[Terrapreta] Industrial Carbon for Making Terra Preta Soils

[Robert Klein]

Hi Folks


I am publishing this article on my blog 


http://globalwarning-arclein.blogspot.com 


tonight to open the discussion on a real industrial protocol for producing carbon for soils.  It is not well known, but I learned years back that coal dust was used to make commercial charcoal briquet's for you barbecue by certain suppliers.  I do not know how true that is, but they sure as hell are not going to tell us unless they have to.  It also makes good sense since it uses up coal fines.


My article goes all the way with an end product that is steel grade coke.  A better solution would be a much lower temperature coke that was easier to grind and process, if it can be done without any nasties.


My other point is that this sets the price point that we must meet with any other system.  Coal will likely always be the cheapest industrial source.  Transportation and handling costs are minimized and a bagged fertilizer  product is delivered to the  farm gate ready to use. 



Industrial Carbon for Making Terra Preta Soils



I set out in this article to
address the industrial production of carbon for agriculture.  I am treating it as an industrial process in
order to establish the most cost effective way of getting the task done.  The reason that I do this is that is that
will always be the prime competition for other industrial methods.  We have already done this for the subsistence
economies were we applied onsite earthen kilns using the unique nature of corn
culture.
 
I am not constraining myself to
sustainable methods for this article, although I certainly think that all agricultural
carbon should be made from agricultural waste where possible.  It will not be possible for a large portion
of the earth’s croplands simply because biomass production is way too low for
it to be feasible.  If you cannot grow
corn for lack of moisture, then you surely cannot make an earthen kiln or even
hope to gather enough biomass to make a difference.  This describes a lot of good farm land in
Africa, to say nothing of the grain lands of western America and Australia.
 
I also think that the principal
benefit of terra preta soils is totally a function of the elemental carbon,
rather than any other carbon form.  This
is because of the long lasting fertility to this day, of terra preta soils,
centuries after any other carbon compound was destroyed.  It is unlikely that any other factor matters.
 
So let us stop dragging vast
amounts of wet wood waste out of the forest in monster convoys of trucks to the
central processing plant.  We start
instead with bituminous coal.  This coal
does not even have to be the highest quality because a good chaser of shale may
even be a good thing.  That also means
that huge reserves of poorer quality coal can be exploited.  There is plenty of that to do the whole job
once and for all.
 
The coal is then coked in coking
ovens which are fueled by process gases and produces a highly porous product of
virtually pure elemental carbon.  This
then has to be crushed into a finely powdered form for agricultural use.  It makes very good sense to also blend in
fertilizers during this powdering stage. If we are fortunate it should produce
a possible non corrosive product that does not damage equipment.  At least that should be the objective.
 
It may prove better to pregrind
the coal before it is roasted for forty eight hours.  This form of carbon has high crushing
strength and this must mean a high wear rate on the grinding equipment.  It makes one appreciate the elegance of
reducing corn stover to elemental carbon which must naturally produce a finely
subdivided powder.
 
We now have an agriculture ready
product that can follow current fertilizer distribution channels.
 
There is no need to attempt to
match terra preta in a single year obviously, but even putting in five hundred
pounds per acre, will easily get us there in three generations.  Integrating properly with the fertilizer
industry facilitates the whole process and allows a slow transition for the
soils.  Even a hundred pounds per acre as
part of the fertilizer blend will put a ton per acre into the ground every
twenty years.
 
Field experiments will need to be
done, if only for safeties’ sake.  We all
know, thanks to the Amazon that the end product is fantastic.  However, a hundred pounds even of completely
activated charcoal may be simply too aggressively reactive to easily be accommodated.
 
This or a similar low level can then
be even mandated by regulation without putting the industry out of sorts and
assuring that soil futility will henceforth be improving no matter how
incompetent the individual farm.
 
This would establish pricing
benchmarks that a wood waste charcoal industry must work towards in terms of
their feasibility.  Biochar kilns on the
farm should still produce a better product, but the commercial carbon
fertilizer industry can establish a price point for farm labor input.
 
What I have just described could
be implemented today with very little fuss.  Experience only has to be gained in grinding coke and blending the
various forms of fertilizers to see what is quickly practical.
 
I want very much to convert
atmospheric CO2 into soil carbon by way of carbonizing agricultural waste and
thus resolving the CO2 issue.  That
desire is however equal to the desire to do everything possible to hasten the
evolution of global agriculture to sustaining highly fertile soils everywhere
and reversing the massive destruction of good farmland everywhere.  I even suspect that the soils of the Fertile Crescent can be brought back to ancient fertility
and perhaps even reversing the salinity problem there.
 
The damage done by ten thousand
years of often lousy agricultural practice is a problem that puts the current
damage of pollution and industrial practice in the shade.  We are actually doing a better job as we have
industrialized agriculture over the last two generations.
 
A really great and overly
ambitious experiment would be to take a barren field no longer productive
because of salinity and attempt an irrigated crop using a ton of carbon
fertilizer.  It should not work at all,
but changes with adjacent untreated plots should inform us if we are onto
something.  I am optimistic that at some
point we will be able to actually produce sweet soil.
 
Most importantly, the conversion
of the industrial fertilizer industry over to carbon based application protocol
will assert the primacy of terra preta style soils everywhere and greatly
facilitate the adoption of other protocols achieving the same objective.


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