Sustainable biochar is a powerfully simple tool to fight global warming. This 2,000 year-old practice converts agricultural waste into a soil enhancer that can hold carbon, boost food security, and discourage deforestation. It’s one of the few technologies that is relatively inexpensive, widely applicable and quickly scalable.
We really can’t afford not to pursue it.
What Leading Visionaries are Saying About Biochar
John Seed, founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre and co-creator of the Council of All Beings:
“For 30 years I have worked to protect rainforests first from logging and now, from climate change. During that time I have always looked to indigenous wisdom for guidance. Biochar, as the modern version of the ancient Amazonian Terra preta, has great potential for restoring the biodiversity of soil life, increasing food production, reducing the pressure to clear forests for agriculture and, most importantly, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for millennia. I commend the IBI for their work to place biochar on the global agenda and to accelerate its adoption. There is no time to waste if we are going to save forests from climate change and development.”
Latest Developments in Biochar
Biochar Stoves on Coffee Farms in Central America
Good coffee and great biochar are a match made in heaven. Especially since one product of that match is a cleaner cook stove for migrant coffee pickers who often have only open fires for cooking.
The match started in Seattle, a global center of coffee consumption and home of the Seattle Biochar Working Group. SeaChar (as it is known) is barely one year old, but this biochar regional group has a huge stack of accomplishments already. Last summer, SeaChar brought in TLUD (Top-Lit UpDraft) gasifier stove expert Paul Anderson to give a stove making workshop. That inspired SeaChar member Scott Eaton to pack up his tin snips and head down to Nicaragua to start building stoves for people who were still cooking over smoky open fires.
SeaChar co-founder and metal sculptor Art Donnelly was also bitten by the TLUD bug. He began making elegant TLUD stoves with artistic scrolls and whimsical touches like an air controller made from an Altoids mint can. Showing off his stoves at a Seattle garden fair, Art met Arturo Segura, owner of Sol Colibri, a sustainable, shade grown, organic coffee farm in the Santos region of Costa Rica. Segura is also a direct trade sales rep for La Alianza, an alliance of organic producers of coffee, cocoa, and bananas. Arturo Segura was interested in making biochar on his coffee plantation and he also wanted to help the migrant coffee pickers from Panama and Nicaragua who live with very little resources in difficult conditions during the picking season. Poor indoor air quality associated with cooking on an open fire is a major cause of respiratory disease.
Photo: Some of the TLUDs built during a one-day stove workshop in Providencia Costa Rica. (Art Donnelly in orange t-shirt).
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Black is Green (BiG): Producing Biochar with a Mobile Pyrolysis Unit in Australia
The original focus of BiG, according to co-founder Dr James Joyce, was to do something about sugar cane trash. James saw a large resource going to waste while neighbors complained about cane trash fires. James envisioned new income streams for farmers from turning the portion of sugar cane trash that is burnt off in agricultural fields into a charcoal fuel, to displace coal usage by local industry and for the charcoal briquette market.
But James, along with his father and BiG partner Stan Joyce, soon realized that first, there was no technology out there that was suitable for this application and any that might have been adaptable were too capital intensive and immobile to justify; and second, that it was not possible to get the product cost below the necessary $100/tonne target for coal displacement required in a country without carbon credits.
So, James dusted off his PhD studies on biomass gasification and set out to design a pyrolysis unit that met the criteria of low capital and operating cost, mobility, flexibility and ability to handle un-shredded cane trash. He said biochar was part of his design from the beginning: “We were always aware of biochar as a higher value alternative, but it soon became apparent that it would need to become our focus if we were to create a viable business from processing of biomass residues.”
Photo: James in the field with a BiGchar unit. Courtesy of James Joyce.
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3R Environmental Technologies, LTD: Pyrolysis Technology in Hungary
Swedish environmental engineer Edward Someus says he has been charring things his whole career. Ever since graduating from the University of Lund in 1978, he has been engaged in scientific research and development on carbonization processing and carbon application to soils. In 2009, after years of research, development and testing, he received a European Union (EU) Authority permit to offer his formulated agrocarbon for open field application on low input and organic farms in Europe.
Someus began developing his patented 3R Agrocarbon technology after moving into the historic Lang Machine Works in Hungary in 1989. Continuing a 140 year old tradition of manufacturing that began with steam engines and boilers, Someus developed the rotary kiln design that produces his agrocarbon product today.
Photo: The 3R Agrocarbon Pyrolysis Unit, courtesy of Edward Someus
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Biochar Results in Cameroon
***This article was written by Chris Goodall and originally published 10/1/2009 at Carbon Commentary. It is used here with permission from the author.
Many field studies in the tropics carried out by academic researchers have shown that biochar improves soil productivity. Biochar Fund’s research did more. It showed that poor farmers typically making less than $300 a year from their crops were able to improve their own yields using simple techniques both for making the char and adding it to the soil. Average production of maize from this area of Cameroon is about 1.7 tonnes per hectare compared to about 7 to 9 tonnes in the EU or US. If the initial results are replicated elsewhere, the impact of biochar could see yields increase by 40% above what would otherwise be obtained.
Photo: Farmers introduce biochar into the soil, courtesy of Laurens Rademakers and Etchi Daniel-Jones
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20 Years of Biochar in Costa Rica
By Gabriella Soto and Stephen Joseph
On a recent trip to Costa Rica to commission a new biochar kiln, IBI board member Stephen Joseph visited a biochar compost facility along with Gabi Soto of the Center for Tropical Agriculture Research and Teaching (CATIE) and other colleagues. This is their report.
Two decades ago, a volunteer from Japan named Shogo Sazaki brought a powerful combination of technologies to Costa Rican farmers: bokashi and biochar. 
Bokashi is a composting system that uses an inoculum of microorganisms known to improve soil health called EM (Effective Microorganisms). Biomass and minerals are reacted with the microbes to make bokashi. Adding biochar to the bokashi mix provides habitat and support for the microorganisms. It’s a winning combination, producing a superior fertilizer for organic farming.
Today, Henry Guerrero of Coopebrisas is in charge of an active program developing new mixtures and improving the process. Henry is the president of an Organic Farmers Association (APODAR) with 26 members who supply the main supermarket chains with organic vegetables. All the farmers have been using bokashi for their organic production for the last 15 years. Productivity using these organic methods is comparable to the productivity of conventional farms, and the technology is spreading to other Central America countries. Click here for the remainder of the story.
Photos: The biochar-bokashi factory in Costa Rica. A worker shows visitors a handful of fermenting Mountain Microorganisms.