Saturday, August 18, 2012

Biochar Gaining Ground With Co-Benefits

Apart from its carbon sequestration potential, biochar is notable for the multiplicity of agricultural, land-use, and other "co-benefits" that accompany its production and use.  Recent developments underline the  importance of such co-benefits for accelerating wider adoption of biochar technology.  This past week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a series of awards and grants as part of its "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" to improve sanitation in the developing world.  Loughborough University in the UK was awarded a first-round $60,000 second place prize for designing a next-generation toilet that produces biochar, minerals, and clean water.  The University of Colorado Boulder won a nearly $780,000 second-round grant to develop a toilet that uses concentrated solar power to convert waste to biochar for use in farming.  The private firm re:char was also awarded funding to help develop a biochar sanitation system.

Co-benefits are also propelling biochar forward in the energy sector.  Zero Point Clean Tech recently announced the successful deployment of its second biomass gasification power plant in Ireland (the first is operating in Germany).  These conversion facilities produce both syngas for combined heat and power, and biochar for agricultural purposes.  In the US, Whitfield Biochar is preparing to unveil its Continuous Feed Biochar Reactor, a biomass-based district heating unit that also generates biochar.  The company plans to install biochar heating plants at locations in California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania starting in the fourth quarter of this year.

1 comment:

  1. A Carbon-Based Religion
    Carbon, as the center of life, has high value to recapitalize our soils. Yielding nutrient dense foods and Biofuels, paying premiums of pollution abatement and toxic remediation and the growing dividends created by the increasing biomass of a thriving soil community. Carl Sagan's human connection to stardust leaves out a critical stage. We are stardust, but only stardust transformed by life. Every time I look at an SEMs of Char, it strikes me, the perfect preservation of the base structures of life, a fractal vision, how life creates the greatest surface area with the least amount of material. The preservation of this structure, for return to the lowest order of life, seems almost a religious act. A perfect cradle to cradle recycling, biotic carbon should never be combusted and destroyed, be revered, as life is revered, be returned to the cradle of terrestrial life the Soil. .
    This view of biologic carbon has led me to compose several paraphrases; "That Terra Preta prayer",;Our carbon who art in heaven, "The soil carbon Commandments"; Thou shall not have any molecule before me, and the "Soil Carbon Dream"; I have a dream that one day we live in a nation where progress will not be judged by the production yields of our fields, but by the color of their soils and by the Carbon content of their character. Google them to read the rest.

    The photosynthetic "capture" collectors are up and running all around us, the "storage" sink is in operation just under our feet, conversion reactors are the only infrastructure we need to build out. Carbon, as the center of life, has high value to recapitalize our soils. Yielding nutrient dense foods and Biofuels, paying premiums of pollution abatement and toxic remediation and the growing dividends created by the increasing biomass of a thriving soil community.

    If CoolPlanet Biofuels processed the entire biomass harvest in the US, 1.6 Billion Tons, the yields would be;
    160 Billion Gallons of tank ready fuel , The US uses 150 Billion gallons per year
    0.3 Billion Tons of Biochar
    The big numbers are jaw dropping,
    That 0.3 Billion Tons of Biochar, with a surface area of 600 M2/gram means; One Ton has a surface area of 148,000 Acres!
    Now for conversion fun: 148,000 Acres is equal to 230 square miles!! ....
    So; 300 Million Tons of Biochar equals 69 Billion Square Miles, or 348 times the entire surface of the earth!


    If I May be so bold,… As I speak for Biologic Carbon… I speak for the very center of life itself. We have been burning it for over one million years, exploiting it out of the soil for 10,000 years, combusting fossil carbon for 150 years.

    Now, we can grow nano-structured fossil carbons into unprecedented materials and even human tissues. Graphene; a two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world, able to sieve water from the seas, Buckminsterfullerene & Nanotubes; for superconductivity, Solar & Thermo-electrics.
    The Stone Age did not end for a lack of stones, as well, the Combustion Age will not end for lack of fossil fuels. Nanotechnology and Terra Preta Technology has thrust The Diamond Age upon us, with it, the rectification of the Carbon Cycle, this train is leaving the station, either get on board or be left in the combusted soot and CO2 pollution of history!

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