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Don’t Throw Out the Biochar Baby With the Bathwater
Posted Apr 23, 2009 by Gloria Flora
When penning his stinging rebuke of biochar and all who support it, George Monbiot not only threw out the baby with the bath water but blew up the bathroom just to ensure no one ever considered bathing again. Admittedly he got in a few good blows but the rest just blows hot air.
Biochar is simply the charcoal that remains after burning any kind of biomass in a closed oven with limited or no oxygen (pyrolysis). The gases and oils that are emitted are either captured for energy production later or co-fired in the process, maximizing the output of heat. The heat can create steam to drive a turbine, or a Stirling engine, which converts heat into motion to generate electricity.
Biochar is an effective soil amendment because of its resistance to breaking down, its significant porosity, and its affinity for water and nutrients. Holding moisture and nutrients in the root zone typically increases plant growth.
With little in the of way of emissions because of closed-loop burning, biochar captures 50 percent of the carbon in feedstocks, and when put in soil holds carbon there for hundreds, even thousands of years. Since it also attracts and holds gases, biochar’s been proven to reduce greenhouse gases from seeping out of the soil by 50 percent to 80 percent. Science, George, not magic.
Biochar does do most everything its proponents claim. But not everywhere and not every time. Biochar production and use is a work in progress; rather than a ‘simple solution’ as Monbiot mocks, it’s actually quite complex. Not all biochar has the same potential, not all ovens have the same functionality. Researchers across the globe are probing every cation exchange and benzene ring in biochar’s chemistry, every updraft in gasification ovens and characterizing biochar/soil interaction six ways from Sunday.
The jury’s still out on what makes the best biochar and what soils can be improved with its use.
Wood accounts for 11 percent of global energy use. Monbiot’s prophecy that biochar cheerleaders expect to replace all other energy with woody biomass is ludicrous and impossible. Biochar production just makes wood energy use more efficient and captures the maximum benefits from it in a carbon-negative, zero waste process.
Mimicking Mother Nature
Now I will hand it to George that a rush to convert land to biomass plantations for the sake of producing biochar soundly stinks. However, biochar can be created out of any biomass, preferably biomass we now think of as waste… rice hulls, nut shells, leftovers from sugar production or methane digesters, slash piles in forests, manure, urban and construction wood waste (28 million tons/year in the U.S. alone). Livestock in the U.S. poops out 35 million dry tons per year, above and beyond what is used for composting and fertilizing croplands. (By the way, you can pyrolysize municipal solid waste but because of unknown constituents, it’s best to stick to creating heat and power and not put that biochar in the soil.)
The imperative remains: ensuring biomass, whatever the source, is used sustainably.
In Western North America, 100 years of fire suppression has severely upset ecosystem balance. Far more trees and undergrowth fill the forests than is natural for most habitat types. As a result, competition for water and nutrients has stressed trees. Add climate change and you have drought, epidemic insect infestations, and millions of acres of dead trees. Nature, always aiming for dynamic balance, will course-correct by catastrophic wildfire.
No one should suggest fine, live trees be harvested to convert into biochar. Nor as a public land manager for decades can I advocate for new roads to access additional timber harvests for biomass. But in the wildland-urban interface (the edges of forests where a lot of people have built homes) there’s a desperate need to reduce the amount of biomass to lessen the risk of wildfire, property loss, and death. Let’s focus there for trial runs on biochar.
We have all the biomass we need right now that we either ignore, let rot, or burn. Problem biomass, like manure in confined animal feeding operations, is just one more area where the production and use of biochar could help contain nitrogen, reduce odors, and put waste to practical, energetic use.
Whether you cook dinner on an open fire in your hut, produce electricity from waste wood, or yearn to produce more food on existing crop land to feed the burgeoning population, there are scientists and engineers around the world trying to figure out if you can do it smarter, cheaper and greener with biochar production.
The collision of Monbiot's derisive rhetoric with biochar logic apparently caused his explosion and subsequent off-gassing. Critics should certainly challenge new ideas but please hold the explosives and allow the rest of us to work for sustainable solutions.
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This article originally appeared at Grist.org.
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12 comments
Fail Fast
From: Mihai, Jun 9, 09 05:10 PM
I was first exposed to the "fail fast" strategy in a startup environment, where resources were limited and possibilities were many. Essentially, for each candidate technology, you're looking for fundamental problems at the outset in order to focus efforts on those that actually have a chance. This is what I advocate here - a rapid assessment of this technique by experienced organic farmers.
I will confess that I'm not as familiar with the char picture as I am with other energy/ecology issues but the idea is initially attractive, especially due to its low-tech nature. I am, however, concerned every time I see a process that relies on a “waste” stream. When properly practiced, (sustainable, organic) agriculture generates no waste since all (or almost all) of the inedible plant matter is needed for the compost operation. The only reason industrial agriculture can survive with its large leak of organic matter is because of the cheap petrochemical inputs. From this vantage point, adding char to current agricultural practices appears to add a small improvement to a catastrophic system whose days are numbered, char or no char. A parallel arguemnt can be made in the case of forestry. Without rampant deforestation there would be no "waste" to char.
It could very well be that on a small sustainable farm, a small stream of organic matter could be converted to charcoal and used as a soil amendment to darken the soil or increase cation exchange capacity. Let’s take this question to some of the organic luminaries (e.g. Coleman, Solomon, Jeavons) and see how much of their compost piles they would give up to thermolysis. I expect that when put into practice on an already-productive and sustainable farm, the char idea would sink or swim in just a few years.
George Monbiot and Biochar
From: Stan Moore, May 24, 09 06:07 PM
I read George Monbiot's original essay weeks ago and happened to read Gloria Flora's rebuke today. As a result, I revisited Monbiot's article and subsequent replies by James Hansen, James Lovelock and others. I find Gloria Flora's diatribe to be even more problematic than Monbiot's.
First of all, George Monbiot's basic premise is exactly correct: biochar is not a panacea or miracle cure for anything. At best, it offers a relatively small scale (compared to global issues) benefit, as recognized by James Lovelock, who recommended biochar as a local solution for farms scattered around the countryside that need to deal with organic waste. I doubt that George Monbiot would disagree with that at all. He certainly did not throw out the baby with the bathwater, which seems to be a catch phrase from the biochar proponents.
Recent history with biofuels in general provides a very powerful context for George Monbiot's concerns. We have seen land converted from conservation projects, such as CRP lands very valuable for wildlife conservation, converted to crop production for biofuels. We have seen agricultural lands converted from food production to fuel production. As a result, we have seen basic human foodstocks diminish and prices rise for the most disavantaged, poorest humans in countries around the world. We have seen plantations created in huge swaths of the tropics with ecological harm and even increased threat to species such as organgutans, forest raptors, and other wildlife. These are real problems caused by injudicious use of what appeared at first glance to be promising solutions to mankind's predicament.
Moreover, I see no concern about ecology of wild nature. Harvesting downed trees to reduce fuel loads may seem like a good idea from a wildfire perspective, but there are powerful ecological benefits to decay and to fire. Forest soils are built from decay and wild animals, including keystone species that are often unnoticed require decayed fallen or standing timber to survive and thrive. Perhaps this escaped Ms. Flora's attention when she was a Forest Service superintendent.
The very idea of soil amendments as a large-scale solution to anything seems exagerrated to say the least. Are the countless tons of amendments going to be distributed to the lands by oxcart? By charcoal-powered wagons? How are they going to be mixed into the earth? Progressive agriculture, such as that studied by Wes Jackson at the Land Institute in Kansas calls for no-till agriculture, which mimics natural processes. How do you mix soil amendments with no till agriculture. And are soil amendments better than fertile soil itself, which is what happens when organic materials are left to decay naturally rather than being burned first?
No, at best biochar is a minor solution to a major problem. It is probably best utilized at local scales in small deployments, and not by industrial scale processes. But even that is subject to further research.
No, George Monbiot did us a service by raising a red flag. We have already suffered as a result of environmental "solutions" that seemed great, even miraculous at first glance, but which proved harmful with further scrutiny. Benefits must be weighed against costs and over time. This includes energy tradeoffs across the full cycle of actions involved in usage of a given technology.
In her rant, Gloria Flora obfuscates from these important issues and receives raves from the biochar industry. Isn't that interesting!
Stan Moore
Petaluma, CA
is biochar better than ethanol?
From: Shodo Spring, May 8, 09 05:22 PM
The defense of biochar reminded me of my own defense of sustainable ethanol. With the same caveats - use the waste! and so forth. Below find my discussion of ethanol.
Sustainable Ethanol: not an oxymoron?
A rough appraisal of the promises in Alcohol Can Be a Gas! Fueling an ethanol revolution for the 21st century, by David Blume.
Today I opened another email, urgently asking me to contact Congress and oppose all biofuels of any kind. It was fervent, impassioned, and certain. As they all are, as I once was. Ethanol means corn, genetic engineering, industrial agriculture, and world hunger. Right?
First, about the image of ethanol: David Blume, who proposes small-scale sustainable ethanol as part of our long-term future, says: "A complete and total wall has been erected against any positive stories about ethanol, built brick by brick in a months-long relentless campaign by the American Petroleum Institute."
Did you get that? The focus on obviously-stupid corn-based ethanol has been fostered by big oil, and if when we think ethanol we immediately think "corn – causes starvation" it is because of big oil's advertising efforts. When we discuss other biofuels, we focus on scarcity of agricultural land and not getting distracted from the need for energy descent. Yet these myths (not enough food, not enough land) were debunked in 1986 by Frances Moore Lappe; somehow we just weren't listening.
I had been puzzled when my friend and Permaculture teacher Peter Bane spoke favorably about Alcohol Can Be a Gas! I promised myself to investigate at the nearest opportunity, and did so as a project for an environmental physics class in fall 2008.
I spent many hours with the book and on the Internet, checking facts, finding data, trying to "do the numbers." I didn't come close to completely figuring it out – but I did enough to conclude that Blume is right. Ethanol can be grown sustainably and, on the land we have, we can grow enough ethanol to power a reasonable society – not the insane consumer society we have now, but a more reasonable way of life.
Revisiting my work 6 months later, I revised a few things and offer these conclusions:
1. Ethanol can be produced sustainably; in fact it can help rehabilitate depleted soils. It's most efficiently produced on a local scale. Done right, it could even help reduce world hunger.
2. Cars and trucks can work well with ethanol, and the conversion is fairly easy.
3. We could make a lot of ethanol now, using waste from the Industrial Growth Society, and it would make the energy descent less painful.
4. The sustainable culture in our future would do well to include some ethanol, sustainably produced, to be used for emergency vehicles, buses, trains, community vehicles (shared pickup trucks?), and possibly even in industries such as manufacturing bicycles, recycling metal for tools, maybe keeping phone and Internet systems alive.
5. We need more people involved in exploring this; we need to think for ourselves.
Here is a brief summary. Rather than footnoting, I'll cite Blume's work as I go along, and list other references at the end.
1. Ethanol can be produced sustainably; in fact it can help rehabilitate depleted soils.
Cellulosic ethanol is made from a wide variety of plants – perennial grasses, trees, and shrubs – which can be grown in polycultures in ways that enrich the soil. The byproduct of ethanol production includes protein, fat, some cellulose, yeast, vitamins, and minerals. It is a high quality cattle feed which actually is healthier for cattle than grain and grass. These byproducts can be directly spread on fields as a high-intensity fertilizer, or fed to livestock and the manure returned to the fields. Or they can be put into the compost, or used to grow mushrooms. The most efficient setup is a small plant (producing under 500,000 gallons per year), with pipelines sending byproducts to nearby fields and pastures. (See chapter 11.) We already know how to do this.
About world hunger: first we need to remember that world hunger is caused not by food shortage but by distribution problems – that is, food is made for profit, and giant corporations have everywhere destroyed subsistence farming and replaced it with products for the world market – causing starvation. The ethanol revolution that Blume proposes includes the desperately needed relocalization, so it is at least consistent with the needed shift in food practices. (Chapter 11 again, plus Lappe's book and website listed below.)
2. Cars and trucks can work well with ethanol, and the conversion is fairly easy.
This is strictly from Blume's work; I didn't evaluate it. Chapters 14-23 and Appendix B are about how and why to convert your car to flex-fuel, including how to fix problems and what to add so it starts in cold weather and so forth. He says the conversion costs about $300, if it's necessary. He also says – a high-compression engine works best, with pure alcohol the engine will last almost forever, and obviously a hybrid is a good idea. Brazil has been running flex-fuel vehicles for decades.
3. We could make a lot of ethanol now, using waste from the Industrial Growth Society, and it would make the energy descent less painful.
When I did the project for my physics class, my focus was on numbers. How much can we make, sustainably? But some of the sources I counted would disappear in a post-industrial world. I am including this section because at this time in 2009, governments are going a little crazy trying to figure how we will run things. Conservation is barely addressed, let alone energy descent. Nuclear and coal both have unacceptable consequences – and both will run out soon enough anyway. Building ethanol plants – many small ones – could provide a relatively steady source of energy through the transition. Some "feedstocks" will disappear as we wind down.
First, let me mention potential sources for ethanol feedstocks which I was completely unable to number – but they're currently big. Waste food from restaurants, hospitals, cafeterias, and the like. Wasted paper from paper mills, wasted wood from wood plants. Yard wastes. The dumpster at your local grocery store – an increasingly popular food source among the poor. Massive amounts of food thrown away before it ever reaches the stores, because of imperfections. Remember that many things that cannot be used as food are perfectly safe to turn into fuel. Later we won't have these surpluses, because we will compost or recycle absolutely everything, but right now we have them.
Second are sources which will continue to be available, but I could not find data for calculations. Kudzu. Euonymus. Reed canary grass. Purple loosestrife. Poison ivy, poison oak. Milfoil and other aggressive water plants. Every area has its own problem plants. Harvest them! Then plant some of these – but how many acres? Switchgrass in polyculture: 1500-5000 gal/acre/year; Tipuana tipu in polyculture with a variety of smaller plants, some edible, over 7000; palm tree sap (just the sap!) 2140 gal/acre/year. There are more, but I'm skipping plants grown in monocultures. For a lot more options, see chapter 8.
Third are the three sources I focused on for numbers, selected specifically to restore damaged ecosystems while causing no harm. Present U.S. use of gasoline is 11 million barrels per day or 170 billion gallons per year. Ethanol contains about 30% less energy than alcohol, so we'd need 240 billion gallons per year – to keep being stupid. (2006 numbers; adjust for changes in population and lifestyle.)
Restoring wetlands while treating wastewater. Since Europeans arrived in North America, we've lost over half our wetlands – about 115 million acres. We can't replace them all. Suppose we replaced just 1% of these with constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment – with a cattail/willow or cattail/bamboo polyculture yielding up to 10,000 gal/acre/year – we get 11 billion gallons per year of ethanol, plus oxygen, some wildlife habitat, and absorbing nitrogen and waste. Some of the energy needs to be used for the harvesting process; I don't have numbers for that.
Reclaiming desert by mesquite plantings:
Of the U.S. 2.3 billion acres, 587 million are pasture or range-land, and 40% of those are at risk of desertification. (Unknown: how much already lost to desert.) Imagine half of this land is suitable for mesquite; plant mesquite on those 120 million acres, harvesting mesquite pods for ethanol feedstock, for over 40 billion gallons/year. The mesquite would provide valuable byproducts and would support plantings of pimelon (wild watermelon), prickly pear, and other plants for food, medicine, additional energy, and ecosystem stabilization. First verify that mesquite actually heals desert rather than increasing desertification – which is the majority opinion.
Heal dead zones in the ocean through algae:
Both microalgae and macroalgae (such as kelp) grow rapidly and are good feedstocks for ethanol; a 1970's project at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found a yield of 5000 gallons/acre/year on microalgae. Giant algae farms are an option. However, I spoke with an inventor who thought he could stop global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide: growing algae on vast areas of ocean, harvesting it for methane, and sequestering excess carbon at the bottom of the ocean. My calculations are based on the more modest idea of using his design to harvest algae only on the ocean’s dead zones near the U.S., yielding 32 billion gallons/year. Dead zones result from excess carbon dioxide, so this would be a recovery process. Obviously, this scheme should not be taken seriously until safety tests have been run – the ocean is not expendable. I don't think it will ever happen.
So my total was 83 billion gallons – reduced for some reasons, increased for others – out of 240 billion. That's at least a third, barring fatal flaws. (Energy cost of building processing plants.)
4. The sustainable culture in our future would do well to include some ethanol, sustainably produced, to be used for emergency vehicles, buses, trains, community vehicles (shared pickup trucks?), and possibly even in industries such as manufacturing bicycles and recycling metal for tools and such.
There's not too much to say about this. Since producing ethanol gives you a higher quality fertilizer or animal food plus the energy, it seems like a good idea to have some. If we go completely back to the Stone Age, we have 6 billion people and can only support 1 billion; this is a serious problem. Everything is going to be bootstrapped – making solar panels with solar panels, for instance, processing the metal for wind towers with solar, wind, or what? Having sustainable ethanol gives us another option.
Final comments:
Blume also has a list of ways the government could help the move to sustainable ethanol – and the end of Big Oil – mostly funded by ending oil depletion allowances. (Book 6) He has instructions for how to build your ethanol plant, what to grow, how to convert your vehicle, and lots of tables for people who actually want to do that. (For hands-on support or training, you have to go to the website.)
I'm thinking about my bicycle, which I'm riding regularly and getting stronger after decades of inaction. Some day (maybe when I'm 90, maybe sooner) it will need to be replaced. As will my shovels, hammers, knives, tools of all kinds. Nails and screws. Metal could help us protect our forests – which could be in great danger. Energy is going to be scarce. Let's learn ethanol and use it. Let's start now.
Resources:
David Blume, Alcohol Can Be A Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century (Santa Cruz: International Institute for Ecological Agriculture, 2007).
Frances Moore Lappe et al, World Hunger – 12 myths (first edition 1986) and http://www.smallplanet.org/
David Blume's comments about feeding the world - http://www.permaculture.com/drupal/node/141
Alternative Energy Blog: “City Trash plus Farm Leftovers May Yield Clean Energy.”
http://blog.alternate-energy.net/entries/entry_77.php#body
“What should biofuel agriculture look like?” an extensive list of criteria, much more detailed than mine. http://timberbuysell.com/community/DisplayNews.asp?id=1779
Daily energy news from around the world: http://energybulletin.net/
US Department of Energy: Transportation Energy Book:
http://cta.ornl.gov/data/index.shtml
US Department of Energy: biofuels data: http://cta.ornl.gov/bedb/biofuels.shtml
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, 1997, http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/sustdev/desert.htm
Major uses of Land in the United States, 2002, http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB14/
History of Wetlands in the Coterminous United States,
http://water.usgs.gov/nwsum/WSP2425/history.html
This is the website of Mark Capron, inventor of the “Plankton Ocean Digestor” which produces methane fuel on the ocean while sequestering carbon. http://www.podenergy.org/
This website is dedicated to explaining simply the concept of “energy returned on energy invested.” It’s funny too. http://www.eroei.com/
USGS Land Cover Institute http://landcover.usgs.gov/
Waste and Recycling Statistics, by ZeroWasteAmerica.org
http://www.zerowasteamerica.org/Statistics.htm
USDA Agricultural Research Service: “Global Change.” http://www.ars.usda.gov /research/programs/programs.htm?npnumber=204&docid=855#cwwcfrrs
George Monbiot: Heat: How to stop the Planet from Burning.
When I did this project I didn't know about Transition Towns. Now I do. The most thorough introduction (apart from going to a training and then starting Transition in your own town) is in Rob Hopkins' book, The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience (2008: UK, green books). But the website is also good and can help you get connected. www.transitiontowns.org
Biochar not a black and white issue
From: Ian M Rudd, May 3, 09 04:39 AM
The characteristics of biochar for enhancing soil quality may be great. Biofuels produced from genuine organic waste may also help reduce CO2 emissions and our reliance on fossil fuels to power nearly everything. Nevertheless we need to be very very wary of the real danger that the money-making potential of these products will give rise to schemes (as is already the case) that compete for land and product used for food production or that result in more environmental destruction.
Once money becomes the overriding driver to produce bio fuels the pressures on governments to relax rules to the detriment of food production and the environment will mount. Make no mistake most governments will bend in the face of these pressures and sustainability will go out the window.
To site just one example - the value added to the not inconsiderable "waste" produced in forestry operations that still, believe it or not, log native forests to produce timber or wood chip will provide a greater reward for this unsustainable practice and less incentive to governments (certainly in Australia where this battle is currently being fought) to ignore the powerful vested interest inducements to allow the status qou to continue.
biochar
From: james mccutchan, May 1, 09 07:02 AM
goodness Gloria, you writing style is a most delightful blend of science, sarcasm and literate good humor. today was my first exposure to your work but certainly won't be the last.
Post Carbon site readers: I
From: Ronal W. Larson, Apr 27, 09 08:56 AM
Post Carbon site readers: I found this rebuttal by Post-Carbon-Fellow Gloria Flora to be one of the best I have seen. Three added points I would make.
1. Visit www.biochar-international.org to get a pretty understated summary of what is going on world-wide in the Biochar world. It is very hard to keep up with the very rapid progress now taking place in this very complicated, but ancient, technology. Additional rebuttals to Monbiot are there.
2. An average increase in soil productivity and an average decrease in the need for fertilizer seems to be about two. This technology has both forestry and agriculture components.
3. Monbiot seems to have relied (his last reference at the site Ms Flora has given) almost entirely on a report that is as poorly scientific as any I have ever read (despite a lot of references). Both Monbiot and this group are adamant against biofuels - often with cause. Biochar is not a biofuel, albeit with some similarities.
Glorious cumuppance for Mr Perfect-Drawers
From: Geoff Moxham, Apr 25, 09 05:14 PM
Thanks so much Gloria,
It is such a relief to see my thoughts and those of our Project 540 small kilns biochar group so well put.
Blew up the bathroom indeed.
And his cred.
Sucked in, George, to a scam from somewhere (time will tell), purveyed as a "declaration" from a biofuel watch organisation that was so punch drunk it missed the probably 5 bottom lines for biochar and hired some tabloid writers to slag it off. It was the Murph'ys law version of the meme.
From my side I was appalled at the shallow reseach for such awfulising acrimony. It was scuttlebutt.It appeared to be written by an ignorant hired gun, totally disconnected from the essence of the research.
That was 6 months ago.
Slowly the smolking scum has slid to the "top"...
Monbiot and some environment groups who should have done their homework and known better, jumped on the same wagon of ego-stroking-journo-kudos-envy, and blew it. Up.
Great advertising. Thanks.
But Gut wrenching for all the folks trying to do it with their hands dirty.
Well done again Gloria, many thanks from people doing it.
Geoff Moxham
Project 540 coordinator
PS if you happened not to see that declaration here's my one-sentence "summary"
"It is an obviously contrived, arrogantly awfulizing, intentionally
inflammatory, willfully ignorant, derisive and demeaning, incorrectly
concluded anti-thesis, that draws on innuendo, repeated error and
drawing self-serving conclusions from earlier falsified points of
logic, while it draws on incorrect or selectively reported data, which
is used to skew really conclusively proven findings into a mishmash of
petty whinges at any hope for a despotic and self-aggrandising species
to pull itself out of it's own mudhole."