[Terrapreta] my report on the agrichar conference

[adkarve]

I give below  the method of charring agricultural waste. It was developed
primarily to produce charcoal as fuel, but the charcoal, once produced, can
equally well be added to the soil. Our Institute won the Ashden Award for
Renewable Energy for the year 2002, for this technology:

The charring kiln, a portable cylindrical structure (about 150 cm wide and
100 cm tall) made out of sheet iron, is carried from field to field, where
agricultural waste is available. The waste is filled into cylindrical metal
containers, 37.5 cm wide and 60 cm tall. The kiln takes 7 such containers at
a time. All containers together accommodate 21 kg of waste. After loading
the containers into the kiln, the top of the kiln is closed with sheet metal
lid, which is provided with a chimney. About 10 kg waste are burnt
underneath the containers (in the kiln) to start the process of pyrolysis.
The heat of the waste burning underneath the containers pyrolyses the waste
in the containers. Pyrolysis gas generated in the process leaves the
containers through holes in their bottom, and it too burns, to add to the
process heat. Each batch, taking about 40 minutes to complete, produces
about 7 kg char (30% of the waste filled in the barrels). Two workers can
operate two kilns in tandem to produce daily about 100kg char. The char is
powdered, mixed with a suitable binder, and extruded into briquettes. By
using a manually operated extruder, it is possible for one person to produce
daily about 100 kg briquettes. The briquettes are laid out in the sun for
drying.  A family operating this kiln for about 200 days in a year, can earn
Rs.200,000 annually, which is equivalent to the annual salary of an
Assistant professor in a university.
Yours
A.D.Karve
----- Original Message -----
From: <kelpie at starband.net>
To: <terrapreta at bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 3:27 AM
Subject: [Terrapreta] my report on the agrichar conference


> FYI - my article on the agrichar conference was published on truthout.org
> yesterday - please let me know what you think.
> -kelpie
>
> http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050307R.shtml
>
>  Birth of a New Wedge
>     By Kelpie Wilson
>     t r u t h o u t | Report
>
>     Thursday 03 May 2007
>
>     Terrigal, New South Wales, Australia - As delegates met in Bangkok
> this week to debate climate change solutions contained in the IPCC's
> latest report, one technology not mentioned in the draft report was
> being closely examined at a conference in Australia in the beach town
> of Terrigal, just north of Sydney.
>
>     The first meeting of the International Agrichar Initiative convened
> about 100 scientists, policymakers, farmers and investors with the
> goal of birthing an entire new industry to produce a biofuel that goes
> beyond carbon neutral and is actually carbon negative. The industry
> could provide a "wedge" of carbon reduction amounting to a minimum of
> ten percent of world emissions and possibly much more.
>
>     Agrichar is the term not for the biomass fuel, but for what is left
> over after the energy is removed: a charcoal-based soil amendment. In
> simple terms, the agrichar process takes dry biomass of any kind and
> bakes it in a kiln to produce charcoal. The process is called
> pyrolysis. Various gases and bio-oils are driven off the material and
> collected to use in heat or power generation. The charcoal is buried
> in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had
> pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil
> fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.
>
>     Prominent Australian scientist Tim Flannery, who has written a book on
> global warming called "The Weather Makers," was on hand to give
> encouragement to the conferees. "I am deeply committed to your
> solution," he told the group. In a keynote address, Flannery provided
> an update on the acceleration of global warming, from the rapidly
> melting Greenland ice sheet to the unprecedented drought that has
> gripped Australia.
>
>     Because the pace of global warming already exceeds projections,
> Flannery is convinced that the world must do more than just reduce
> emissions; we must find ways to rapidly remove CO2 from the
> atmosphere. According to many researchers at the conference, agrichar
> has the potential to store billions of tons of carbon safely away in
> soils.
>
>     The attendees were clearly excited by this potential, and, unlike
> other meetings concerned with climate change, an electric buzz of
> optimism was in the air. Joe Herbertson, director of a consulting
> company called Crucible Carbon, said, "When I heard about this
> technology, the hairs went up on the back of my neck. This is the best
> news on climate change I've ever heard."
>
>     One reason for the excitement is agrichar's potential to address a
> range of problems from poor soil fertility to waste disposal to rural
> development. About half the world's population relies on charcoal for
> cooking fuel, and the production of charcoal drives deforestation in
> Africa and other places. Smoky, inefficient charcoal kilns pollute the
> air with noxious gases that harm health and heat the planet.
>
>     An effort to replace these kilns with modern, efficient pyrolysis
> units would relieve the pressure on forests by reducing waste and
> adding the ability to use any source of biomass, including
> agricultural waste products such as rice hulls. The ultimate objective
> is to produce enough charcoal to have some left over to bury and
> increase soil fertility, leading to a bootstrapping effect where
> increased yields provide both more food and more biomass for energy.
>
>     Projects discussed at the agrichar meeting ranged from a
> household-size pyrolyzing stove that produces both cooking gas and
> charcoal, to industrial-scale units capable of processing large waste
> streams from sugar mills, pulp mills, poultry farms and even
> municipalities.
>
>     Some participants suggested that energy, rather than agriculture,
> would be the key driver for adopting biomass pyrolysis. There is a
> tradeoff between producing energy or charcoal, as the process can be
> optimized for either one. Desmond Radlein of Dynamotive Energy Systems
> said, "It is wishful thinking that people will switch to renewable
> fuels unless it is cheaper. All of this is tied to the price of oil;
> as it goes up, many more things are possible." Because it costs money
> for transport and the labor to put agrichar into soil, Radlein feels
> that the path forward lies with biomass energy plantations fertilized
> by agrichar, which will become a self-sustaining loop pumping carbon
> into soils, paid for by the energy yield.
>
>     Robert Flanagan, an entrepreneur working in China, had a different
> view. There are 700 million farmers in China, he pointed out. China
> could quickly deploy a small, village-level pyrolysis unit he is
> developing, and because labor is cheap, spreading the agrichar on
> fields would be affordable even without a large energy harvest.
>
>     Others at the conference felt that an expanding market for carbon
> credits under the Kyoto protocol would be the force that drives the
> adoption of agrichar. Mike Mason, director of the UK biomass company,
> Biojoule, said the impact of agrichar on nitrous oxide emissions alone
> would be enough incentive to fund the needed projects.
>
>     Nitrous oxide is 270 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas
> and it lasts for 150 years in the atmosphere. Use of nitrogen
> fertilizers is a major source of the gas, and a difficult one to
> mitigate. But agrichar applied to fields seems to have a significant
> damping effect on nitrous oxide emissions. Lukas Van Zwieten, a
> researcher at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries,
> looking at preliminary results of his field trials measuring nitrous
> oxide emissions from agrichar amended soils, said "the more I look
> into this, the more excited I get."
>
>     Several farmers attending the conference were primarily interested in
> the increased yields possible with agrichar. Australia has some of the
> poorest soils in the world - 75 percent of Australia's soils have less
> than one percent carbon.
>
>     The exceptional properties of charcoal in soil were first noticed in
> the Amazon where there are large areas of what is called "terra preta"
> or Amazonian dark earths. These dark earths can be several feet deep
> and contain up to nine percent carbon, as compared with nearby soils
> that have only about half of one percent. In one of the most
> fascinating aspects of this story, the terra preta soils turn out to
> have been deliberately created by a lost Amazonian civilization. Some
> of the areas have been dated going back to more than 7,000 years, and
> they are still highly fertile.
>
>     Field trials and experiments in pots show impressive yield gains in
> charcoal-amended soils, but so far researchers don't completely
> understand why. One question is whether the effect is primarily
> chemical and physical or primarily biological. Charcoal is a highly
> porous material that is very good at holding nutrients like nitrogen
> and phosphorus and making them available to plant roots. It also
> aerates soil and helps it retain water.
>
>     Charcoal's pores also make excellent habitat for a variety of soil
> microorganisms and fungi. Think of a coral reef that provides
> structure and habitat for a bewildering variety of marine species.
> Charcoal is like a reef on a micro-scale.
>
>     One of the research papers presented at the conference documented an
> increased diversity of beneficial microbes in terra preta soils as
> compared with unamended soils, but there are still no answers about
> whether the fertility increase is due to physical or biological
> factors. The best answer may be that it is both.
>
>     One very evident tension at the conference was between the scientists
> who are trying to better understand how agrichar works, and the
> farmers and investors who want to apply the technology as soon as
> possible. But one obstacle to deploying agrichar is the ability to
> quantify its effects in order to create both a reliable product for
> farmers and a solid guarantee of agrichar's carbon-fixing capacity for
> the carbon-trading market.
>
>     To that end, one of the most important research questions is how long
> the charcoal stays fixed in the soil. It's important to distinguish
> char, or black carbon, from soil organic carbon that comes from adding
> compost, manure or crop residues. According to John Gaunt of Cornell
> University, this kind of fresh organic matter does not stay in the
> soil but is almost all released back into the atmosphere as CO2 within
> ten years. For this reason, soil organic carbon has not qualified as a
> carbon emissions reduction that would be tradable under the Kyoto
> protocol.
>
>     Johannes Lehman, also of Cornell, is attempting to determine what
> percentage of the char stays fixed in the soil. Some of it does
> oxidize, he says, but it's difficult to say how much. He believes that
> agrichar-amended soils will see an initial period of weathering, after
> which they will be stable for long periods.
>
>     Certainly the existence of the terra preta soils in the Amazon is
> testimony to the long-term carbon-fixing ability of agrichar, and
> several conference participants felt that it would be best to settle
> on a conservative amount of guaranteed carbon fixation and move as
> quickly as possible to get policy in place to qualify agrichar as a
> tradable form of emissions reduction.
>
>     The feeling in Terrigal was universal that there is no time to waste
> in deploying the agrichar wedge as a global warming solution.
>
>     However, there were some additional cautions sounded about the
> potential for abuse, especially the pitfall of all biomass schemes -
> the danger that too much of the planet's land will be appropriated for
> human needs and not enough left for other species. Mark Glover of
> Renewed Fuel said that the source of biomass must be carefully
> determined and that it would not do to repeat the mistakes of the palm
> oil industry, which is rapidly deforesting the habitat of orangutans
> in Indonesia, or the American corn ethanol industry, which has ended
> up pricing tortillas out of the reach of Mexico's poor.
>
>     Mike Mason of Biojoule expressed concern over the quantities of
> biomass needed, but he said that if properly phased in, agrichar can
> be the solution we are all looking for. First, he said, we must take
> the four billion tons of agricultural waste products produced every
> year and turn as much of that as possible into char and bury it in
> soils to increase soil fertility. After a few years, as the
> productivity of our fields rises, we can begin optimizing biomass
> pyrolysis for energy production to help replace coal and fossil fuels.
> Eventually, as our energy supply becomes decarbonized and we move more
> and more to rely on solar, wind and ocean power, we can shift biomass
> utilization back to char again and keep sequestering more carbon to
> get atmospheric levels back to pre-industrial levels.
>
>     In addition to directing Biojoule, Mason is also the founder of
> Climate Care, a highly successful voluntary carbon-offset program that
> supports renewable energy projects in the developing world, so he is
> one of those visionary people who also knows how to make things
> happen.
>
>     By the end of the conference, after the participants had considered
> the political and economic obstacles to the vision, there was a bit of
> sobering up, but not much. Robert Flanagan set up one of his
> pyrolyzing wood cookstoves out on the beach and the scientists and
> entrepreneurs quaffed beer and roasted marshmallows over the smokeless
> glowing coals. Occasionally the stove would belch a sudden puff of
> foul smoke and Flanagan would rush to adjust the downdraft control.
>
>     After an hour or so, Flanagan opened the stove and dumped a few chunks
> of charcoal out onto the sand. Those small morsels of black lying on
> the white expanse of sand might symbolize the embryonic state of their
> movement, but for most of the conference participants, agrichar was
> still the best news they had ever heard.
> ------------
>
>     Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a
> mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection
> activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the
> solar power industry. She is the author of Primal Tears, an
> eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of
> Darwin's Radio, says: "Primal Tears is primal storytelling, thoughtful
> and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of
> human and family."
>
>   -------
>
>
>
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