1. Make sure you burn stuff that is a mainly carbon. You don't want to use up nitrogen sources. Don't know if this is even a serious possibility; does high nitrogen stuff make good charcoal? If it does avoid using this as a source.

2. Watch out for air pollution of the GHC kind. Charcoal making can be really really air polluting.

It is part of what I was talking about when I wrote of the importance of turning agriculture from a net emmittor to a net source.

And as my old ecology professor used to say,
"productive coppice & standards woodland holds the highest biodiversity of any European ecosystem."

Not to mention the ~20% better wood yield from coppicing
(felling deciduous trees at less than 35 years and letting them regrow from the stump).

Not to mention that using forestry rather than agriculture for feedstock production avoids numerous problems,
such as land-pressures, plowing, chem fertilizers & biocides, population expulsion by new ag-machinery, etc.

On the pyrolysis angle, there is another very significant potential -
the gasses and vapours driven off form a crude feedstock for that beautifully clean-burning liquid fuel, methanol.
(Current best practice gives over 600kgs methanol per 1000kgs dry wood, with methanol having 55% of petrol's energy by volume).

And it would appear that we are on the road to becoming very short of liquid fuels.

On the terra preta angle I can only say that I greatly look forward to some practical trials on my farm here in  Wales.

Regards,

Billhook

Ming Dynasty villagers must have burned more fossil fuel than Cadillac driving Americans.

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/data/mwp/ ...

The authors developed a quantitative reconstruction of temperature changes over the past 3500 years based on alkenone distribution patterns in a sediment core retrieved from China's Lake Qinghai (37°N, 100°E), based on the alkenone unsaturation index that has been calibrated to the growth temperature of marine alkenone producers and "to temperature changes in lacustrine settings on a regional scale." This work revealed that the peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (AD 900-1500) exceeded the temperature of the latter part of the 20th century by about 0.5°C.

So don't get to hyped about the supposed juices that come out. Those are primarily the smoke forming compounds which would be undesirable for burning.

Individual local temperatures don't represent global temperatures.

Currently in my town much of this kind of waste goes towards a city compost facility. While this is great and all a large part of the compost outgasses as methane into the atmosphere.

Our local feedstock would be an equal mixture of privet and blackberries. Privet is like stupidity; and endless resource.

I live in a hot climate and I can tell you that 2 full inches of compost applied to garden soil is mostly gone in a few years. That carbon outgasses back into the atmosphere. In tropical climates this process happens even faster resulting in barren soil two years after a patch of rainforest has been cleared.

It has long been the opinion of many in the organic gardening and permaculture communities that soil structure is as important or more important than things like nitrogen content. This Terra Preta research seems to confirm it.

Now if only somebody could post a demo of AgriChar making in a Weber Barbeque.

Put the Carbon Back

However the other byproducts are not useless. I'm pretty sure that you don't end up with 90% of energy in charcoal--more like 50 or 60 percent. The rest are gases, charoil, and waste heat.

The gases are carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Most of this needs to be used to fuel the process, but you have a little surplus that can be used for electricity production. Waste heat can also be used for electricity production or for various agricultureal processes, such as drying. The charoil is chemically valuable.

So no, you don't get a lot of energy out of it. But you get carbon sequestration, because you are converting carbon to a more stable form, and the small amounts of energy and useful chemicals you produce make a nice bonus.

It has long been the opinion of many in the organic gardening and permaculture communities that soil structure is as important or more important than things like nitrogen content.

As important yes. More important, no.

This is one of the traps I was warning against. Industrial agriculture tends to produce zombie farms; with completely destroyed soil structure, only kept alive through the addition of artificial fertilizers, and soaking in pesticides, herbicides and so on.

But you don't want to go to the other extreme and produce soil with wonderful structure missing nitrogen and other nutrients. I mean the point of adding legumes to a row crop rotation, or leguminous trees to a permaculture orchard is to put nitrogen into the soil. You don't want to start harvesting nitrogen rich plants or nitrogen rich waste, and using that to make charcoal. I'm not sure nitrogen heavy biomass makes particularly good charcoal to begin with; it would certainly produce more air pollution. But at any rate this is only one wedge. You don't need to take it too an extreme and start damaging other aspects of the  ecosystem. I'd be surprised if the people working on this were not taking nutrient preservation into account.

Torrefaction is a feasible method for improvement the properties of biomass as a fuel. It consists of a slow
heating of biomass in an inert atmosphere to a maximum temperature of 300 °C [1]. The treatment yields a
solid uniform product with a lower moisture content and a higher energy content compared to those in the
initial biomass.
The process may be called mild pyrolysis, with removal of smoke producing compounds and formation of
solid product, retaining approximately 70% of the initial weight and 80-90% of the original energy content
[2].
http://hem.fyristorg.com/zanzi/paper/zanzi_apisceuVI.pdf

Fixed-carbon yields of up to 100% of the theoretical limit can be achieved in as little as 20 or 30 minutes. (By contrast, conventional charcoal-making technologies typically produce charcoal with carbon yields of much less than 80% of the theoretical limit and take from 8 hours to several days.) http://www.hnei.hawaii.edu/bio.r3.asp#flashcarb

First thing, you turn the biomass into charcoal.  This doesn't take sophisticated equipment; it can be made simple, rugged and cheap (though it can always be improved).  The process takes biomass and compressed air (or heated gas of some kind).  Its products are:

1. Hot medium-BTU fuel gas (the content of heavy molecules such as tars depends on the operating conditions; hotter operation breaks down heavier molecules).
   
2. Charcoal, amounting to as much as 30% of the dry weight of the input biomass.

A 30% (ashless) yield of carbon would contain about 50% of the energy of the original biomass.  The remaining 50% would come off as heat and chemical energy in the gas.  The simplest processes for making charcoal do it by burning some of the input fuel, but this can be improved.  If the carbonization process was driven partly by external or recycled heat, less energy would be expended in combustion; the net energy yield in the gas would shift away from heat toward chemical energy (and total energy yield of charcoal+gas could exceed 100% of the heat of combustion of the biomass). http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2006/11/sustainability-ene ...

I guess it depends on what you're after.

_

But perhaps one scary things about Terra Pretta.

Ironically, rainforrests aren't that good soil to plant crops, since all the nutrients are in the plants themselves.

Terra Pretta allows for a great way to bulldoze forrests into "productive" farmland.

And when you look at this from a biofuels perspective....

First, with regard to the energy potential of gaseous outputs,
I'd well agree that if charcoal is the sole goal of pyrolyzation,
then little bi-product energy will be gained.
For instance, back in 1680 when methanol was first traded commercially,
it was distilled from the fume of charcoal kilns at a mere 3% of feedstock weight.
It was a saleable bi-product, but charcoal was the prime interest.

If wood is totally reduced, then the raw "wood gas" can be processed into a syngas
which holds twice the CO to H2 ratio needed for methanol production.

Rather than providing additional H2 from steam to maximize methanol (CH3OH) output,
a dual output plant would halt the pyrolization at a point to leave "surplus" carbon in the form of charcoal.

I mention the option because there are already nations where liquid fossil fuels are becoming unaffordable,
but are required to maintan food production & basic services.

With the approach of the peak of global oil production,
all nations seem likely to find themselves short of liquid fuels.

On top of which is of course the issue of the intentional displacement of fossil fuels.

With regard to carbon banking, that achieved by the terra preta process
could and I think should be augmented by a global program of reforestation,
that is, productive sustainable reforestation preferably under the coppice & standards sylviculture
to maximize  feedstock yields, habitat, early output, local employment, etc.

Given the standing stock of carbon in in-cycle coppice,
and in its growing root-balls,
and in the growing standards (trees only felled at maturity)
the carbon banking potential of this oprtion is very significant globally.

Regards,

Bill

It's perhaps even more silly than turning electricity into hydrogen.
http://www.greyfalcon.net/hydrogen.png

_

And while I realize Aircraft aren't going to stop using liquid fuels anytime soon.

Why would we want to waste our time with liquid fuels for ground vehicles?

Batteries, the cost is merely a matter of economies of scale.

And plugins can reduce our need for liquid fuels RIGHT NOW, by gignourmous proportions.

http://www.greyfalcon.net/plugins.png
http://www.greyfalcon.net/electriccars.png
http://www.greyfalcon.net/electriccars2.png
http://www.teslamotors.com/display_data/tedpresentation_f ...

http://www.greyfalcon.net/plugins

Like a tropical forest exposed soil quickly burns off its carbonacaeus material and turns to hard clay. I always have a ready source of mulch in the summer in the form of weeds but it is difficult to maintian good structure for root and water penetration.

Where local farmers have orchards(vast) or fields they tend to ignore soil structure and attempt to maintain fertility by cultivation and addition of fertilizers. Reducing cultivation and fertilizer expense is a significant savings.

Terra Preta soil management in California might allow our farmers to deal with waste that is now burned (orchard waste, vineyard waste and rice straw) in such a way that disease vectors are destroyed and value accrues to the farmer, the air and the land.

As for cogeneration a local dairy farmer already burns methane from a digester and sells the power. I'm sure we need more peaker power plants here and a woodgas plant burning even a few hours a day would be cost effective.

Put the Carbon Back

By using the gases from the biomass in a solid oxide fuel cell/turbine power plant instead, electric power is generated at 75% efficiency.  And the cogenerated waste heat can power the pyrolisis.

And if land is dedicated to biomass production for this process using chemical agriculture it will release more carbon than it can ever sequester.

Biomass that would otherwise be burned in fires, like harvested prairie grass, could actually save a lot of cO2 emissions.

A better process overall would be using the biomass, added to manure and other waste, in biogas digestors.  the organic fertilizer produced would replace cO2 releasing fossil fuel based fertilizer.  The biogas would produce a lot of clean electricity from fuel cells and the CO2 from the fuel cells could go back into a soplar collector algae system to produce biodiesel plus more biomass to run the fuel cells.

It is doubtful that industry would actually use the charcoal as soil amendment/sequestration anyway.  They would instead see added profit in burning it as well.  This sounds like the scheme to pump CO2 under ground.  Whop is going to make sure industry lives up to the promised sequestration?  Industry itself through self (no) regulation?  that's my guess, knowing how the bottomline crew operates.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

2)DRX-- sorry, I've looked at the poet engineers stuff in some depth. He was even kind enough to share some of his spreadsheets with me.  We don't need to burn charcoal for electricity or even combust it in fuel cells.  We can make all the electricity we need from wind and sun, backed by small amounts of pumped storage and hydro. (There are other renewable sources around the corner too; but he don't know how far away the corner is. Solar thermal electricity, wind electricity, hydro and pumped storage are mature technologies, that range from less expensive than fossil fuels, to not much more than double--before we take social costs such as global warming into account.) So a soil amendment is a better use for the charcoal than electricity manufacture. I'm also aware of the proposal to use waste gas from charcoal making to create electricty, and then waste heat from the electrity to make the charcoal.  It is not thermdynamcially impossible; you still end up with less energy out than in. But you would have to have a really good heat transfer process. I'm not sure after heat transfer losses that you would have enough waste energy for charcoal making. Also it looks to me like the temperature of the waste heat is too low for most known ultra-efficient charcoal making processes. Also, as far as I know most charcoal making processes on the high end of the efficiency curve generate heat for charcoal making on the inside, not outside of the reactor. I'm not sure an externally powered reaction will be as efficienct.

3)torrefaction--sounds interesting.If feasible for this purpose might increase sequestration potential beyond 10%. I will note two things. Torrefied wood is not charcoal. I would be curious if it has the same long term stability as charcoal.

Most other possible uses of agriculture rob the soil. This converts carbon that is part of the biological cycle back into fossil form and then applies that fossil form to building soil structure. It is a true win-win. And like most win-wins it is only win-win if kept within reasonable limits. We don't want to start converting rain forest in fossil carbon. We don't want start converting all agricultural waste into fossil carbon. We burn every year fossil fuel that took 400 years to create. We are not going find any way to take than much carbon from the current biosphere, and certainly not sustainably. But within reason, used sensibly, there is every reason to believe charag can make a real contribution.

The whole idea would hinge on carbon credits, paying people to bury fuel.

Here is a paper describing USDA research using pyrolysis to convert switch grass into a crude oil that can be sold to refineries to make fuels. However, they plan to use the charcoal as a fuel for the pyrolysis. This paper also shows another way to get energy from switchgrass other than using cellulosic. Of course, you can also just burn it to replace coal in a power plant.

The cost of transporting bulky switchgrass bales is a major hurdle for using it as a fuel.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

Could you please consider looking for a champion for this orphaned Terra Preta Carbon Soil Technology.

The main hurtle now is to change the current perspective held by the IPCC that the soil carbon cycle is a wash, to one in which soil can be used as a massive and ubiquitous Carbon sink via Charcoal. Below are the first concrete steps in that direction;

Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.
Potential Carbon Emissions Reductions from Biomass by 2030
by Ralph P. Overend, Ph.D. and Anelia Milbrandt
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
http://www.ases.org/climatechange/toc/07_biomass.pdf

The organization 25x25 (see 25x'25 - Home) released it's (first-ever, 55-page )"Action Plan" ; see http://www.25x25.org/storage/25x25/d...ActionPlan.pdf
On page 31, as one of four foci for recommended RD&D, the plan lists: "The development of biochar, animal agriculture residues and other non-fossil fuel based fertilizers, toward the end of integrating energy production with enhanced soil quality and carbon sequestration."
and on p 32, recommended as part of an expanded database aspect of infrastructure: "Information on the application of carbon as fertilizer and existing carbon credit trading systems."

 I feel 25x25 is now the premier US advocacy organization for all forms of renewable energy, but way out in front on biomass topics.

There are 24 billion tons of carbon controlled by man in his agriculture , I forgot the % that is waste, but when you add all the other cellulose waste which is now dumped to rot or digested or combusted and ultimately returned to the atmosphere as GHG, the balanced number is around 24 Billion tons. So we have plenty of bio-mass.

Even with all the big corporations coming to the GHG negotiation table, like Exxon, Alcoa, .etc, we still need to keep watch as they try to influence how carbon management is legislated in the USA. Carbon must have a fair price, that fair price and the changes in the view of how the soil carbon cycle now can be used as a massive sink verses it now being viewed as a wash, will be of particular value to farmers and a global cool breath of fresh air for us all.

If you have any other questions please feel free to call me or visit the TP web site I've been drafted to administer.  http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node
It has been immensely gratifying to see all the major players join the mail list , Cornell folks, T. Beer of Kings Ford Charcoal (Clorox), Novozyne the M-Roots guys(fungus),  chemical engineers, Dr. Danny Day of G. I. T. , Dr. Antal of U. of H., Virginia Tech folks  and probably many others who's back round I don't know have joined.

Erich J. Knight
540-289-9750

This Earth Science Forum thread on these soils contains further links, and has been viewed by 19,000 self-selected folks. ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):  
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-pre ...

All the Bio-Char Companies and equipment manufactures  I've found:

 Carbon Diversion
http://www.carbondiversion.com/
 Eprida: Sustainable Solutions for Global Concerns
http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4
BEST Pyrolysis, Inc. | Slow Pyrolysis - Biomass - Clean Energy - Renewable Ene
http://www.bestenergies.com/companies/bestpyrolysis.html
 Dynamotive Energy Systems | The Evolution of Energy
http://www.dynamotive.com/
Ensyn - Environmentally Friendly Energy and Chemicals
http://www.ensyn.com/who/ensyn.htm
Agri-Therm, developing bio oils from agricultural waste
http://www.agri-therm.com/
Advanced BioRefinery Inc.
http://www.advbiorefineryinc.ca/
Technology Review: Turning Slash into Cash
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17298/

Nature article: Putting the carbon back Black is the new green:  
http://bestenergies.com/downloads/naturemag_200604.pdf

 Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/biochar/Biocha ...

University of Beyreuth TP Program, Germany http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=taxonomy/term/118 ...

You will be asking people to bury a fuel. The 700 Chinese farmers mentioned will not bury profit if the charcoal is more valuable as a fuel than as a fertilizer. The same can be said for any given industry.

Charcoal is always being used for multiple products, and fuel is only one of many. It competes with biochar use, but it also contributes to interest in biochar. As the value of biomass for energy ratchets up, the value of the land needed to produce the biomass follows, as does the value of improving the soil with charcoal.  This alone won't offset the effect but it certainly moves in the right direction.

Fuel demand will sop up all the charcoal produced in some areas, but not all just as terra preta nova will happen but not everywhere at once.  It will happen more where biomass feedstock quantities are prodigious. Much of the candidate feedstock stream currently goes to waste. You can't turn it all into electricity or hydrogen - there is too much of it. Char is pretty easy to make and fairly easy to move around short distances. The potential production of charcoal can fairly easily exceed the demand for charcoal as fuel in many, perhaps most, biomass productive locales.  

One hears reports that in early industrial Europe, astute farmers and select ground keepers were investing prodigious quantities of charcoal in favored plots of soil. This was at a time when the services of the collier was still in high demand.  From my perspective, this scenario makes perfect sense for those times, as it does for the foreseeable future.

Also, once soil reaches more than 10% carbon        there is no further agricultural benefit, though it does no harm either.

I will say, some of the more enthusiastic supporters of charag are starting to creep me out.It needs to be used responsibly, in reasonable measure. A carbon tax combined with subsidies for proven sequestration will provide incentive to add char to the soil rather than bury. Carbon, especially chemically stable carbon such as charcoal, is measurable. So we can prevent, detect and punish fraud if we choose to.

Basically MIT guy saying what we should do is torrefy as much biomass as we can, and then bury it.

Not as a soil amendment, but as a practical way of storing carbon away from the atmosphere.

_

But like said... what are the chances that they wouldn't just turn it into fuel....

Terra Preta reduces the need for artificial fertilizers and water.

Artificial fertilizers are the primary source of N2O, a greenhouse gas which is 300x more potent than CO2.  It's also a toxic air pollutant.

And reducing water use is important since it's a scarce resource, as well as in California, 20% of our energy is spent merely pumping water around.

Organic biodigestor fertilizer replaces fossil fertilizer (using less GHG producing fossil fuel)that breaks soil down, releasing cO2 stored for millenia (prairie soil was 20+ feet thick when sodbusters started plowing it, it is gone now).  Organic fertilizer builds the soil ecosystem that stores cO2 year after year as biomass.

Pyrolisis just can't compare, even without the obvious problem of making sure the charcoal is really put back into the soil.

Pay Chinese farmers or GE to put the charcoal back?  Prosecute them (in China?)when they are caught not doing that, but instead burning it or selling it to be burned?  A formula for more scamming, fueled by carbon "indulgencies".  Buy your carbon offset and sin all you want, you will still get into Gaian heaven with your hard purchased climate (saving?) karma.

No way.  Mother Earth knows your sins, they are written in the molecules.

Wind, solar, water, and biogas power.  Organic farming, geothermal heating/cooling, and plugin electric vehicles.  The real solutions are now obvious.  How long until the mass delusional media gets it?  

Too long?  Too long for thousands of species that will go extinct.  Too long for 100s of millions of humans in flood and drought zones.

Too long for the whole planet, overtaken by oil, water resource, and proliferation wars turned into nuclear terror and jingoistic (election winning?)retaliation?  Putin already has his "floating chernobyls" a-building.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

By then they should understand that "Electric = Good.  And Electric = Our only way forward"

After that, they will probably put 2 and 2 together that "If we want to green our cars, we need to green our grid"

_

Cool thing though.

Apparently filling up a Plugin Prius in the LEAST green parts of the United States is actually no worse than a conventional Prius.
http://www.aceee.org/pubs/t061.htm

Another cool thing.
Looks like

1. Phoenix is building a series hybrid
   
2. A123 is going to be offering retail Prius conversion kits

And I would be totally against using this as offset to burn fossil fuel elsewhere. The thing is, scientifically this is something that can work-- but only up to a point, and only as a supplement to reductions. If we stop using fossil fuels (producing all the electricity we need from wind and sun) AND use charag, AND stop deforestation, AND capture all methane emissions from  closed mines and landfills (cause we should not continue to mind coal or waste resources by dumping them in landfills) AND eliminate or greatly reduce production of F5 gases. Incidentally I don't see why this would be limited to farmers in China. It could as easily be done by farmers in the U.S.

As terra preta delivers on its promise of dramatically increasing soil vigor, it is not delivering on that promise uniformly, and, like all things soil related, it reveals itself as wondrously less simple with each passing day.  

There are definite times and places for terra preta, at this point in time we truly don't know what these are.

I sense that the carbon sequestration potential of terra preta is greater than the potential embodied in strategies to increase soil carbon with improved sward management and no-till cropping.  That doesn't mean it should supplant rational sward management, or that soil that can be no-tilled should be tilled because terra preta is here to make everything right.  Terra preta is only one tool in the tool box.  There is place for digestion (wet biomass) and there is a place for pyrolysis that digestion can't touch.  I know we TP enthusiasts get a little excited at times, but, if you dig into everything we write you will see that no one of us, not even Erich, sees TP as the be all to end all. Its just that TP is well, so incredibly interesting on so many different levels.