[erich]

Hi All,
This just in from biopact to the Biochar Yahoo group;


RESEARCHERS SAY THEY will optimise a system that produces heat and power and supplements fertilisers using a new intermediate pyrolyser fed by ash-rich biomass.

A research team led by Andreas Hornung of Aston University, UK, says that they will demonstrate that low-oil, high-ash biomass sourced from agriculture and forestry, including twigs and grass, can be used to generate electricity and produce a stable char suitable for carbon sequestration on farmland.

The fundamental part of the project is proving the intermediate pyrolyser where vapours pass directly to a gasifier for gasification. “We have tested the pyrolysis in a reactor and it works and we have had a gasifier running for seven years. The team will spend two years optimising the coupled system.”

The aim is to prove the entire integrated approach, and couple biomass driven processes to generate combined heat and power (CHP) from non-edible sources of biomass and also produce a char that can supplement fertiliser and sequester carbon more efficiently than CCS says Hornung.


News Detail - TCE Today



Apparently, the recently created European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI) , also headed by professor Hornung, is working on the same technology.

Check it out here:

Pioneering international research institute to launch at Aston University

Under the 'note to editors': "Collaboration with the Odenwald district in Germany to develop and establish the first highly integrated biomass based power plant with a negative CO2 impact through carbon sequestration."


Erich

[Michaelangelica]

TP in Australia
[quote]

Methods that significantly enhance carbon sequestration in soil include no-till farming, residue mulching, cover cropping, and crop rotation, all of which are more widely used in organic farming than in conventional farming. Conversion to pastureland, particularly with good management of grazing, can sequester even more carbon in the soil.

Terra preta, an anthropogenic, high-carbon soil, is also being investigated as a sequestration mechanism. By pyrolysing biomass, about half of its carbon can be reduced to charcoal, which can persist in the soil for centuries, and makes a useful soil amendment, especially in tropical soils (biochar or agrichar).

Controlled burns on far north Australian savannas can result in an overall carbon sink. One working example is the West Arnhem Fire Management Agreement, started to bring "strategic fire management across 28,000 km² of Western Arnhem Land". Deliberately starting controlled burns early in the dry season results in a mosaic of burnt and unburnt country which reduces the area of burning compared with stronger, late dry season fires.
In the early dry season there are higher moisture levels, cooler temperatures, and lighter wind than later in the dry season; fires tend to go out overnight. Early controlled burns also results in a smaller proportion of the grass and tree biomass being burnt..

MyEBike.biz :: - geosequestration

Interesting but very dense article. Like being hit over the head with an old word processor (typewriter)
Still, lots of good info on CO2 Sequestration.

An article with lots of similarities here
Tree-Nation :: Carbon dioxide sink - Tree-Blog

GEOECOLOGY ENERGY ORGANISATION [GEO] is a registered Public Charitable Trust formed by people who have been closely associated with the work of various Institutions involved in ENVIRONMENTAL, CLIMATE CHANGE, NATURAL AND HUMAN RESOURCES - AGRICULTURE, TERRA PRETA, WATER, ENERGY, SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS, DISASTER MITIGATION AND RESPONSE, and INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY.

www.e-geo.org - _uacct = "UA-1735770-3"; urchinTracker();

A US political Forum that needs some help (erich?)
Terra Preta - PoliticalGroove Forums

Tree hugger forums
View topic - Terra Preta- Amazonian dark soil : TreeHugger Forums

Blog about glomalin

As a glycoprotein, glomalin stores carbon in both its protein and carbohydrate (glucose or sugar) subunits. It permeates organic matter, binding it to silt, sand, and clay particles. Not only does glomalin contain 30 to 40 percent carbon, but it also forms clumps of soil granules called aggregates. These add structure to soil, and keep other stored soil carbon from escaping.

Glomalin is causing a complete reexamination of what makes up soil organic matter. It is increasingly being included in studies of carbon storage and soil quality.
. . .
What interests me about all of this is the potential of the kind of biological matrix to reclaim nutrients that would otherwise wash right off fields and out of barn stalls straight into our rivers.
Would it be possible to grow soil this way instead of river algae?
If it is then there may be a way to take carbon out of our atmosphere, build soil, clean up agriculture and restore oxygen to our bodies of water by using nothing more than some charred wood and some fungus spores. Seen in this way the terra preta glomalin idea could be seen as a a kind of Roald Dahl magical sponge taking the crap out of our world and converting it into gold. Now that would be alchemy.

Since Terra Preta was popular… I bring you Glomalin Tokyo Babylon

A blog with an idea of using ashipping container as a charcoal maker.

Getting the job done - Biochar on the modern farm

Getting the job done on the modern farm is a challenge that needs to be confronted on a capital sensitive basis. A good analysis of the problems facing us comes from Tom Miles over at the Terra Preta website in links. I have also posted one of his posts today and the reader can get a taste of the current debate by visiting the Terra preta link.

Global Warming: Getting the job done - Biochar on the modern farm

[Michaelangelica]

he DOE needs to expand this funding of CCS to include Biochar systems;

The department's restructured FutureGen program is looking to invest $1.3 billion in multiple projects.
U.S. DOE puts out the call for new CCS projects | Cleantech Group





And this originally from Biopact;

FAO introduces new global soil database: allows analysis of carbon ...
By Tremane Barr
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) introduces a new database on the world's soils which improves knowledge of the current and future land productivity as well as the present carbon storage and carbon sequestration potential of ...

Prism Webcast News - Prism Webcast News




Also, a Great article from Richard;

Whatcom Watch Online - Story Display


Erich

[Michaelangelica]

he DOE needs to expand this funding of CCS to include Biochar systems;

The department's restructured FutureGen program is looking to invest $1.3 billion in multiple projects.
U.S. DOE puts out the call for new CCS projects | Cleantech Group





And this originally from Biopact;

FAO introduces new global soil database: allows analysis of carbon ...
By Tremane Barr
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) introduces a new database on the world's soils which improves knowledge of the current and future land productivity as well as the present carbon storage and carbon sequestration potential of ...

Prism Webcast News - Prism Webcast News




Also, a Great article from Richard;

Whatcom Watch Online - Story Display


Erich

[Michaelangelica]

But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone.
I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh." Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind.
Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work.
If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

"Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this," Woods told me. "Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused." Indeed, Meggers's recent Latin American Antiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling "developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint." Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, "makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation." Doubtless there is something to this—although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats "perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain saws." But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn.

Yahoo! 360° - The Big Sur Bohemian Club - America 1491-Part 4

[Michaelangelica]

Intersting article

Charcoal, agriculture and climate change | Energy Bulletin

Charcoal, agriculture and climate change
By bart
An emerging method for mitigating carbon emissions by burying charcoal needs advocates... It will take work on all fronts to reduce the carbon in our atmosphere, including this rediscovery of Amerindian agriculture — Terra Preta. ...
Energy Bulletin - - Full Newswire | Energy Bulletin

I found this comment especially interesting


Do not put fresh charcoal into the soil!

If you put fresh charcoal into soil the fertility might actually decrease. In addition, we have noticed charcoal has a hydrophobic property that needs to be biodegraded before water borne nutrients can be transmitted into the internal structure of what was once the vascular system of the plant. In the conditioning process, the large inner surface of charcoal causes nutrients to adhere making them temporarily unavailable
until the charcoal is saturated. Once saturated the charcoal becomes attractive to plant roots and soil microbes. Because of the inorganic nature of this substrate the charcoal will serve as an enrichment culture for nitrogen fixing and mycorrhizial partners.

I haven't found the char I use difficult to wet or especially hydroscopic. In fact quite the opposite.
I do grind it fairly finely. I do notice the big lumps remain dry although left in a sack in the rain.
What have others found?

[erich]

Great News,

I got a call this morning that National Geo's article on soils put TP front and center. It's not on their web site and I have not seen it yet, but headed to my dentist office for a good read.
Combined English and other language circulation is nearly nine million monthly with more than fifty million readers monthly!

I think it was Ron Larson , who first hinted this was coming after speaking to one of the editors.

Next stop , hopefully, The New York Times ( come on Michael Pollan ! )

Cheers,
Erich

[Michaelangelica]

Another (very) interesting article from Erich.
Quite a long read but the last 50% is very TP

Our Good Earth
The future rests on the soil beneath our feet.
By Charles C. Mann
Photograph by Jim Richardson

Our Good Earth - National Geographic Magazine

There is supposed to be a soil quiz there, but I can't find it

[erich]

Our Good Earth - National Geographic Magazine

I love the "MEGO" factor, Lord how I Know that reaction.

I like his characterization concerning the TP pot shards;

so filled with pottery "It was as if the river's first inhabitants had
thrown a huge, rowdy frat party, smashing every plate in sight, then
buried the evidence."

A couple of researchers I was not aware of were quoted, and I'll be sending
them posts about our group.

I sent an email to Michael Pollan ( NYT food columnist) , Pleading for
him to get on this Biochar Bus along with Mann's and Hansen's articles.

Plus we heard this about Hansen in a reply from Ron Larson on the yahoo group the other day;

"3. Ruy: "I am not aware of any group in opposition of biochar."
[RWL: Me either - but hope everyone reading this will let us know when they see something negative/inaccurate. I suggest a negative reaction will become a big topic as soon as Jim Hansen's next article in Science comes out (as we think "biochar" will appear there quite soon)."

Cheers
Erich

[erich]

Business Could Make Billions From Emissions Trades
Monday, 18 August 2008, 4:48 pm
Press Release: New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Dev

Business Could Make Billions From New Emissions Trading-Related Investments

A new report released this morning says New Zealand businesses have an opportunity to make billions from new technology investments stimulated by the proposed emissions trading scheme.

The opportunities range from starting major new industries, exporting biomass (like woodchips) to fuel major new power plants in Europe, to storing carbon in soil


Scoop: Business Could Make Billions From Emissions Trades