al. (5) estimate that if slash-andchar
agriculture replaced slash-and-burn practices, and if agricultural
and forestry wastes were used for biochar production, it
would be possible to drawdown CO2 concentrations by approximately
8 ppm or more within half a century, or 62.5 Gt CO2.
According to Sohi et al. (61), the global potential for annual
sequestration of CO2 may be ‘‘at the billion-ton scale’’ within 30
years, although they note that the published evidence is largely
from small-scale studies and cannot be generalized to all locations
and types of biochar. Under an aggressive scenario, where
all projected demand for renewable biomass fuel is met through
pyrolysis, Lehmann et al. (62) estimate that biochar may be able
to sequester 5.5–9.5 Gt C per year, or 20–35 Gt CO2, per year
by 2100.
Biosequestration through biochar production may be able to
be deployed rapidly and relatively cheaply on a decadal time
scale (68) using both regulatory and market-based approaches at
national, regional, and global levels. The United Nations Convention
to Combat Desertification has proposed including biochar
in the UNFCCC climate negotiations (69).
Globally, soil organic matter (SOM) contains more than three times as much carbon as either the atmosphere or terrestrial vegetation. Yet it remains largely unknown why some SOM persists for millennia whereas other SOM decomposes readily—and this limits our ability to predict how soils will respond to climate change. Recent analytical and experimental advances have demonstrated that molecular structure alone does not control SOM stability: in fact, environmental and biological controls predominate. Here we propose ways to include this understanding in a new generation of experiments and soil carbon models, thereby improving predictions of the SOM response to global warming.
The ground beneath your feet could hide a sleeping giant. Globally, soils store three times as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere or in living plants.
Scientists don’t know what will happen to this carbon in response to climate change. It could enter the atmosphere as CO2, a greenhouse gas, and further accelerate climate change. But how much — and when — remain a mystery.
An international group of scientists has proposed a new approach to soil carbon research that seeks answers to these questions. Their roadmap is published in the October 6 issue of the journal Nature and is co-authored by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) soil scientist Margaret Torn.
Q: Can this research also help scientists develop climate change mitigation strategies?
A: As scientists, we’re driven by the idea that a more accurate understanding of the earth system will help us do a better job of being stewards. And that applies here.
Our research could help evaluate carbon emissions-reducing technologies such as biofuels and biological carbon sequestration. Michael Schmidt, a co-author of the Nature paper from the University of Zurich, has already found that biochar, which is charred material from wildfires or a kiln, is not stable as previously believed. It also readily decomposes. Some scientists had believed that biochar could be used to sequester carbon, but this may not be the case.
The 2011 ConocoPhillips Energy Prize, a joint initiative between ConocoPhillips and Penn State, concluded today with its fourth annual mission to provoke and catalyze the 21st century energy revolution by awarding this year's prize to Ben Glass and Adam Rein for their innovation, "Aerostat Platform for Rapid Deployment Airborne Wind Turbine," a plan to make wind power literally leap out from the box by taking advantage of stronger and more-consistent winds higher in the air, seeking to hoist a wind-turbine up to 2,000 feet aloft.
The first runner up was Jason Aramburu, founder and CEO of re:char, and team for their entry, "Biochar Production for Climate Change Mitigation." This concept seeks to roll biochar out to the masses, with cheap recycled kilns that can churn out up to five tonnes of biochar each year.
A nascent biochar industry is emerging in connection with biomass power technologies that coproduce electricity and char via gasification and pyrolysis.
A single source of biomass could ostensibly create multiple revenue streams, with systems calibrated to produce more electricity, biochar or bio-oil when one is more profitable than the other.
Research shows biochar improves soil fertility, decreases water pollution and even mitigates heavy metals. The charcoal-like substance has enthusiastic support from researchers and the sustainability movement, but it has been slow to commercialize.
“This is a brand new industry with a chicken-and-egg problem,” says Kelpie Wilson, project development director of the International Biochar Initiative. “You have lots of research but not a lot of supplies.”
For now, however, large biomass power producers are neither equipped to create biochar nor are they interested in making it. The creation of biochar leaves less energy for power production. Also, there is no established market for biochar in industrial agriculture.
Supporters say biomass operators will soon see more revenue from biochar since organic farmers and garden centers are starting to demand it for soil blending. EPA clean water regulations could open nutrient credit exchanges to biochar, setting the stage for a biochar boom in agriculture and environmental mitigation.
A 2010 study in Nature Communications says biochar is 20% more effective at mitigating climate change than bioenergy because it slows the rate carbon returns to the atmosphere while increasing agricultural productivity.
Biochar comes with inherent competing interests between biomass power and agriculture, but research and outreach efforts are starting to close the gap in understanding. Farmers say they will express greater interest in biochar coproduced with electricity if it is rooted in agriculture science.
“You don’t want to create a negative legacy by applying the wrong char to the wrong soil,” says Jeff Novak, a USDA soil scientist.
His research shows char produced at temperatures of 300 to 400 C have good qualities, but chars produced at temperatures exceeding 600 C can become alkaline. Chars that improve southern soil can also lead to nutrient imbalances in other regions.
Recognizing these concerns, the International Biochar Initiative has begun an effort to standardize and certify char products.
“Electricity production isn’t our focus, although we are very interested in energy capture when biochar is produced,” says Wilson, the group’s project development director. “The ultimate goal is to have an impact on climate change.”
Adding a charred biomass material called biochar to glacial soils can help reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists.
Studies by scientists with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are providing valuable information about how biochar-the charred biomass created from wood, plant material, and manure-interacts with soil and crops. As part of this effort, ARS scientists in St. Paul, Minn., are studying biochar activity in soils formed from glacial deposits.
After the researchers amended the soils with biochar at levels ranging from 2 to 60 percent, emission levels for the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide were suppressed at all amendment levels. But the suppression in nitrous oxide emission was notable only in soils amended with 20, 40 or 60 percent biochar.
The amended soils also had lower microbial production of carbon dioxide and lower volatilization rates for the pesticides atrazine and acetochlor. The scientists plan to follow these findings with new investigations on how volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in biochar affect soil microbe activity. As part of this work, they have already identified 200 different VOCs on some biochars.
Spokas and Baker also conducted the first study that documented the formation of ethylene, a key plant hormone that helps regulate growth, from biochar and soils amended with biochar. They found that ethylene production in biochar-amended, non-sterile soil was twice as high as ethylene production observed in sterile, biochar-amended soil.
This strongly suggests that soil microbes are active in this biochar-induced ethylene production. The scientists also believe ethylene might be involved in plants' reaction to biochar additions, since even low ethylene concentrations produce various plant responses.
Backyard gardeners who make their own charcoal soil additives, or biochar, should take care to heat their charcoal to at least 450 degrees Celsius to ensure that water and nutrients get to their plants, according to a new study by Rice University scientists.
The study, published this week in the Journal of Biomass and Bioenergy, is timely because biochar is attracting thousands of amateur and professional gardeners, and some companies are also scaling up industrial biochar production.
"When it's done right, adding biochar to soil can improve hydrology and make more nutrients available to plants," said Rice biogeochemist Caroline Masiello, the lead researcher on the new study.
The charcoal, or biochar, that is used to create such soil can be made from wood or agricultural byproducts. The key is to heat the material to a high temperature in an oxygen-starved environment. Native Americans did that by burying the material in pits, where it burned for days. Today, industrial-scale biochar production is beginning to occur, and dozens of do-it-yourself videos online show how to make biochar in just a few hours using steel drums.
The agricultural benefits of biochar are just one reason there's a groundswell of interest in biochar production. Some enthusiasts are drawn by a desire to fight global warming. That's because about half of the carbon from wood chips, corn stalks and other biomass -- carbon that typically gets recycled into the atmosphere -- can be locked away inside biochar for thousands of years.
“Let’s not simply reduce the CO2 emissions going up into the atmosphere. Let’s draw them down.”
So says Robert Brown, a professor of engineering at Iowa State University and a leader of the university’s Initiative for a Carbon Negative Economy and its Bioeconomy Institute. Those are interdisciplinary campus efforts to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by growing plants or algae, making them into fuels and burying their carbon residues in soil -- and make money doing it.
The notion that we can generate wealth and remove CO2 from the air is obviously appealing. As atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rise and climate risks grow, so does the need for carbon-negative technologies that pull CO2 from the air, as plants do, and then store it underground or deep in the ocean.
But is this practical or a pipe dream? That’s what Brown and his colleagues at Iowa State and its Bioeconomy Institute want to find out, as they explained this week at a two-day workshop on biochar -- that’s the term used for the charcoal created when biomass is decomposed at high heat, in a process called pyrolysis. The workshop was part of the Carbon War Room‘s Creating Climate Wealth Summit in Washington, D.C..
The Carbon War Room, as you may know, is a nonprofit created by Richard Branson of Virgin fame to unlock gigaton-scale, market-driven solutions to climate change. Its new president will be Jose Maria Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica. The group is also tackling projects around energy efficiency, renewable jet fuel, low-carbon ocean shipping and sustainable livestock.
Biochar crop boost "found only in the tropics"
3 May 2017, by Gavin McEwan
A new international study has cast doubt on biochar's ability to boost crop yields in temperate areas.
The research, by Dr Simon Jeffery of Harper Adams University along with colleagues in the Netherlands, Portugal, the USA and Canada, analysed data from more than a thousand trials conducted around the world, each measuring the effect of biochar on crop yield.
This found that biochar only improves crop growth in the tropics, with no yield benefit at all in the temperate zone.
"Location, location, location: it really matters for biochar," said Jeffery. "Biochar had a huge benefit in the tropics - a 25% increase in yield. But in the temperate zone, there was just no effect at all. We were really surprised."
The idea of biochar was inspired by the terra preta – Portuguese for "black earth" – a soil rich in black carbon, the partially burned remains of old plants, which is more fertile, and with a more favourable pH, than typical tropical soils.
"Our study was the first to test whether geography matters, and we were able to do this because of the very large dataset we assembled," said Professor Jan Willem van Groenigen of Wageningen University & Research.
"Our findings confirm that biochar can benefit farms in low-nutrient, acidic soils such as in the tropics, but in more fertile soils, such as those in the temperate zone, obtaining yield increases through biochar application is much less certain."
The study, published in Environmental Research Letters, did not evaluate other potential benefits from biochar such as managing waste or locking up carbon in the soil.
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