Biochar Workshop Part 1, How to Make Biochar

We are working very hard to achieve four goals at the same time. The first is to

make

the best

biochar

. The second is to use as much energy as possible from the process. The third is to eliminate as many emissions as possible. The fourth is to

make

the entire process as profitable as possible for everyone. No matter what biomass we put in, we could have carbon. This is how we really aim to reduce our carbon footprint. I'm so glad to have you all here. I'm Bob Wells with NewEngland Biochar in Massachusetts and I represent Chargrow LLC in North Carolina.

Our presentation today hopes to cover a lot of bases and we have a lot of good information from various sources. and then it will also give you plenty of time to ask questions and try to fill in the blanks. We are excited that you are all here to experience this with us. We are certainly excited about

biochar

and what it can do for farmers, gardeners and the entire world. We're going to do this a little backwards for a couple of reasons. I'll start by showing you how to make biochar in your own backyard if you wish.

The reason I'm starting this is because it takes a while and I want to make sure you see the whole process and then we'll talk about the details of biochar and we'll start from the bottom and work our way up. To start, we are going to convert this type of biomass into this type of biochar with this simple 55 gallon drum and a 30 gallon drum that we affectionately call the Tin Man. The way this works is that we have a barrel within a barrel. The reason I like to show you this whole system is that it really represents everything that was being done there on a much larger scale and you can do it on a much smaller scale and once you start playing with this kind of stuff it's really fun. and you can create your own designs.

There are a million different ways to do this. All you have to do is search YouTube and you'll see there are dozens and dozens of people trying different ways to do it. There are four rules that I always preach to everyone I work with regarding biochar. Number one is we're going to try to make the best biochar we can make and this is a good biochar. There are several ways to know. If you look inside and there is no brown inside. If you look outside, there is no white ash outside. We have really good pure coal here and that's not as easy as it seems.

I usually taste each batch to make sure it's good no matter what it's made of. Another good indicator that it is a good charcoal is that you can hear it. It does feel clinical when you let it go and move it. so you can hear its almost metallic or glassy fragility. If you don't hear that, it's probably not cooked enough. Good charcoal doesn't taste like anything because, like any good charcoal filter, it actually absorbs the things you would be tasting, so it will really take away the flavor. It will take the smell out of things, it will take the toxins out of things like a charcoal filter, it's the same as charcoal.

Number one was to make the best biochar. Number two, we are going to use the energy that is available in the process because in the process of producing biochar we are releasing a huge amount of energy that comes out of the biomass that we are producing the biochar from, so we want to make good use of it. . that energy, if possible, and again my real job here today is to inspire you to try it yourselves and find new creative ways that you can use it for your own applications. There are many applications in farms and homes where we need energy, everyone needs energy;

Hopefully we can offset the use of fossil fuels by using that energy and in some useful way, well that's number two. Number three, we're going to avoid as much pollution of any kind as we can or cause any kind of environmental damage that we can avoid, that's number three. The old way to make biochar, if you've ever seen the old way they did it for many centuries and they still do it in some countries and they would arrest you if you tried to do it here, is to make a big pile and to make it burn slowly, they would cover the pile with wet leaves and soil, etc., and they would let it burn slowly and it would cook in the process of doing so, releasing all the gases in the wood, the gases, i.e. the smoke, go away. into the atmosphere generating a large amount of pollution, that smoke is the same fuel that we will use in this process to make it work.

We're going to burn that smoke as much as we can to avoid pollution and use energy at the same time, so we're killing two birds with one stone right there and hopefully you'll get an idea of ​​how it works. here. Number four, we have to make it profitable and I use the word profitable. I used to use the word "we make a profit on it" and I've expanded a bit on saying that we made a profit because it doesn't necessarily have to be money that they were making from this, but we have to see that we are making something. good or we won't do it.

So either the profit is that we are helping the environment or the profit is that we are making money or the profit is that you grow better food, more nutrient-rich food, whatever your profit is, you help your community. There are all kinds of wins you can connect to the number four, but if you don't have all four going for you, you probably won't continue doing it. You're not going to feel the full benefit of what biochar can give you, so you probably won't continue, so I always try to get people to see the bigger picture. I was already talking to someone this morning about how they want to see the big picture here, the big picture of why biochar is good and why it's complicated for a very simple elemental element, almost purely carbon.

The big picture is actually quite complicated when you start to study it and you have to put all the pieces together and that's what we're trying to do here and this is really one of the best examples in the world of what happens. There are people all over the world. The world tries to make those four rules work and most of them don't even realize there are four rules. They're trying to make one of those rules work, and by trying to make one of them, you'll screw up the other three. By trying to do two of them, you still don't get the full benefit, so we're going to keep the four rules in mind throughout the day.

This is what we call our internal retort chamber and retort simply means reburning. Just a few half inch holes drilled in the bottom of this. This is a 30 gallon drum. We will fill it with raw materials. There's nothing at the bottom drilled into this one, the outer drum. It is sealed at the bottom, so the inner drum rests against that bottom. We are going to fill the inside of the drum with raw materials. It turns out that we have very high quality raw materials. This comes from furniture factories. It is a hard wood, beautiful and dry, like the Cadillac of the raw material.

At home you probably have sticks and lumps and that will work, but it probably won't work with wood chips because if you fill them up, they don't breathe and the gases won't escape well. It will insulate itself and end up with a big brown spot in the middle that wasn't cooked, so think of it as an oven. Now we put the lid on them. It's just the inner barrel full now where the outer one is not. Only the inner barrel closed at the top. Now we're going to place wood here in the spaces between these two barrels.

Again we're doing this with very high quality raw material here, southern yellow pine, in this case, and we're filling the annular space between the two. The drier the wood you are using, the better it will be in the end. We can fill the spaces with these things. I normally use round sticks at home, not these pretty cutouts. We don't want to put any chemicals into the process because there are heavy metals, copper, things outside of the paint, that's all that ends up in your biochar. What was put in now is the fuel that will heat the inner chamber.

Now Abram is going to start a fire up here. We are always looking for waste products. We don't want to do this if we can help you in any way with new materials that we gathered just for this. There are many wastes from which we can make biochar and we can add them to our list of advantages. We're eliminating waste, which is a bigger advantage than it seems at first glance because if you study the carbon cycles of what happens even with wood chips when you put them in the ground, whether it's in the forest, in your backyard or in the county landfill or whatever, these things are being converted as they decompose back into CO2 and methane.

Methane is a greenhouse gas 26 times worse than CO2, so any methane we can avoid will be better for the environment. By converting it to biochar, we will begin to sequester that carbon that would be methane in the air and we will get into that in more detail as we go and sit down. We're going to get this fire going a little bit on the top and what's going to happen is it's going to burn between the cans, on the outside and inside, and it's going to burn on the inside. We have primary air holes down here, so our air will be sucked in here and keep this fire going.

It is interesting that we start from the top and not from the bottom. If you start it from the bottom it won't work. It's really a little counterintuitive because we've all been taught to go underneath and light the fire from below. In this case the fire will start at the top. The fires will slowly go out because the air is coming from down here and up through the fire, as it does so, it will cook the inner container, heating the wood in that container which is sealed except for those holes in the bottom. The gases we cook with that wood are all flammable gases.

Every time you see smoke like the one here, you're wasting fuel. That smoke is fuel and if you can burn it, you will convert fuel into energy. This is a simple way to do it. If you can imagine, it starts cooking, it creates gas, the gases have nowhere to go because the top is sealed, it comes out through the holes in the bottom and it comes out between the cans and it ends up being absorbed between the cans. cans until it touches the embers burning the gas as fuel, it burns the gas inside the can into the wood on the outside of that can.

Both will heat the inside of the can and push out more and more gas. Now the key is that we don't let it get too much oxygen, that's always the key and pyrolysis is always the key to producing biochar, no matter how you do it, you remove or at least limit the amount of oxygen that gets to the loading. In a retort system we practically eliminate oxygen. We're going to cook that wood on the inside using the wood on the outside, but we're not going to let there be any oxygen inside, that way it won't burn to ashes, it'll just push out the gases, but it won't burn everything up.

This way, if we make a mistake and have a hole in the top or our seal is bad, we will end up with a big can of white ash at the bottom so we are sick and we have wasted time. So your little fire is going this way and that fire will be pushed sideways once it's going. Normally a can of this amount of material would produce a lot of smoke, but we will burn the smoke as best we can and once the gas starts to come out of the inner chamber, it rises here and meets the fire which moves downward and burns. .

It's really fascinating because the gas will use the oxygen first long before the wood engine, so you'll have wood that will stop burning right here and just burn gas until the inside runs out of gas and then it ends up burning. the wood down. The beauty of this little design that I like the most is that it is very labor efficient, once we turn it on and get it going, we can put the lid on it and walk away and it will do its thing, it is completely self regulating. I don't have to sit there waiting for it to finish and then turn it off, it turns itself off.

You can come back tomorrow morning and it will just be a nice can of biochar inside and nothing outside. What expels the gases is simply its own pressure, which expands all the time. The first

part

of the process, which is a multi-stage process, involves removing the water from the wood. If you can imagine a steam kettle, it's pushing all the time, there's a little bit of pressure and that takes it out of the holes, so it's all a very natural process, very low pressure, but there's enough pressure because we're not holding the

part

superior. In this can, if we were really pressed, it would push the top up and it would burn right here.

It's not going to burst or explode or anything like that. I don't know how to prop it up at all. If you prop it up, what can happen? At the end of the burn, when everything is still hot but all the embers are gone, the oxygen can go back to its stuff, it will go down and I'll keep it on and then everything inside will burn. also. Again, I think this is a really cool system because you can turn it on and leave it as long as there's nothing burnable around it, which is why we do it in the driveway.

There is always one to be sure. I have one at home that I have used literally hundreds of times. It's a little bigger than this. I call him old faithful and I just go out in the morning and carry him. It's made of stainless steel, so it's lasted a long time, so I charge it like this, turn it on, cover it with a battery, andI leave and come back the next day, take out my barrel of charcoal, throw it away, and load it all up again. I turn it on and go to work so that every day I can make the most of it.

This process will probably take three or four hours, so in theory you could get two charges each day if you're ambitious enough at the time to want to do it. Throw away the Char and hose it down with water to make sure it cools down. Before you leave it alone, putting it in a pile like this is actually a little dangerous, I warn you. Even when the weather is good and cold, chemical processes still occur there. Never assume things are safe, even when it's cold; You should get them wet as soon as possible to ensure they are safe and spread them out if possible.

Don't leave it in a big pile. There are many security issues, but none of them are difficult, you just have to keep them in mind. These are secondary air holes, we call them, and what they will do is if there is still residual gas coming in here and we don't have enough oxygen from below, it will draw air in here and burn it before it gets out. Chimney. You can hear the fire now as soon as you put the chimney in, now you've got the thermal siphon going and it's pulling in our primary air here and our secondary air here.

We've got a lot of fire right here, it's going to heat up real quick here and we're done, even with a 4 foot stack you're going to end up seeing flames coming out of the top of this, but notice what you see. We're not seeing smoke coming out of the top of this. We are going to work very hard to achieve balance. I think of it like the carburetor on an old engine getting the balance between the fuel gas and air mixture and the right amount of heat and getting clean combustion and getting efficiency. You can put a screen on top.

You've got a good tie there right now. If you want even better draft, you can use an insulated chimney and it goes faster because you don't lose heat down the side of the chimney. At this point we start, at home I put a big frying pan here and start making spaghetti sauce or something like that with my rotten tomatoes or use and that's a matter of using energy. We already have number one, we are making the best character we can. Number two, we are using some of this energy if we want to. Obviously we're going to waste a lot, we're wasting a lot of energy with this, but it gets us started.

Number three, we're not generating much pollution here. If we had burned that wood we would be making a lot more smoke in an open pile than we are making now or if we had thrown it in a can with holes in it, we would still be making a lot more smoke than we have now and that is a matter of balancing these holes. with the type of wood you are making. There are many tweaks to make it this perfect. This will smoke at some point because it will become unbalanced when you start cooking the inner barrel and produce a lot of smoke.

It won't be able to burn all of it and it will run out a little bit, so just so you don't put too much pressure on me later on you'll see how it happens and we can even adjust it by lifting the top up a little bit. Little give it a little more air and it will clean it. Just to give you an idea of ​​how much the balance counts for producing smoke, we take it off and it doesn't burn too much, but it's because we have this nice dry raw material, so it doesn't look as good, but you can see the smoke and the stuff. that come out of it.

Even if I put the clamp on the top of this can, it won't seal it very well. That clamp is made to be used cold with a rubber seal. We have removed those rubber seals because they obviously produce a lot of nasty smoke etc. It's just that there is no chance of anything getting out of hand in this. I've done it hundreds of times. Every now and then you get a little wow, if you get a burst of gas that mixes and then ignites it will give you a little wow. With our great reports, we've experimented a lot with a lot of different materials and you can make biochar from any biological material, pretty much anything that used to be alive, you can make it into biochar, you can make it from bones. with corn stubble.

I have made it with a pretty good raw material: sunflower stems. Although the key is that if you are looking for carbon by mass, the mass you are putting in is the mass you are going to take out and is directly proportional to the mass you are going to take out. Obviously, corn stubble. I can package one of our reports with corn stover; It will only weigh a couple hundred pounds and you'll get about a third of that as biochar. Then you'll only end up with less than 100 pounds. If we feed the replica 2000 pounds, which is about how much of this hardwood will fit, we'll get 500 to 600 pounds per biochar, so if you're going by weight, then that's important if you're going by volume and you don't care, so use ears of corn, whatever sticks you have lying around in the yard, you know, that pile over there is very attractive to me, most people see it. like a big pile of pine trees that needs to get rid of.

To me it looks like carbon that needs to be sequestered. All right, I'm going to put this back on and you can hear it take off with the chimney. The chimney really helps bring in the air and will help speed up the process and we'll see that for the rest of the day or at least another four or five hours later today we'll open it up and I'll show you. what's inside that is essentially this. We did this on this, so that's what you're going to see, but you can also get up close and personal with your cold, especially because it's going to put out a lot of heat and you're going to hear and see how much energy is coming out of the top.

This thing throughout the day is the energy that we are going to try to catch. Right now there's a big stream of hot air coming out of this, which is hopefully mostly CO2 and water vapor because that's what we're trying to achieve is a clean burn where there are no particles and certainly no carbon monoxide or other missions like that. Any other questions before entering. If you have any kind of business, like a furniture company or something, there is at least one pallet recycler here, there is a phenomenal variety of raw materials. Yeah, that's a great example of a place to get raw materials.

The wood on pallets is usually a hard wood, usually quite dry, the only thing I would say to be careful with pallets is what is being transported on them. If chemicals were spilled or there was plastic or paint on them, but otherwise the only other thing is nails that got together, you should be aware of that. In our process, you have to take out the nails to keep them pure. You can leave cloves and make charcoal if it goes into your garden or something. Those nails will rust and break, but they can also puncture tires, feet, and shoes, and that's another thing to keep in mind, but it's a big source of wood waste.

A really good charring wood produces a really good charcoal. There's a six-inch stack there, you can use it. I use 8 inch insulation at home just because that's what I can find in the landfill and then I just put it on top but this took me and the guys probably 20 minutes to do with the two cans and in fact there is no real special tools if we have time and people want to see it, we'll make another one while you watch, so you can see how it's done. We've done demos up north where I do this with just a chisel and a hammer, just punch all the holes in that. shape.

I mean, Old Faithfull that I talked about earlier is made from a stainless steel drum that came out of a candle factory, they used to use it to melt wax and it's about 100 gallons so I can easily put a 55 inside it and it works very well. good. One of the disadvantages of this is that if we heat that very hot steel inside with these two drums made of normal carbon steel, you will get about 10 passes before using one or the other of those drums. It will just peel off until there is none of that metal left and you will have to get another drum.

That influences its profitability. How much does charcoal cost to make versus how much is charcoal worth when it's finished? Obviously it's going to take a lot longer for the heat to get through this as it's just to get through this so there are limits to both small and big, you can't go small because we're going small, what happens? They are packed together and the gases that are in the inner chamber do not escape and insulate the center of the lot, so if you put wood chips instead of blocks you will end up with a big lump in the middle. it is not loaded at all.

It will char about three, four, five inches maybe and then it won't work in the center, so that's a big deal. I love using sticks because I'm clearing land, so I use my pole and run it while cutting down trees. I pack it up and run it aside and it keeps me warm in the winter. Because I'm in Massachusetts and sometimes it gets a little cold there. Would it affect the performance of the fireplace if the fireplace was turned to one side to maximize the heat surface for cooking? It might affect it a little bit because you want the fire to start all over the outside so it burns evenly because if you burn one side too quickly it ruins the whole cycle, but I'm sure it could be done, I'm sure it would. you'll be able to figure it out and because I want you to use the heat.

I love seeing how energy is used and I hate to see it wasted like we are doing now. Yes, two pots that fit together, or a big round pot with a hole in the middle that fits over the fireplace, right? It is not clear to me whether the raw material abroad will be converted into biochar at some point. No, that's just our starting material, it's basically for cooking the inside, if you take into account the performance, it's an important factor from that point of view. By performance I mean the relationship between what we invest and what we get.

Yes sir. What happens to the ash left outside? Can you tell us about its use? The ash doesn't bother me. I have very acidic soil and I look for ashes where I can find them so that the little bit of ash remains from the firewood that is burned outside. I usually throw it in directly with the biochar which I then mix with my compost and then put on my soil. You may want to be more careful with it and place it somewhere else, but it's not in the same container so it's easy to separate. The question is what is the maximum cross-sectional area of ​​the raw material we could use.

In this, a lot of it depends on the moisture content of the species, whether it has bark. All of those things will have an effect and you can play with it. It really is. a ship and you have to learn all the pieces of that ship. Probably about three inches would be the most you could get out of this now, my old trusty one at home also has a band of insulation around the outside, so I'm really focusing attention on that. It's a little bit bigger than this, so I have to be able to get that heat penetration and I do that by putting an alumina silicate blanket around the outside.

Don't try it with fiberglass, it will melt. So again there's a lot... I'm trying to inspire you to try it and I hope you have fun with it and you don't burn yourself or anyone else and you don't bother the neighbors with a lot of smoke and that's the challenge. How are charcoal lumps processed before they are put into the ground? How do I process charcoal lumps? All that green and yellow equipment that just came off the truck is to do that. At home I placed it in the driveway on a piece of plywood and drove my tractor back and forth on it.

At least that's how I used to do it before I increased my production and I would shred it and then shovel it into my compost pit and let the compost work with it. What would happen if you put it through a wood chipper? You would make a cloud of black dust that would cover the entire neighborhood. I speak from experience. So you could do these things in places where there are climate disasters, could you use them to burn debris? There are already people at FEMA working on designs that they can take with them again, there are many in a hurricane disaster or something, you have wood everywhere that you got rid of and you have power needs everywhere, so if you can converting that wood waste that is everywhere now, everyone will win because you are getting rid of the waste and you are creating energy that can hopefully be used at the same time.

There is also a lot of pollution in those areas due to disasters. Can charcoal help clean up the area right where it was created? Did you prepare these questions beforehand? This is amazing. Yes, you certainly can, again, it's a carbon filter that they already use to remedy. Activated carbon is commonly used in remediation when there are oil spills, they use it for that. Where there are chemical spills, mercury and all those things will absorb it. In some cases you have to take it after it is contaminated and treat it, but it will absorb it. In other cases, you're going to burn things later, so at least you'd be using the energy, although I hate seeing coal go up in flames.

So you would use it to absorb things and then burn them? Yes, and in other cases, or leave it in the ground because the biology that goes into biochar will still work in things like fuel oil. If there is a fuel oil spill, it is the biology they use to change that oil into something that is not. poisonous to humans, so those are all issueskey in environmental aspects. You can actually see from here how nice and clean it burns and it hasn't started producing its own gas yet, but it will and it will start generating a little more heat than that.

Last week the boys and I created a little new style invention, at least we thought it was new until we went on the web and found out other people were already doing it, but that's cooking lunch right there. Wow! Look, I told you it can wow. This is called a Rocket Avila stove. It's similar to what we're doing here, except it has the ability to feed our initial fuel into the bottom like a rocket stove, if any of you are familiar with rocket stoves, but it has an interior chamber with holes for the The pyrolysis that happens inside can be forced into the center tube and ignited by air coming in from below and cook lunch and make biochar at the same time, so this is a new design that we just decided to try and put together to the present day. demonstration and I am sure that if you try it you will come up with others and I really hope that if you do you will share them with me and with other people so that we can all continue to perfect this type of activity and as a community. show it to the kids and show them all the benefits and later when we are, after lunch and after it cools down, we'll open it up and you can see the insides of it and how the flow works and how you can put it on. one together yourself if you wish.

We were working on this design this week here. This one in particular, because yes, the wood we use is different than what I use at home, so you have to change the inputs so it burns cleanly. One of the things I've done on one of our later designs is to make those secondary holes variable so I can adjust them during burning. So we can check the can a little bit if anyone wants to see the flows in that tin man. Here you can see the inner chamber, it actually happens in two phases: in the first phase, the inside can be heated and then in the second phase, it causes the gas to bubble up at the bottom and rise to the fire and ignite.

It's the second phase and we get a lot of fire from the gas once the gas runs out and it runs out of gas, that's when the hard coal is left behind, then the fire starts to go down and finishes burning things on the outside. By the time it descends, the inner chamber has already been cooked of all its gas, so the important key to producing biochar is to remove all the volatiles from the feedstock. One way to look at it is that we're taking a normal piece of wood and we're going to take out the volatiles and leave just the solid carbon.

So what are volatiles? It starts with water, the first stage is what we take out of the water and water requires a lot of energy to move, which is an advantage and a disadvantage depending on how you look at it.