Could Biochar Carbon Removal Credit Revenue Increase Funding for Loss & Damage?

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“Loss & Damage” is a relatively new term within the climate community.  It refers not just to the impacts being experienced ever increasingly as a result of too many heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, but also to the activities which can and should be undertaken to address these impacts, whether they are sudden or slow, after they occur. Importantly, it also seeks to address how those activities are funded. It is focused on insuring and assisting those suffering the most from climate change that contributed the least to emitting excessive carbon into the atmosphere. This pool of funds is completely separate from funding aimed at helping countries to either reduce emissions or proactively adapt to expected changes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the amount of funds pledged by high emitting countries to date is woefully inadequate to meet the escalating costs of rescuing communities that have been hit by extreme events exacerbated by increased atmospheric GHGs. A recent example is huge flooding due to excessive rains in 2022 in Pakistan which caused more than $30B in damages and affected tens of millions of people. The US contributed less than $100M to recovery efforts.

Roughly 3 million hectares of crop land were impacted. Loss and Damage estimates for agriculture included 3.1M bales of cotton, 1.8Mt of rice and 10.5Mt of sugar cane. Not only were these crops lost leaving farmers with no revenue and increased food insecurity, but the damaged crops most likely led to significant GHGs as they rotted in wet fields.

Now imagine if there was a way to finance the collection and carbonization of rotting residues (I acknowledge that drying during wet seasons is a significant challenge). Given the growing number of biochar-based carbon removal methodologies and growing demand for removal credits, it may now be possible to fund some sort of biochar focused disaster recovery effort using portable carbonization equipment, some of which may be able to provide needed electricity and/or heat. This could provide numerous jobs for displaced people and the biochar could be used to replenish lost soil carbon or filter water or remediate toxins or any number of other uses depending on what the most pressing needs are post-disaster.

Large multi-national corporations that are dependent on the crops could purchase these credits which will help farmers to recover faster and hopefully incentivize them to stay in farming. Or countries could purchase removal credits from the impacted countries as a mechanism of meeting their NDC targets.

Perhaps an organization such as the UN Central Emergency Response Fund could act as a facilitator, broker or verification agency when it comes to understanding the potential biomass impacted and available for carbonization. And perhaps organizations such as Rotary or Samaritan’s Purse could train locals on how to make and use biochar in the most pragmatic way based on the specific impacts from the disaster.

Biochar production from disaster debris is already happening but at very small scale in Puerto Rico and the Philippines and likely elsewhere as well. Given the increasing number and scale of climate disasters, I’d say there is no better time than now to develop this idea and test the waters for funding!

To ‘solve climate’ requires a shift in perspective: from profiteering to parenting

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Recently I visited a biochar demonstration site at Spruce Haven Farms (SHF) in Union Springs, NY. The project is funded by NYSERDA and is a collaboration between the folks at SHF, Johannes Lehmann (pictured 2nd from left) and team from Cornell University, Biomass Controls (CEO Jeff Hallowell 2nd from right), Cuff Farm Services, and others. They are carbonizing dairy manure digestate and quantifying the climate impact of reducing methane emissions from digestate storage and spreading on fields, emissions from transporting and spreading significantly reduced amounts of material, and reduced phosphorus fertilizer requirements. In addition to the carbon sequestered in the biochar they are also optimizing excess heat recovery to reduce fossil fuels used to heat the digester during cold months to reduce the farms scope 2 emissions. Hopefully they will have the bandwidth and funding to test the use of biochar produced on-farm in the digester as a means of improving the quality and quality of renewable natural gas produced and fed into a nearby pipeline. A techno-economic assessment is also in the works to better understand how on-farm pyrolysis could be scaled up across New York State.  Conversations with the buyer of their milk products about purchasing removal credits are also underway. It is an ambitious, comprehensive project. We need a thousand more like it.  

As with nearly all biochar demonstration projects that I am aware of, to declare that things have always gone smoothly would be misleading, to say the least. But this team, which includes some of the leading thinkers in biochar and sustainability at Cornell University, has persevered and continues to educate the public and policy makers about the benefits and challenges of biochar production.

During the Q&A session I asked Doug Young (pictured on far left above), owner of SHF, this question: “knowing what you know now about all of the challenges in moving this project forward, would you do it all over again”. I instantly regretted asking the question in such a public forum. But his answer was unexpected, heartfelt and provides a much more pragmatic perspective for justifying challenging climate action. His analogy was that of raising children; if we all knew how challenging and costly it was, would we still do it? Of course, we would (or at least most of us would I’d venture to say)! This got me pondering possible parallels to parenting when it comes to taking on a biochar (or any other CDR) project.  Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

Benefits:

  • You become a teacher (and maybe a bit of a preacher too) – parents are forever showing kids how to do a myriad of new-to-them things. Climate activists get to be on the cutting edge of ‘show & tell’ when it comes to demonstrating new lower emission alternatives and processes.
  • You become part of a new community/family – much like finding new communities through children’s sports, music or other activities, hosting a biochar facility opens new doors to a host of new individuals that are eager to collaborate with you and share lessons learned.
  • Makes you more empathetic – understanding and acknowledging concerns of others is a vital parenting skill; once you have lived through the challenges of getting a pyrolysis plant permitted and into production, empathy likely rises leading to (hopefully) improved collaboration with others just coming into the industry. (I have seen this over and over within the biochar industry!)
  • Teaches you patience – keeping your cool with kids is not always easy and not all parents learn to be more patient, but many do out of sheer necessity. Getting a biochar facility up and running has many unforeseen obstacles which can test your patience beyond what many project developers are used to, but for those that succeed that want to replicate the model over and over (a common refrain that I hear almost weekly), getting subsequent plants up and running, will likely be less stressful given the lessons learned and patience developed during the demonstration phase.
  • Pride in seeing you kid (or project) graduate from one stage to the next is its own reward.

Challenges

  • Discipline is necessary – A lot can go wrong when raising kids and burning biomass, so running a tight ship at all times pays off!
  • Not for the faint of wallet – getting into industrial-scale biochar production is not cheap! Finding patient capital to get things off the ground can be exhausting…much like keeping food on the table and a roof over your family’s head.
  • It’s hard work and often messy – Birthing a biochar production facility is far more complicated than most people understand at the outset.  As with parenting many activities will be quite new to biochar producers; from permitting to procuring off-take agreements to finding carbon removal buyers.  Even those in the waste management industry that have experience with moving biomass around will need to delve into a number of new realms.
  • Less me-time – most new families (and businesses) require a lot of time to launch, but I would venture to say that biochar businesses require even more dedication not least because so few people, including lenders, permitters, and buyers have yet to even hear the word ‘biochar’. Learning how to effectively educate different stakeholders in your biochar business ecosystem can take up crazy amounts of time!

I’ve met many folks that are coming into the biochar industry for the pot of potential gold they think will be waiting for them, but which is often elusive to say the least. Many have little understanding of the challenges ahead and get disillusioned and sometimes financially destitute mid-way through setting up the first plant. While shifting from a short-term profit perspective to one closer to parenting may dampen desire for some to jump in, it seems a more accurate positioning of the challenges and actual pay-offs that can be achieved in the current biochar and larger CDR industry.

Time Value of Carbon Removal: Purpose-grown Crops vs ‘Waste’ Organics

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Using agricultural land for anything but growing food or fiber for human consumption (including indirectly for livestock feed) is taboo to many. The ethics and economics of using land to grow crops for biofuels (e.g. sugars, starches, oilseed), which makes up about 8% of ag land (1.4B acres) has been hotly debated for decades. Nowadays discussions and action is starting to coalesce around growing crops that can draw down vast amounts of of CO2 in a single growing season which can be used to sequester carbon via biochar, BECCS or more recently, as buried biomass. I suspect the food vs fuel debaters will soon begin to debase the food vs future furor.

My own opinion on the value and financial viability of purpose-grown feedstock for CDR has evolved over the past several years. If you’d asked me 5 years ago about doing this, I would have said the economics won’t work. All the costs of growing feedstock (not to mention the water and nutrients needed) would make the price of the biochar too high for most markets, particularly agriculture. But with the average price of biochar-based removals hovering around $150 per ton of CO2e (so double that – at least – to get the price per dry ton of biochar), carbon revenues puts paid to the financial viability argument.

Land use conversion is still a concern, but fortunately biochar protocols are so far guarding against converting forests into farmland for feedstock (may that continue!). That said ‘waste’ organic material is plentiful and carbonizing it is an increasingly attractive way to rapidly reduce volumes, toxins and eliminate methane emissions from waste organics, particularly wet ones, while converting up to half of the CO2 absorbed during the plant’s lifetime into much more stable carbon. Why focus on purpose-grown feedstocks if this is the case? Given the dire need to rebalance carbon and the dearth of safe, scalable and shovel-ready solutions available RIGHT NOW, I no longer think in terms of ‘either/or’ when it comes to climate action. Much as I believe there are (and we need) dozens of removal solutions, time is not on our side as the ever-worsening climate is clamoring to show us.

Some of the most compelling reasons to consider using purpose-grown crops for carbon sequestration can be found in the readiness and speed it offers. Woody biomass is by far the most common feedstock currently used to produce biochar (and likely BECCS and burials too). Much of this is considered either a hazardous fuel (e.g. vast stretches of standing dead trees) or a waste material (e.g. green waste, sawmill residues, etc.). But a typical forest will only drawdown ~1t of carbon (3.67t of CO2) per acre, per year. For as long as the forest is still standing or the material isn’t burned, it prevents this accumulated carbon from returning to the atmosphere and provides countless other eco-system services as well. But this reservoir of carbon is increasingly at risk. Each year hundreds of millions of acres of forest are decimated by fire, sending the vast majority of decades worth of stored carbon skyward in a blaze of smoke and soot.

By contrast, certain annual crops have significantly higher drawdown capabilities. Some types of hemp can withdraw 6 – 10 tons per acre of CO2 in just 6 months. This week I spoke with Joe James, CEO of Agri-tech, and learned that biomass sorghum can remove double that amount. In some locales you might even be able to have 2 harvests per year. Bamboo is another super accumulator. Adding the biochar produced back to the soils used to grow the biomass for the first few years could reduce water requirements while optimizing soil resiliency and yields. Utilizing the vast amount of degraded lands could not only help drawdown vast amounts of carbon in this decade but done right, this could also help  restore these lands to enable better, safer food production.

No one knows when tipping points will be reached, but the increasing signs of climate chaos are pretty strong indicators that we need to act with speed, focus and efficiency now. We have at our disposal today the means and mechanisms to draw down vast amounts of carbon and convert it into geological storage as well as producing renewable energy, so let’s ‘Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, and Shape the Path’ as the Heath brothers advise in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.

The never-ending lure of biochar rabbit holes:

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How biochar can enhance food security and safety

One of the charms of biochar is also a bit of a curse: its sheer versatility provides endless opportunities for diving down all manner of rabbit holes. After more than a dozen years in the biochar industry, it seems as if biochar has taken over a large part of my brain. I am not sure if it has helped or hindered my divergent thinking, but no matter what I read, see or hear, I end up more often than not, pondering if or how biochar could be utilized. I think this affliction needs a name and I think it should be ‘Biochar on the Brain” or BOTB. I wonder how many other sufferers there are.

Whether it is a blessing or a curse has yet to be determined but one thing is certain, the endless biochar rabbit holes I have been down over the last dozen years have opened my mind to new ways of thinking about biochar and opened doors to new industries in which biochar could play a role.

The most recent random rabbit hole took over my brain while reading ‘Eating to Extinction’ by Dan Saladino (a great read btw!). He describes the many threats to diversity in the plants and animals consumed by humans including a fungus called Fusarium Graminarium which leads to fusarium head blight (FHB) in grains and grasses. No sooner had I read about what it is and the enormous impact it has had on farmers, flora & fauna, than BOTB kicked in: is anyone researching this? The answer: of course they are!

How can biochar help minimize damage from this formidable fungi and its moldy mates? Biochar research points to at least three ways:

  • Once FHB is found in soils, it is nearly impossible to irradicate. It will lurk below the surface waiting for the right conditions (usually warm and wet weather) to be reborn.  However, there are some recommended mitigation measures, one of which is to burn or bury severely stricken crops. Instead of burning crops to ash, farmers should carbonize it and get carbon removal credits for doing so.
  • Using the resulting biochar in combination with microbial inoculants in the impacted soils may help suppress or control the negative impacts of the pathogen in future years (Liu et al.,  2023). This is particularly helpful in acidic or sandy soils as biochar may provide a liming effect and help hold on to nutrients which may improve plant defenses.
  • FHB can lead to mycotoxins which can lead to ill health in livestock (and humans) that consume contaminated crops. Biochar (activated charcoal) has long been used as a binder to immobilize toxins (e.g. mycotoxins, herbicides, etc.) enabling them to pass through a body with minimal negative impacts. [“Legend” has it that the reason the US FDA took activated charcoal off of the approved feed additives list was that a farmer was using it to mask tainted feed.]

Given warmer and wetter weather, fusarium and other pathogens will continue to threaten food security (yields can diminish by up to 75%) as well as food safety. The potential economic, health and geopolitical implications are enormous. If we can showcase how biochar has played a significant role in mitigating FHB for farmers in different geographies growing different crops, then I think we will see a more rapid adoption of biochar than we have seen to date.

So much of the attention focused on biochar lately is about its permanence compared to other carbon removal technologies. I would venture to say that few other CDR solutions can not only help bury carbon, but can contribute to a healthier, less fragile food future.

2023: My Biochar Whirlwind Year

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Biochar interest and activity seems to be increasing at warp speed these days – and none too soon I might add given the climate weirding we witnessed this year! 2023 has been a bit of a farewell tour for me; not from the biochar industry but as the Board Chair of the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), a role that has enabled me to see and do a wide variety of things in this industry over the past 4+ years. Here are some 2023 highlights:

Webinars on biochar are far more common now than they were five years ago when I started doing them for IBI. I’ve enjoyed hosting dozens of these, and this year was no exception. I selected four topics along with some excellent speakers that discussed their work in areas that have the power to transform not just the biochar industry, but others such as wastewater treatment, carbon removal markets, the building trade, and land restoration. These webinar topics were:

  • Forever No More: Biochar and PFAS Mitigation
  • The 1,000 Year Question: Biochar CDR Permanence (and Climate Cooling Services)
  • Concrete Decarbonization: Biochar Leading a Net Zero Pathway
  • Biochar & Mine Reclamation: Cleaning Brownfield & Contaminated Water

All IBI Webinars are recorded and available for free to IBI members, so give the gift of IBI membership for the new year to someone who might benefit from these and so many more! I also helped to host a webinar held by AirMiners called Innovations in New Uses of Biochar and was invited to speak on Sander Reuderink’s CarbleCast about Biochar & Coffee.

Conferences that cover (or should) biochar are also proliferating of late. Some of those that I attended included:

  • Aspen Ideas: Climate – more general climate conference, mostly US focused
  • North American Carbon World – very carbon markets focused,
  • New York State Organics Summit – I was asked to introduce biochar to this community
  • Aim for Climate hosted a global conference in DC focused mostly on sustainable agriculture
  • Bio360 Expo in Nantes, France is one of the best convenings of biochar, bioenergy, biogas companies
  • Irish Bioenergy Association – I was asked to introduce biochar to the IrBEA community then found out that there is already a surprising amount of biochar activity in Ireland!
  • COP28 in Dubai, UAE – I attended as an observer on behalf of IBI and met quite a few folks working in the biochar space, though the biochar topic is still not on the COP Agenda, nor is it included in any NDCs.

Educational opportunities for biochar are also evolving, both in person and on-line learning options. I headed up the development and hosting of IBI’s first Biochar Academy in my hometown of Canandaigua, NY. We welcomed nearly 40 students from 20 countries for two weeks to do a deep dive into all things biochar. Within that 2 weeks, we also hosted a larger gathering of more than 100 attendees for a 2 day Field Day event with the help of NYS Soil Health group. One day was dedicated to in-person presentations about the use of biochar in agriculture and a second day included on-site visits to Spruce Haven Dairy farm using Biomass Control’s BioRefinery to carbonize digestate, a stop at Cornell’s Leland Lab to check out their high-tech research scale pyrolysis unit, another stop at Seneca Farms Biochar to see their flatbed reactor and learn about their success with wood vinegar and finally a visit to Hunt Country Vineyard, a highly sustainable vineyard that has been making & using biochar as well as hosting biochar workshops for years.

The Biochar School, hosted in Torino, Italy, continues to gather an international crowd to discuss mostly non-agricultural uses of biochar. I spoke about the various ways I have used biochar to build my Dwelling on Drawdown home. And I joined as a guest lecturer at Tejas Rajvihar‘s excellent on-line biochar internship program aimed at educating interested students in India about a wide range of topics to enable them to enter the biochar industry. [2024 will bring even more educational opportunities via IBI and Lulea University of Sweden is debuting an on-line Basics of Biochar course for Masters & PhD students.]

Amidst my treks for talks and time-off, I sandwiched in a surprising number of on-site visits to biochar producers and end-users both in the US and abroad. Seeing so many different biochar production scenarios and listening to their challenges and lessons learned has given me some great insight into the variability within this sector. In addition to those mentioned above, here of some of my 2023 biochar visits:

  • Terra Fertilis, Argentan, France. One of the only industrial scale biochar production facilities in France!
  • Biochar made from sawmill cut-offs where excess heat is used to dry lumber at Metzler Forest Products, Reedsville, PA – great demonstration facility!
  • The Clean Burn Company, Calistoga, CA is utilizing 5 Air Burners to reduce fuel loads and clear fire damaged trees. More info here.
  • Visted one of remediation sites being deployed by the Sierra Fund in Nevada City, CA – using biochar to reverse damage from hydraulic gold mining in California
  • Had a great visit with my friend & colleague, John Webster, owner of Go Biochar – Salt Lake City, NV
  • Arti – Prairie City, Iowa – manufacturer of pyrolysis equipment and a fantastic library of biochar made from a wide variety of materials.
  • TigerCat Carbonator 650 at White Feather Farm – Saugerties, NY. More info here.
  • As part of the Swiss Study Tour we visited :
    • Inkoh has a BioMacon pyrolysis kiln and they are using biochar in concrete
  • After the IrBEA conference I visited:
    • Arigna – traditionally a coal company is shifting to biocoal and looking to build a market for biochar in Ireland. They commissioned a large kiln in Q4 2023.
    • Arti Ireland has been road testing the Arti kiln for several years and are focusing on biochar use to replace peat which is being discontinued in Ireland as a growing medium.
    • C-Go (BioenerG) and C-Capsule in Wales, UK where they were doing emission testing for low-tech kilns being piloted in refugee camps in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa.
  • During COP28 I was lucky to meet biochar folks from:
    •  Viqa Investments that had recently started up a CarboForce pyrolysis unit at Camelicious, a dairy farm with 8,500 camels in Dubai, UAE. See my blog here for more details.
    • A Healthier Earth also had a very well-done biochar crop trial display in the Green Zone at COP.

Beyond webinars, conferences, educational programs and visits, I also spoke with countless start-ups, project developers and large global food (and fossil fuel!) companies looking to join the biochar industry. Acting as an advisor to projects looking at using biochar to cap oil wells in Colorado and using it in building materials has also been something that gives me great hope that this industry will continue to thrive in both the short- and long-term future!

It’s been a whirlwind, but I sincerely believe that this is the pace needed to scale in a time period that will make a material difference in rebalancing atmospheric carbon. I look forward to an equally productive 2024!

The scoop on carbonizing camel poop

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Who knew large-scale camel dairy farms are a thing? Not me, until last week that is when I visited Camelicious, an impressive 8,500 head dairy farm in Dubai at the invitation of Viqa Investments (VI). They have just commissioned a small pyrolysis machine to convert a portion of the 10 kg of excrement produced per day per camel.

What do the currently do with the massive amounts of camel doo-doo? The droppings are dropped off at a local dump. One might think that all of this fecal matter might transform the sterile sand into more fertile fields, but the severe lack of water seriously impedes any microbial activity. I visited the dung dump, and it looked like a moonscape with no visible signs of life.

The VI team is experienced at managing a wide variety of waste streams and when asked about alternative management practices for the dromedary doo, they went from ideation to installation in eight short months (in my experience in the biochar world, this is lightning fast). They purchased and shipped a slightly used, containerized unit by CarboForce from Germany to kick off a pilot which will enable them to optimize material handling.

Drying livestock manure prior to thermo-chemical conversion is often a big issue but camels have evolved to minimize the amount of water they excrete. Compared to other domesticated animals their ‘output’ is not only fairly dry, but it is quite hard and round. A day or two in the scorching sun is sufficient for additional drying, but during scale up they plan to have a more mechanical drying solution. Given that camels live in sandy outdoor paddocks and that sand is not good for pyrolysis equipment nor for biochar, a separation step is necessary prior to drying.

Quenching biochar in parched climates can be costly and challenging. VI has figured out a nifty closed loop solution by adding in a mobile water treatment system called ReedBox which uses plants to filter a portion of the dairy’s wastewater which is then used for quenching.

Camel manure has a relatively low carbon content so the carbon content in the biochar is likely ~40%. Still when this operation is scaled up to convert all of the manure (~3.6 tons per camel per year * 8,500 camels = 30,600 tpy) into biochar at 30% yield means that 3,672 tons of stable (dare I say sTURDy) carbon (13.8 kt CO2e) could go a long way towards making this type of farm carbon neutral. Now imagine if this were the de facto manure management practice for the 39 million other camels around the globe!

What are they doing with the biochar? They hope to create different soil amendments to enable more food production in the UAE.

A Visit to White Feather Farm

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White Feather Farm (WFF), located in the Hudsen Valley (Saugerties, NY) is a beautiful and bountiful farm growing more than 80 varieties of fruits & vegetables, many of which are donated to a local food pantry. It is a non-profit farm doing research and providing education on a wide variety of topics, one of which is biochar.

Their next-door neighbor is Rothe Lumber. Together they are solving the lumber yard’s excess organic waste problem and the farm’s dearth of organic matter in their soils. Their solution is using a massive pyrolysis machine called a Carbonator which converts much of the unusable tree residues, including tree root balls which are notoriously challenging to manage, into biochar.

WFF hosted a demonstration during Climate Week to showcase not only the Carbonator, but other smaller kilns which can be used (and I brought along a few including the one pictured below made by High Plains Biochar). They also demonstrated the growing number of ways they are using and testing biochar on their farm.

Yours truly showing how this High Plains Biochar Kiln works. Photo courtesy of Benjamin Von Wong.

Raw, chunky biochar is combined with compost in a GeoBin helping the pile to get hotter as well as to charge the biochar with various nutrients and microbial life. In roughly 2 months the compost is done and top dressed onto their veggie fields. Farm manager Dallas McCann and Bill Hilgendorf who manages most of the biochar side of things, say that results to date have been fantastic as their silty soils have been a challenge in the past.  

Dallas and Bill demonstrated how WFF is putting raw biochar deep into the subsoil in their hoop houses using a broad fork. Normally raw biochar is not recommended as it tends to scavenge nutrients needed by crops but adding it at the end of the growing season should allow the biochar to soak up excess nutrients and fill up its nooks and crannies with ‘wee beasties’ over the winter.

Another research project under way is using raw biochar to filter pond water in hopes of keeping algal growth low. They will be testing the saturated biochar to see if it has harvested excess nutrients from the pond and then testing the pond charged biochar in the next growing season. Should results be promising they will scale up to a more meaningful filtration system.

One last experiment we learned about is the possible use of biochar to control their recently arrived jumping worms, an invasive species of worm that can devour organic matter in soils leaving behind depleted soils that look like coffee grounds. There has been some early research suggesting that abrasive materials such as biochar or diatomaceous earth may create a less than ideal environment for these slithering, slimy invertebrates.

Durability Uber Alles

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For much of the XX century Western Civilization bowed to the god of profit above all else. Externalities were vehemently, sometimes violently ignored. This mode of thinking brought many, though certainly not all, a vastly more comfortable lifestyle. Meanwhile many planetary systems upon which humans and most other flora and fauna depend suffered greatly. Unchecked pollution of water, air and soil exacerbated biodiversity loss triggered by converting vast swaths of forests to farmland around the globe.

As we round out the first quarter of the XXI century, profit still reigns supreme nearly everywhere though carbon is (finally) beginning to nudge its way into the balance sheet of more and more governments and corporations. Sadly, it looks like we may repeat the ill-begotten singularity of focus with carbon as was done with the god of profit.

The emerging myopic focus being lauded most loudly is known as ‘permanence’ (aka durability). While preventing carbon from converting back into carbon dioxide for as long as possible is definitely a most admirable trait, it should not be viewed as the only trait of relevance.

Curiously (or not if you follow the money behind it) permanence seems to be all everyone is talking about these days. It has begun to outweigh any and all other considerations and criteria for supporting certain carbon removal strategies. Somewhat arbitrarily it seems to have been determined by many influential carbon removal buyers that 1,000 years is the new holy grail for durability, though others acknowledge that removing carbon from the carbon cycle for a century or even a decade has value and should be valorized.

Consideration as to when these removals will actually happen is barely discussed. Given the intense and earnest messaging around how critical the next decade (or less) is in terms of averting the worst impacts of the climate crisis, one might think near term delivery and scalability would factor in at least as high as durability.

Considering all of the other critical problems humanity is facing such as increasingly depleted and toxic soils, our ability to feed a burgeoning population while adapting to the many new climate vagaries, competition for ever scarcer resources, and the need to shift quickly and cost effectively away from our dependance on fossil fuel energy, one might think that co-benefits of carbon removals such as those provided by reforestation, afforestation and biochar would factor at least as high as durability when considering what CDR to invest in.

Considering the mounting mountains of unloved organic materials from sewage sludge to food waste to excessive forest residues looking for safer, end-of-life options, one might think win-win (or even win-win-win) solutions that convert problematic organics into carbon removal opportunities would factor into decisions about what carbon removal strategies should be selected and funded.

At such a critical juncture in human history, all removal solutions should be on the table. That should go without saying. But in a time and resource constrained world, prioritization is paramount. What is doable now and how do we scale it cost-effectively should be at the forefront of investment decision making. Climate change mitigation, while exceedingly important, is not the only crisis needing our immediate attention and funding. Likewise, carbon permanence is important, but it is far too simplistic (and dangerous) to focus so much attention on this aspect to the detriment of all others. (What is that expression about all eggs in one basket?) Complex problems require more than a single, overarching focal point or rallying cry. We can and we must learn from the lessons learned from focusing solely on profits. If we don’t the suffering experienced over the last century will look like child’s play compared to what we will experience in the coming decades.

Decarbonizing Coffee

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I have been fascinated by the challenge of decarbonizing coffee for many years. Initially this took the form of diving deep into the research literature on biochar and coffee combined with scanning the globe to see who was doing what with biochar in the real world of coffee growing, milling, roasting and ‘merching’. This culminated in a 2015 white paper which was later updated in 2018. A few years later I started working with some very forward-thinking folks at CarCafe (a subsidiary of VolCafe which is owned by ED&F Mann a global food company) to figure out low-cost, low-tech ways to reduce GHG emissions at small-holder farmers – mostly focused on improved residue management and reduced fertilizer use which is where the vast majority of emissions come from on farms (and a recent study showed that roughly 44% of the entire supply chain emissions are at the grower/milling stages).  Over the past few years, we’ve taught 100+ farmers plus a hotshot group of ‘tecnicos’ (agronomists -mostly- that help farmers to grow more efficiently and sustainably) how to make and use biochar on the farms.  

Most recently I was invited by a friend who formerly headed up a protect at Coop Coffees, an organic coffee trade organization, to attend a gathering in Jaen, Peru with various coffee cooperatives that had gone through a multi-year GHG benchmarking process for 250 smallholder farmers in several LatAm countries. Ostensibly I was invited to introduce them to biochar and how it could help reduce emissions. As it turns out a few of them are well on their way on their own biochar journey and ‘francamente’ (this seems to be an oft used word in Peru which made me smile when I started counting how many times it was used!) it was inspiring to learn more about what they are doing. How could I not share their biochar stories at least a small part of them?

Sol y Café is an impressive coop with more than 1000 farmer partner/owners. While coffee seems to be their mainstay, selling ~200 truckloads per year, they have expanded into cacao, aquaculture on a few farms, and at their central hub they now have an elementary school and small-scale livestock farming (i.e., rabbits, guinea pigs and apparently a somewhat mythical creature which is half goat, half sheep (as with donkeys they cannot reproduce). They make their own EM1 formulations and other fertilizers and soil amendments, they have an impressive coffee tree nursery and a good-sized vegetable garden which grows food for the school and worker’s cafeteria. They also have the tiniest alfalfa field I have ever seen which grows food for the bunnies and guineas.

I gave a short demo on how to produce biochar from a variety of unused biomass found at the central coop and discussed various ways they could use it. Turns out, however, they are already experimenting with a LOT of biochar made from coffee parchment by another coop in the region, Norandino. This small scale, continuous feed machine was recently fabricated in Peru in collaboration with Swiss engineers and has been used to carbonize both coffee and cacao residues. Our Sol y Café hosts showed us the various ways they have been experimenting with the parchment biochar, a very light-weight, consistently small sized type of biochar. To be honest I have never seen so much biochar used in such a small space and I was (francamente) curious as to why they used so much of it as the soils, at first glance, seemed quite dark already. Looks can be deceiving apparently as they told us their veggie plots were rice paddy fields not so long ago and are heavily cracked hard pan soils laden with salt and excess calcium. They were on a quest to remediate these issues organically and were hoping biochar could help. Given they had received a lot of biochar at no cost (for now!), they decided to go big! For each half row, they used 5 ‘quintales’ (coffee sacks) of pure biochar then blended it with homegrown compost. It doesn’t appear that it was tilled into the ground, but they seem fairly protected from erosion and there is a sunscreen overhead. I wish they had done controlled trials which may happen in the future but after several weeks the plants seem very productive, and the Sol team seems quite happy with the growth as well as reduced need for watering.

Prior to receiving the parchment biochar, they apparently learned how to make small amounts of biochar from another coop in Honduras, Comsa, that has an unusual way of making biochar which I have not seen and am still waiting to learn more about it. Comsa also taught the folks at Sol about EM1 and their on-site international school was the model for the recently built one at Sol. This type of collaboration versus competition was so refreshing to see. It is definately the way to spread ideas quickly so you can iterate on customizing what works in different cultures and share improvements.

At the end of my short biochar production demo, I asked the 2 – 3 dozen folks if there was interest in on-farm biochar production and I do believe there is interest, not only as a way to upcycle residues but also to reduce fertilizer purchases. As prices have skyrocketed over the past year, farmers are looking for all manner of ways to reduce their dependency on fertilizers, organic or otherwise. The great side benefit is that the biochar they make and use to reduce fertilizer can help them to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. And soon, very soon, through the Artasanal C-sink methodology being finalized by Carbon Standards International, smallholder farmers that make their own biochar from on-farm residues and use it on their farms, will be able to tap into the ever-expanding carbon removal marketplace.

[NOTE: my Spanish is rusty so I am still verifying a few things I thought I understood from various conversions so I may have to update a few parts of this post!]

Dwelling on Drawdown Part IV – About Grout (with biochar, of course!)

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I absolutely love it when I come across contractors willing to consider more sustainable ways of doing things. Too often in my Dwelling on Drawdown (D0D) home-building journey the opposite has been my experience. But recently when I had my shower floor installed by Charlie B from Skip’s Custom Flooring, not only was Charlie willing to consider using biochar in the project, he was downright enthusiastic! I was a bit shocked to find out he’d been reading up on biochar for years and was hoping to build a kiln to char through lots of tree debris on his acreage. (Biochar is still mostly unknown in my part of the world.) We discussed possible ways of using biochar on this small project and tested it as a tint for the grout. Charlie also had other ideas about how biochar could be used in buildings but also knew that it is likely used in certain types of pottery (see La Chamba pottery from Colombia, or Raku from Japan). That was news to me – yet another tantilizing biochar rabbit hole for exploration.

The grout sample dried nicely so we mixed up a batch to use on the 48sf shower floor. It took a lot more biochar than I thought we’d need and we never got it to turn black though that wasn’t really my intent on this project. Roughly one pound was added to 2 gallons of grout . I’ve used Aries Clean Technology’s powdered biochar for other D0D projects and was a little surprised that it didn’t turn a darker shade of grey as it definately tinted my walls a very dark black as I’ve written about before. The only difference Charlie observed was that the mix was a bit ‘greasier’ than a more commercially available tinted grout, meaning it was slightly more difficult to wipe off the tiles when grouting was finished.

Black iron oxide or magnetite is what is commonly used as a black tint for grout and a whole host of other materials. Both natural and synthetic types are used in everything from construction materials, paints, coatings, and plastics, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and even ceramics, and toners (Pfaff 2021). Imagine if we could start displacing some of that with different types of biochar?! We just need to understand the tinting abilities of different types of biochar across they gray to black spectrum. On our recent EPA project focused on using biochar in drywall we observed quite a variation in coloring based on feedstock types, particle size and obviously amount used.

How else could biochar be used in bathrooms? The plan for the shower walls is tadalakt plaster with a just a touch of biochar to tint it a lighter shade of gray. I’ve tested it out and it works great with a wide variation of grays possible (see picture). Next up though is my sink vanity top which is being custom made using epoxy and biochar. The epoxy artist has already done a test run and is now very interested in using biochar as his black tint is about $60 per pint! More on that soon.

[I know my BURN co-author would remind me that it can be used in composting toilets. Though I I didn’t go that route for my Dwelling on Drawdown, I do have an ‘emergency’ toilet in the basement with biochar in a bucket!]