This is from the American Chemical Society journal via a press release. After making a bunch of this, I’d be tempted to have a “BBQ summer”.
From the ancient Amazonian Indians: A modern weapon against global warming
Scientists are reporting that “biochar” — a material that the Amazonian Indians used to enhance soil fertility centuries ago — has potential in the modern world to help slow global climate change. Mass production of biochar could capture and sock away carbon that otherwise would wind up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Their report appears in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology, a bi-weekly journal.
Kelli Roberts and colleagues note that biochar is charcoal produced by heating wood, grass, cornstalks or other organic matter in the absence of oxygen. The heat drives off gases that can be collected and burned to produce energy. It leaves behind charcoal rich in carbon. Amazonian Indians mixed a combination of charcoal and organic matter into the soil to improve soil fertility, a fact that got the scientists interested in studying biochar’s modern potential.
The study involved a “life-cycle analysis” of biochar production, a comprehensive cradle-to-grave look at its potential in fighting global climate change and all the possible consequences of using the material. It concludes that several biochar production systems have the potential for being an economically viable way of sequestering carbon — permanently storing it — while producing renewable energy and enhancing soil fertility.
DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es902266r
It is estimated that the terra preta soils used to cover 0.1% to 1% of the Amazon area. Although that is a lot of land, it is apparent that before 1492 a much larger fraction of what is now the U.S. was under … um … (fire cultivation?) see Wikipedia’s native use of fire
The farmers here in Saskatchewan have been tossing ash from the hearth, egg shells and coffee grounds for ever into their vegetable gardens and raspberry bushes to take things up a notch with regard to yield. How’s this any different?
Alan F (21:49:13) :
The farmers here in Saskatchewan have been tossing ash from the hearth, egg shells and coffee grounds for ever into their vegetable gardens and raspberry bushes to take things up a notch with regard to yield. How’s this any different?
Probably time to allow bacteria to ‘inhabit’ the physical niche that charcoal provides and the process seems to work better with acid soil. Once you have the earthworms you can be pretty sure of success. I am going to grind up my charcoal into the compost bin and see what happens.
A comment in that Amazon link by Engiiner sums up the article this is scientific evidence from 1000 samplings of 25% greater bacterial species richness and increased earthworm activity in terra preta anthrosols. The A horizon of pristine forest soil was only 1 centimeter compared to the terra preta 1 meter thick A horizon.
The diesel exhaust remarks in jest are not far from the mark! Some farmers in Australia are ‘drilling in’ the tractor exhaust as they plant, and results are comparable with normal fertilizing, but without the cost.
After coming across terra preta when looking to improve my non existent topsoil, I started making charcoal (retort, drum in drum) to experiment with, and am pleased with the results.
Who would of thought that those native americans would have been ” fighting global climate change” all those years ago. How is it that they were so smart?
My favorite way of “fighting global climate change” is to smear myself with bright red ochre and dance around in a circle until I collapse from exhaustion, all the while singing “I’m saving the world, I’m saving the world, Lord all mighty I’m saving the world”.
Sequestering carbon on a mass scale in this way may have some unintended consequences that might actually lead to catastrophic climate changes. “…biochar is charcoal produced by heating wood,…” Like with the biofuels saga leading to deforestation and food shortages this might lead to mass deforestation and could well lead to local species extinctions and affect the water balance in certain areas.
I’m no scientist but IMHO this would be tantamount to deliberate geoengineering.
General info here:
http://www.biochar-international.org/
Anyway, the greens would never approve of mass deforestation for the sake of farmers as it would lead to an increase in population.
:o) :o) :o)
Charcoal has some very good characteristics for improving soil but then so does most (all?) organic matter. Fresh organic matter supplies more energy than charcoal to the soil to sustain the community of organisms that live in the soil and decomposes to recalcitrant compounds that persist in the soil for a long time- probably as long as biochar. So fresh organic material is better for the soil than charcoal- for several reasons. We are in fact returning even less organic matter to the soil now due to diversion of “waste” organic matter for biofuel production- so what organic matter is going to be used to make biochar? If sufficient conventional organic matter was currently being returned to the soil to maintain fertility, we wouldn’t be adding polyacrylamide to soil to improve structure and moisture holding capacity- so just where is the will to add biochar going to come from? Here in Canada we continue to burn massive amounts of waste wood in association with timber harvesting because it is too much of a bother to leave it in the forest. Anybody think we are likely to convert it to charcoal and sprinkle it back into the forest? While bio-char is kind of neat, it is a solution in search of problem. We already don’t do what we know needs to be done to maintain soil productivity, so only dreamers could believe that we would be prepared to do something additional on a scale large enough to mean anything. And if the organic matter for biochar production also has the potential to become fuel at the inistence of the AGW extremists forget about it ever making it into the soil. To paraphrase The Princess Bride “Biochar is a dweam within a dweam”. But like most AGW hysteria- it can pull in research dollars.
The natives in the Amazon region and beyond have been using for centuries a method like this of enriching the soil which they call “Terra Preta”. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with any aspect whatsoever of changing the climate.
Lucy Skywalker (15:55:48) :
You are thinking about activated charcoal, aka activated carbon. It is made from carbon-bearing material which is in a very fine state, perhaps pulverized or finely ground. After processing the carbon has a structure somewhat like pumice, like a solidified foam with many tiny voids and thin walls. Thus it has great surface area. Traditional charcoal made from wood will be similar, but likely not as useful for filtering.
Blacksmiths will use bituminous coal, a relatively soft type containing a tar-like substance called bitumen. After proper heating the structure, called coke, is similar to activated carbon and traditional charcoal. Actually all three things are practically the same, purified carbon with a high surface area and great burning characteristics.
Anthracite coal is the hardest form, with a very high carbon content between 92 and 98%. At the parents’ house we used to have an anthracite automatic coal stoker furnace. Anthracite is like glass. It burns very clean, when you can get it to burn. Seriously, you could use slabs of it to build a fire pit for wood. It takes a lot of heat to get it burning, then lots of air through a good-sized pile of it to keep combustion going. Carbon in the next highest form, graphite, is used for crucibles for molten steel. While you can get a large amount of heat from anthracite, with the low surface area it is generated at a rather slow rate. It is not used for blacksmithing.
If you wanted to see if the addition of carbon by itself makes for a fertile soil, you could use crushed anthracite. That can be compared to the crushed version of the charcoal-type forms, of which activated carbon is commercially available in grades designated as powdered and granular.
I don’t know about anyone else here, but I personally really do not like this “green packaging.” Taking the name “charcoal,” dropping the “coal” because that is a dirty horrible Mother Earth-killing thing, then sticking “bio” on the front to stimulate the release of the sunshine and rainbows as it is now suddenly a wonderfully nature-friendly product. As opposed to the repugnant substance it formerly was.
Maybe someone could sell the greenies some toxic waste, just name it “biotoxic.” With all the foods being pushed these days that contain “pro-biotic” things, you could get some sales just on confusion with the name.
Hey, it says “bio” so it must be good!
Ah, so the great age of science still has lessons to learn from the ancients?
How come?? We’re so much more SOPHISTICATED now, aren’t we??!!
I love the idea, although very much not pc, that before Columbus, the Americas were very developed and managed. This was absolutely not virgin land. It was improved and managed but not depleted. Terraforming on a very extensive scale including animal management. Humanity isn’t the problem, just clueless Europeans who were much more barbarians. Another inconvenient reality.
Thanks, Keith Minto for the link to terra preta paper.
I’m relating this data about biomass growth through added charcoal, to physics professor Freeman Dyson’s discussion of carbon sequestation. Although a global warming ‘heretic,’ Professor Dyson said that we if we wanted to stop the carbon in the atmosphere growing, we need only increase the biomass in the soil of half of our global landmass by one hundredth of an inch each year. F.D. argues that if increased co2 is a problem, it is a problem of land management and not a meteorological problem. At any rate, increasing soil fertiity without slash and burn would be a bonus for poor farmers and for us all.
Steve Schaper (21:04:55) :
The PROMSociety.net is an India (East Indies) group that has discovered that mixing manure with finely divided phosphate rock provided a crop response more persistent than DAP (Di-Ammonium Phosphate). Look them up.
Terra Preta possibly could not be developed in Canada. Especially now that the ice sheets will be coming back.
Help me, Please: I know we have been mining the organic from our best agricultural soil for hundreds of years. No good. But I don’t understand the rational between “no-till” and plowed planting. I assume access to the soil by sun and air consumes some organic, but i would also assume that plowing the green waste under also Improves the organic content.
[Although somewhat OT, this thread in WUWT has been one of the more exciting to me in a long time. I don’t expect Terra Preta to be used to prevent the terrible nutrient loss and pollution our current farming methods cause, but you might note that there are many jurisdictions that are banning fertilizer use over certain periods just because of the lack of stay-put nutrients. By the way, how much CO2 is released during the charing process? We don’t know, but Al Gore will likely want to tax it.]
An untintended benefit of bio-char: we will have a large supply of high quality black pigment with which to decorate the caves we’ll be all living in, come the Cap-and-Trade Apocalypse.
Sorry, didn’t have time to read all the posts, so this might be redundant.
First, think of activated carbon filters and how they work. This is all biochar is. It has a high level of ionic exchange sites. In soils this is quantified as CEC, or cation exchange capacity and higher levels of CEC are significantly correlated with productivity. CEC is usually associated with the amount and quality of the silt or clay fraction. As the paper states, elevated CEC levels result in improved fertilizer use efficiency which enhances crop performance and thus reduces the amount of commercial chemical fertilizers applied. This also leads to reduced nitrates in the aquifers underlying cropped acres. In addition to the reduced need for chemical fertilizers, biochar reportedly reduces N2O soil emissions that result from N fertilizer application, leaving more available for the crops. Another benefit is increased availability of cationic trace mineral nutrients, which can be helpful in soils with a greater than 7 Ph, (and retention in low Ph soils).
I will not address the economics of biochar, and could care less about carbon sequestration.
Tim Clark (06:47:11) :
Is is difficult to keep up with the cross-threads even withing a single thread (:
At least as far as Terra Preta is concerned, you are incorrect to equate Biochar with the high surface area effects of activated carbon. The >magic< of Terra Preta is in the microbiology-biochemistry that can actually turn metallic carbon into fulvic acid.
see http://www.amazon.com/Bacterial-diversity-pristine-forest-Western/dp/B000PC0KDU/ref=pd_cp_b_2 et al
Activated carbon has been used for decades in the extraction of gold; in most cases the carbon is made from coconut shells and the carbon particles are actually put into the slurry of ground gold ore along with cyanide, hence the term Carbon in Pulp (CIP). The cyanide leaches the gold from the ore but the activated carbon steals the gold from the cyanide as it has a higher affinity for it than does the cyanide. A good reference is here:
http://www.e-goldprospecting.com/html/activated_carbon_in_gold_leach.html
Note the micrographs of the activated carbon shown in the link, along with a number of excellent references below. Thankfully, this description is only one page and the layman should be able to understand it.
Terra Preta = Soil Alchemy
At our integrated farm project in the Philippines we are using a soil mixture made from charcoal powder, ashes, animal manure, compost and topsoil. Whatever we are planting is growing perfectly, the use of commercial fertilizers and pestizides is just minimal. We are harvesting already commercial quantities.
I have no idea why it is working so well. I guess the key role is not the charcoal but the ashes. If it is like this, maybe the charcoal at the Amzonians was just a by-product. With the then available tools the best way to cut big trees was to carve a ring around the stem to stop the water entering the upper parts of the tree. After a while the tree will dry out and die. Then the people burn a fire around the stem and remove little by little the outside charcoal until the tree collapses. This technique is still abundand here in the Philippines at remote mountain places.
For me it does not matter to know why it is working well. Important are the results. Many of our neighbours are successfully immitating our system. The ashes and charcoal are by-products from local bakeries and grain dryers which are heating their ovens with abundant rice husks and other farm wastes.
For mor informations have a look to my website or the new farm video:
Engiiner (05:46:50) :
Help me, Please: I know we have been mining the organic from our best agricultural soil for hundreds of years. No good. But I don’t understand the rational between “no-till” and plowed planting. I assume access to the soil by sun and air consumes some organic, but i would also assume that plowing the green waste under also Improves the organic content.
First off, in most instances the organic matter plowed is not green, but dried stover.
Secondly, the plowed material is in a wetter environment with higher microbe numbers, leading to greatly elevated degradation rates relative to minimum or no-till.
Last, I’m not mentioning the reduced tilth, infiltration, and increased erosion from plowing.
Tim Clark (08:35:02) :
I;m not sure I understand the negative :”increased erosion,” what with contour plowing, and, as an extreme, terracing.
Can you elaborate as to the advantages of no till?
Engiiner (07:07:03) :
The >magic< of Terra Preta is in the microbiology-biochemistry that can actually turn metallic carbon into fulvic acid.
Its structure is best characterized as a loose assembly of aromatic organic polymers with many carboxyl groups (COOH) that release hydrogen ions, resulting in species that have electric charges at various sites on the ion. It is especially reactive with metals, forming strong complexes with Fe3+, Al3+, and Cu2+ in particular and leading to their increased solubility in natural waters. Since they have many carboxyl (COOH) and hydroxyl (COH) groups, fulvic acids are much more chemically reactive than other humic substances. They also have a cation exchange capacity that is more than double that of humic acids. [Petitt]
Same effect. Don’t be pedantic. I was summarizing the processes for non-agronomists.
More tax payer money down the drain on another useless “green” study.