[Terrapreta] Where do you get it?

[Biopact]

Kurt, you get it from agricultural waste and from dedicated biomass. Just imagine the potential in the tropics. Today, in Central Africa, yields for very many crops are less than 25% of what they should be with basic management. This low productivity fuels a land expansion and deforestation cycle. If you put char into the ground (grab if from anywhere, even secondary regrowth forest), you make soils much more productive (remember Steiner's findings of an 840% increase in the yield of a crop the soil in which it grew being amended with char and mineral fertilizer; the increase was compared with what that crop would have yielded with fertilizer only). This boosted productivity yields far more biomass from which you can make char.

Now for many crops, the "residue to product ratio" (RPR) is 0.5 to 2 (that is: for a ton of "useable product" (e.g. grain), you get 0.5 to 2 tons of "unusable" biomass in return); rice yields vast quantities of straw, cassava yields a big pile of wood, maize has a high RPR too. 

Instead of leaving all this biomass on your field (as in no-till) or instead of burning it (as with rice straw), you turn it into char, and make the soil even more fertile (yielding more biomass in return).

Alternatively, you can grow dedicated biomass crops like grasses and short-rotation trees.

Granted, there are competing uses for all this biomass (cellulosic biofuels, bioenergy in classic power plants, bioproducts such as plastics, animal feed, etc...), and we should carefully look at these to see whether biochar can compete.

But in general, I don't think there will be a real shortage of biomass. Let's not forget that in principle biochar could help reclaim soils that were abandoned and emptied because no longer containing any organic matter. There is a vast amount of degraded and highly degraded land on this planet, that could perhaps be restored and made fertile again with char. Invest a little char to make land productive, get a big amount of biomass in return, from which you make more char.

I see biochar as a very dynamic concept, one that builds on itself and boosts itself; one that can expand "outwards", reclaiming poor soils as it goes along.

Cheers, 
Lorenzo





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: folke Günther 
  To: Kurt Treutlein 
  Cc: Terra Preta 
  Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 10:57 AM
  Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Where do you get it?





  2008/6/5 Kurt Treutlein <rukurt at westnet.com.au>:

    I've raised this question before, and so have others. If we consider the
    large scale production of charcoal, to be used for TP, where is the
    biomass feedstock to come from?

  I certainly think that if a tax is raised on carbon dioxide emissions and the same (or at least a similar) amount is paid to those that sequester carbon (as charcoal, which is 3.77 kg more carbon per kilo as the carbon conten of carbon dioxide), then the wole invention capacity of mankind would be released, and certainly a lot of feedstock would be found.
  I rather think that the inverse problem would occur: that more biomass that the carrying capacity would be harvested. Therefore I think that an (international?) body need to be raised, so that takng out biomass that is damging the ecological system wold lead to a detention of payment, which may imply a use of benign methods.
  FG



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