Biochar -- Putting the carbon Genie back in the bottle: Rob Lerner at TEDxSanMiguelDeAllende (2013)

In April 2008, I was driving from Panama to Costa Rica, where I was living at the time, catching up on my podcasts. One of my favorites is Science Friday, which covers a variety of topics through interviews with guests that the guest was talking about in this particular segment. Using charcoal as fertilizer, he called it

biochar

and said that all this also helps him fight climate change. Now I know what fertilizer is and what charcoal is not and I also know a little about climate change and I was baffled by what charcoal might have to do. What to do about this I first learned about the threat of global warming 40 years ago when I was a student in the Environmental Studies program.

Then I did graduate work in botany where I learned, among other things, what fertilizer is now. I left the world of academia long ago, but it left me with a lifelong commitment to scientific literacy and a deep concern for the environment inspired by the work of activist scientists like James Hansen and Tim Flanery. I felt motivated to do something about humanity's impending sustainability crisis, but what will be the next opportunity? I googled something called

biochar

and my life hasn't been the same since, although it's not a fertilizer per se, charcoal improves fertility in ways not previously appreciated and persists in the soil sequestering

carbon

in the fight against change climate.

Best of all, you make biochar by building things and burning things, which to me sounded like a totally good time Serendipity, a philanthropically funded biochar project was getting underway on Coast R, so I jumped in I entered the circle of participants as a volunteer and quickly found myself linked to a global community of scientists. Sustainability advocates and entrepreneurs, all dedicated to researching and promoting this new idea called biochar. Now we all know the charcoal on the grill. A more refined version known as activated

carbon

is found in your home water filter and is now also used in industry, while charcoal is technically Biotar made from wood could be made from almost any form of biomass when these Materials are heated in an oxygen-free environment, they thermally decompose into combustible gases, tires and oil.

The solid waste we call biochar, the process is known as pyrolysis and is widely scalable. Stove production saves fuel and reduces emissions while increasing harvest and subsistence prosperity. Farmers' megawatt-scale grid-tied biomass plants can be profitable in today's electricity generation markets and this is one of my favorites, a multi-stage process that transforms raw biomass directly into liquid. fuels to power the transportation fleets of our future and its first pilot plan is operational today. What all of these technologies have in common is that they produce large amounts of biochar. Now charcoal is one of the oldest industrial arts and Pizinger for energy is not. new either discovering that granular waste from these processes can be used to enrich soils while combating climate change that is new or perhaps not so new and therein lies a story in 1541 Francisco Pizaro having conquered the Inca Empire sent a When exploring the other side of the Andes, the expedition encountered set

back

s, but Francisco de Orana led a group of survivors on a two-year odyssey down the Amazon River and eventually returned to Spain, where he spoke to the Royal Court. of fabulous cities with fertile fields and health. natives who enjoyed a diverse diet and thanks to whose generosity he was able to bring his countrymen home safely.

The next expedition to explore that immensity did not leave for almost 20 years and found only jungle, none of the civilizations they expected. Meanwhile, Oriana had fallen from the Taste of the Crown and so the story of him was soon forgotten. A handful of discoveries from various disciplines have changed this view, and I hope you find the revelations as fascinating as I do. Archaeologists discover funerary profits and decorated pottery. Soil scientists find deep deposits containing pottery. fragments and bones of fish and much charcoal known locally as Tera pretta, these Dark Lands are prized for their fertility and perhaps most surprising is that a geographer flying through the interior detects large-scale geometric traces in the recently cleared landscape beneath vestiges of cities and roads that anthropologists today.

He describes the Amazon at the time of contact as the scene of a thriving civilization. Cities with huge earthworks were linked to satellite settlements surrounded by fertile charr seals. The inhabitants of Teta Preta lands, who number in the millions, live sustainable agrarian lives here. Oriana had told the truth, but the diseases transmitted by her own men, for which the native immune systems had no resistance, decimated the population and the jungle erased its traces. What is known today as a tropical forest is cleared and planted with intensive petrochemical monocultures. Sites are detected. of terpret soil up to 2 m deep still fertile hundreds of years after they were first created, what did the natives know?

That the settlers destroyed them and that their contemporaries have not yet discovered a bit of biology that can help to explain how plants perform what is possibly life's most impressive magic trick from the air. In broad daylight, they increase their mass by drinking some water and exhaling pure oxygen. The light hand for this trick is the extraction of mineral nutrients that plants extract from the soil. No minerals, no magic, and the main one is nitrogen, the most abundant gas in our atmosphere. Nitrogen is stubbornly stable. Plants have not been able to break it down since the dawn of agriculture.

Farmers have relied on fertilizers that began to change about a hundred years ago with the invention of a process to produce nitrogen fertilizers using natural gas, whether of chemical or organic origin. On the other hand, a mixture of those mineral nutrients that plants need to develop fertility is not so easily defined, it is a bit like pornography or, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it, fertility It is something emergent. property of complex physical and biotic factors that interact fertile soils retain water while allowing drainage make nutrients available while preventing leaching fertile soils contain a lot of organic matter in various stages of decomposition and are full of microbes an tablespoon can contain billions in total their feeding and excretion and Dev searching and dying and cycling the nutrients that plants can absorb the hapless settler who first cultivated the jungle uses slash and burn, a technique that works quite well in the temperate zone , but in the humid tropics biology is in a hyperdermic competition for nutrients so intense that organic waste is rapidly recycled

back

to the canopy.

The ashes provide a shot of nutrients that are quickly removed because there is no organic matter in the soil to hold them. Biochar can serve as a substitute for natural organic matter its highly porous structure provides habitat for microbes and has a weakly negative surface charge, so nutrients adhere to it like a magnet and its stable carbon structure resists decomposition, so biochar soils are persistently fertile. Biochar improves agricultural productivity, especially in areas of low rainfall or nutrient-poor soils. In addition to sequestering carbon, biochar also suppresses emissions of nitrous oxide and methane, potent greenhouse gases generated by agricultural soils.

Beyond agriculture, the bioburden, dual properties of filtration and supporting biology make it a powerful tool for a variety of other environmental challenges, so here's the big idea. massive practice on a global scale that depends mainly on residual biomass without displacing food crops without impacting natural areas and accounting for sequestered carbon directly avoiding agricultural emissions and displacing the use of fossil fuels biochar can offset 12% of human production of greenhouse gases and biochar is one of many technologies in renewable energy and other areas capable of achieving comparable or even greater emissions reductions with the potential to completely decarbonize our economy, all of these ideas are scientifically proven, technically feasible and many of them are put into practice today.

This curve may be familiar, it records the constant increase in CO2. concentrations in our atmosphere now, if we think of this graph as civilization's report card on climate change, we will get a good grade when the curve starts to go down, the point is that even if we stop burning fossil fuels today and until now we still have done it. Even stopping the only thing we will achieve is stopping the upward trend of this curve. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone won't be enough to put the carbon

genie

back in the

bottle

, but biochar is different. In addition to avoiding emissions, biochar sequesters carbon in the soil, removing it from the atmosphere.

We call it negative carbon and negative carbon is positive for the planet. Biochar is among a handful of carbon-negative agricultural strategies that actually restore the natural properties of ecosystems. Industrial agriculture has been phenomenally successful in providing us with abundant and cheap food, but it is totally dependent. on petrochemicals and we are all paying the price in the form of eroded soils contaminated waterways Oceanic dead zones and other externalities that accumulate in the global triple threat of biodiversity loss desertification and climate change soil holds the key Earth's soils contain more carbon than the atmosphere and Earth's ecosystems combined, but we are losing it at a rate close to 100 billion tons a year;

It can take a thousand years to form a single inch of topsoil in nature. Biochar and related agricultural practices drive soil formation through global adoption. With these land-building strategies along with technologies to transition away from fossil fuels, we can put the carbon

genie

back in the

bottle

.