The Biochar Debate: Charcoal's Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility (Schumacher Briefings)

Mostly opinion without much depth in the social research behind the debate. This is a complex subject whose complexity is not illuminated here.

Biochar as an answer to the climate problem is an extremely important subject. The author makes the subject interesting and easy for the layman to understand.

The author is informative about Biochar but way too much time worrying about political implications when we need to do something now on a large scale.

I was attracted to this little book for two reasons: 1) "biochar" is apparently the same thing as the "terra preta" (dark fertile soil) found near the Amazon River and attributed to a now-disappeared civilization which created it, and I wanted to know more about how they did it, and 2) because the book postulates that use of biochar is supposed to help reduce global warming, and I'd like to know how it does that. These are complicated issues; the book deals with the creation and effects of biochar, but the author's main agenda seems to be around rethinking the current initiatives (such as those in the Kyoto agreement) that various nations are undertaking to contain global warming. Biochar, he says, has a role to play, but it is only a part of a larger solution to a fairly desperate crisis facing humanity.Biochar, for those who don't know, is created from organic material that is burned into charcoal (using a process called pyrolysis). The "terra preta" discovered in the Amazon jungle is black because it contains a large amount of charcoal. The theory is that the ancient people who once lived in the region discovered a way to add charcoal to the soil, and this gave them a very fertile, productive soil that supported a large population and, amazingly, that soil is still there and still fertile. What happened to the people who created it? The best theory is that they were all but wiped out by a pandemic brought by Europeans.The same fate (the being wiped out part) may face many more populations across the globe if nations don't begin to act more forcefuly on global warming. But what should they be doing? How does biochar fit into this scenario? Biochar, as we know from the example of the terra preta, can enrich the soil and keep it fertile for long periods. That would benefit the world through production of more food without soil-degrading and energy-consuming chemical fertilizers. But the real payoff (if I understand the author's point) is that biochar mixed into soil basically sequesters carbon, taking it out of the atmosphere. This is a good thing to do and has the effect of reducing carbon emissions that cause global warming. So far so good.But the author also discusses current ways of counting carbon that use market mechanisms for buying and selling "carbon credits" and are supposed to provide incentives for nations and their citizens to use less carbon. But, that often doesn't happen. The author clearly does not think market forces can ever solve the problem of global warming. He says that small farmers the world over are the main producers of food, and most of them do not even operate in the global market. He thinks their main motivation for using biochar is not going to have anything to do with buying and selling carbon credits, but will simply come from the better production of food they will get by incorporating biochar into their soil.The book makes many interesting points, but the author seems to wander all over and I got to the end still scratching my head trying to figure out what I had really learned here. Yes, I do know more about biochar than I did before reading this, so I guess from that standpoint the book succeeded. I didn't learn anything new about the people who created the terra preta, but I can't help but think about how their civilization disappeared back into the jungle. Could that also be the fate of our current global economy? When it comes to the big picture of what my country (USA) and other countries should be doing to avert a coming disaster from global warming, I admit that I am still confused.However, I'd love to get my hands on some biochar or find a way to make some out of my yard wastes so I can improve the yield of my little backyard garden. I live in a place where the soil is basically sand, and I fight a constant battle to improve the soil enough to grow some tomato and cucumber plants. Clearly, the author had a larger purpose in this "briefing" book, but he DID convince me that biochar could help me and everyone else grow more of our own food, without resorting to chemical fertilizers, which he points out, actually deplete the soil. Perhaps millions of people with backyard gardens could make a difference. Or maybe not. Maybe we're all facing Armageddon over global warming, and there's not much any one of us can do about it. I just don't know.

As someone very much interested in global warming, and as a soil scientist working in Africa with smallholder farmers, I was very interested in this book. I was hoping that it would point to real solutions. But from my perspective, it does not.Biochar may have a lot to offer. Biochar is basically fine-ground charcoal that can be produced from just about any organic plant residue, from entire trees right down to stems and leaves of annual crops. Biochar is created by pyrolization, the process of heating said residue in the absence of oxygen, to create charcoal, which is then ground. Either biochar or charcoal are very slow to decompose, making them a long-term sink for carbon, their primary constituent. Organic residues decompose relatively quickly; biochar does not. Furthermore, biochar has proven potential to have long-term benefits on soil fertility and soil water holding capacity. Soils treated with biochar in the Americas over 2000 years ago is still fertile today. The final beauty of biochar is that the plant residues from which they are created are renewable and abundant. Conceivably, if only 2.5% of the world's cropland were devoted to biochar, all of the industrial carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas, would be re-absorbed by the year 2050. James Bruges makes a solid case for the potential of biochar, and the book has one chapter that is particularly interesting to me as a scientist where the global carbon cycle is explained and roughly quantified.In the early chapters, he makes a very strong case of the need for urgent action. For climate change skeptics, this may seem exaggerated, but as a scientist who has followed the debate for a number of years and has seen that scientists have actually under-estimated rather than over-estimated the pace of global warming effects, I agree with Bruges completely--urgent action is indeed necessary before we reach the "tipping point", where natural feedback mechanisms create a vicious cycle of greenhouse gas release from oceans and permafrost soils, accelerating unimaginably greenhouse gas concentrations and global warming to a scale that has in the past resulted in mass extinctions when it occurred naturally. By the way, the debate should not even be about whether it is natural or not--the debate should be, can we do something about it? And we can.Then the book gets into solutions. The question is, are these solutions either doable or workable? And I think this the book's weakness--from my limited perspective, they are not. First of all, Bruge suggests that to limit C dumped into the atmosphere, we cap it at the source--that is, put a limit on how much the 500 or so companies that produce coal and oil can mine annually. Each person in the world is then given some sort of allocation, which they can then "sell" to the producers. So you can't produce more than what credits you have "bought" from all the 6 billion people on the planet....hmmm. Do I need to go into the number of reasons that this does not seem workable? Like, how are you going to get those funds down to every person on earth? Or whether we can get any agreement on this approach?These companies account for 2/3 of the carbon emissions, according to Bruge. The remaining third comes from land use (or abuse thereof). Really? Actually, 1/3 of emissions come from land use in general, including the energy needed to plow, harvest, process, package, and transport the food--but then in reality, that actually is to a large extent oil and coal, so it should be in the first group. Then, his idea to monitor C gains or losses from land use is by remote sensing. I don't believe the technology is there--and biochar is supposed to fall under that. But for the most part, biochar is buried--meaning that it's a dead end to try to sense it by satellite. And if you want to correlate it through ground truthing--forget it. So, this is no way to monitor biochar or its overall carbon-reducing footprint.But the next question is, would anyone producing biochar be ready to put it into the soil? And here's where you have to crunch some numbers. This number-crunching is lacking in the book. At their peak, carbon credits were running something like $40 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. Charcoal has a higher CO2 equivalent than its weight--so roughly speaking, a kg of biochar is equal to over twice that. So roughly speaking, let's say that a ton of biochar has 2.5 tons of CO2 equivalent, placing its value at $100 per ton. That's 10 cents per kg. Nice. Except for the fact that its value as fuel is worth a lot more than that. It has close to the same energy content per kg as ethanol or diesel fuel. So in terms of fuel equivalence, that's the same as paying 10 cents per kg, which is roughly 10 cents per liter or 40 cents per gallon. When was the last time you saw diesel fuel so cheap? You can imagine that people might be tempted to sell their charcoal to generate power at a hefty premium to what they would get as carbon credit. Perhaps they can also get some soil fertility benefit as well, but consider application rates start at 5 tons per ha. If you are able to sell it at 25 cents per kg (the going rate for bush-produced charcoal where I live), that 5 tons is going to cost you $1250 per hectare--that is to say, if you had sold it as charcoal, you could have made $1250. That's a lot of money to spread over a hectare. Most people will take the $1250, thank you!So in the end, the book seems to me to be thought-provoking and has enlightened me regarding a potential technology. Four stars for that, but would people actually do it--grind up their valuable charcoal and put it into the soil? I don't think so.For a non-biochar method that has serious carbon removal potential, check out using iron seeding in the ocean. That's a whole 'nuther subject, but is perhaps more practical and can have massive impact--though it has its caveats as well.