Biochar, long championed by soil scientists, has become a darling of the climate mitigation movement as well for its ability to sequester carbon, as the impacts of climate change have grown increasingly apparent and destructive
alifornia has a methane problem. The state’s dairy industry is the largest in the nation, but all those dairy cattle are producing more than milk. Foul-smelling slurry ponds of manure dot the Central Valley, and methane-producing bacteria thrive in these lagoons, expelling the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
“It’s really an ancient technology,” said Rebecca Ryals, an agroecologist at the University of California, Merced.
That’s because biochar is itself a waste management tool, and the U.S. has no shortage of waste. California, for example, has an endless supply of forest biomass from wildfire fuel reduction and agricultural waste from the Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s food is produced. Farmers often burn the orchard cuttings, husks, and other organic waste in the field, releasing those carbon stocks back into the atmosphere.
Cities are largely impervious environments, where development has left most of the land capped with concrete and asphalt. Even in green spaces along roads and highways, or in grass-covered yards, the soils are so compacted that the water often runs off without infiltrating the ground. “You end up with a scenario where the soils are nothing more than green concrete,” Hegberg said.
A worker lays out biochar to dry in the sun before it is packed and distributed at the Eco Fuel Africa factory in Lugazi.As the California Association of Sanitation Agencies learned, not all feedstocks will make for great biochar filters. Finding the right market for all the different kinds of biochars out there is about matching the properties of the biochar to its intended use.
Poultry farmer Josh Frye spreads churned out biochar from chicken waste and wood chips from a gasifyer on his land.The company has piped biochar into a pilot well in Louisiana, and they are hoping to expand to Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Colorado. “The reality is, on a well-by-well basis, we’re not moving the needle too much,” Mark Mersman, a co-founder of OFX, said. “You might be able to get 5 to 10 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent out of every well bore.
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