Finger Lakes Biochar

Ben Goldacre, a UK physician, writer and bad science debunker, has helped found an excellent initiative called the AllTrials Campaign. The aim of the campaign is to correct many of the funding inefficiencies as well as much of the mis-(or dis-)information related to drug trial data around the globe. I think the world of biochar could use something similar. The basic ideas behind the AllTrials Campaign that could benefit the biochar world include:

1. Pre-Trial Registration – one of the shady elements of drug trials is that apparently the methods or measurements get shifted around during the trial to better highlight the positive aspects and/or conceal the less attractive outcomes. Pre-registration of the trial and methods precludes this type of shenanigans.
2. Demonstration project funding necessitates trial registration – any funding for trials provided by government, NGOs, commercial enterprises or academia, etc. would require registration of the trial and reporting of the results.
3. Negative findings more likely to be published. Biochar can help in many different scenarios but not all. Publishing ALL findings, including those that don’t have great results, will help understand which biochars work best in given situations.
4. Reduced Conflict of interest. Biochar production companies may have a conflict of interest in terms of not disclosing less than positive results.
5. Facilitation of follow up.  As researchers must list their contact details, others are able to follow up more easily to ask for further information.

Providing a basic template for information to be collected for trials such as biochar production parameters (i.e. technology, highest heat, hang time) plus pre and post treatment of biochar, application methods, amounts, depth, etc. would be very beneficial to facilitate apples to apples comparisons as well as replication of best practices.

So biochar industry, what say you?  Shall we join the transparency revolution?

Not all uses of biochar are as righteous as others…

No not that ‘F’ word. I’m talking about Fracking. Recently yet another person I really respect in the biochar world has been talking about optimizing biochar to mitigate the harm created by fracking. This is one of those uses of biochar that makes the idealist in me cringe, but the pragmatist in me understand that fracking is happening at an ever increasing rate and the environment surrounding fracking wells is suffering. Badly.

Articles such as this one, which talks about using biochar to treat the enormous amounts of flowback water contaminated during fracking show there is a lot of ‘promise’, if that is the right word, in using biochar to filter out these unnamed toxins. What they fail to address though is what to do with that biochar once it has adsorbed the toxins. It’s not exactly a desirable commodity that could be sold. Perhaps the chemical filled char could be cleaned similar to how activated charcoal is, but that is both costly and complicated and most assuredly would negate any potential carbon negative aspects of using biochar. Perhaps it could be injected down old oil wells or old mines where it is unlikely to come into contact with food growing land or ground water. But in all likelihood it is likely to be managed as hazardous material, which just means one more headache to be solved in the fracking formula. This just kicks the can down the road a bit longer.

While the market for biochar is still at the neophyte stage and production has, for now, outpaced demand, I suspect that more and more biochar will find its way to uses such as this one. We shall, or I suppose I should say we ‘shale’ see what the future brings.

Here’s why biochar just might be the most important par.t of a Survivor’s Toolkit

Attention all Preppers: what single item is the most valuable and versatile in a survival kit? Allow me to make the case for an item that can be made by just about anyone, anywhere: biochar (or charcoal). I am far from what you’d call a Prepper but I recently attended one of NY State’s Preparedness Training classes which got me thinking of the various ways that biochar could be of value to individuals after an emergency. Here is my top 10 list of reasons why biochar ought to be on every Preppers ‘Must Have’ list:

1. Water Filtration – while not as high tech as some of the gadgets out there, biochar can do a pretty good job of getting toxins out of water. (If you’ve got kids and want to show them how it works, put some food coloring in a glass of water and then add a chuck of charcoal to it. By the next day the water should be clear.)
2. First Aid – Charcoal has long been used as a means of riding the body of toxins when ingested but can also help on things like bee stings and poison ivy when used in a salve.
3. Sanitation – let’s face it, toilets when you are roughing it can be kinda gross. Put your biochar to work and you can not only clean it up but you are making a nice fertilizer while doing so. You could even use if for kitty litter!
4. Extended Food Storage – have some fruits and veggies that you’d like to last a bit longer? Bury them in biochar to keep them from spoiling.
5. Fire Starter – (this is where the real difference between biochar and charcoal comes in) – this will hopefully not come as a shock to anyone, but charcoal catches fire pretty easily so you can always use it to get your fire on.
6. Cooking Fuel – not only can you start a fire with charcoal, you could use it for the fuel to cook with if you can’t find any other dry stuff to burn.
7. Deodorizer – Survival situations sometimes involve some stink, like if the sewage systems overflow like they did during Sandy and Irene. Use some biochar to help get rid of the smell and some of the humidity too.
8. Cosmetics – biochar can be made in to soap, exfolient, tooth paste, heck I have even used it as a mouth waste to get rid of mouth bacteria.  And for those of you that want to  glam it up, there is always the eye liner usage.
9. Emergency Writing tool – Once the ink runs out of your fancy pen, grab a hunk of char to jot down your inner most thoughts, or at least use it for emergency communications as I did in my fancy sign above.  (Warning it is messy and will not stand up to rain.)
10. Perhaps best of all it’s FREE and you can make it yourself. What’s not to like about that! If you do it with the right gear (as I talked about here) you can even generate enough electricity to charge your cell phone, a fan, or a radio while you are making more biochar!

Fall is a gorgeous time of year in the Finger Lakes. One of the prettiest things to see, besides the stunning fall foliage, is the site of so many pumpkin patches dotting the landscape. Generally one of the top five producers of pumpkins in the US, New York harvests roughly 50,000 tons of mostly ornamental pumpkins from 7,000 acres which nets farmers a chilling $25M. On a micro scale that translates to: ~7 t/acre at $500/t or $3,500/t per acre.  Not a bad revenue per acre for an annual crop! On a macro scale, Americans grow 1.5 BILLION pounds of pumpkins per year.

Rarely have I given much thought to the afterlife of pumpkins but now that I’ve become such a waste hunter, I always seem to be pondering what heaven looks like for various types of biomass. For pumpkins it seems that come All Souls Day, the fate for most of those lovingly carved globes is a rather unglamorous trip to the local landfill.   Yep, that’s right. Unlike their tasty cousins grown in Illinois which are destined for pumpkin pies, the ornamentals get chucked in the dump where they turn into something far scarier…methane! If you bury pumpkins and starve them of oxygen, their gaseous ghosts will continue to haunt us all long past their prime.

Although there are ways to delay the trek to the dump what I wanted to know is this: could all that pumpkin waste be used as a feedstock for biochar? Given that the moisture content of pumpkin guts (ok if you want to get technical, the shell, pulp or fibrous strands) is really high (probably ~90%), that part of the pumpkin is, unfortunately, not really a likely target for biochar unless you dehydrate it, which is normally a fairly energy intensive process. But hey, maybe California could collect and ‘squash’ all those discarded pumpkins to recycle all that water for irrigation! With 1.5 Billion pounds * 90% water we are talking a LOT of water!!

Not one to give up on any biomass as a biochar prospect, I came across some articles that claim that the stems or seeds of pumpkins have been turned into activated carbon which is useful as an absorbent for toxins. This of course leads me to think that biochar made from certain pumpkin parts might not be a bad idea. But really who is going to go out separating all those stems from all those pumpkins? Perhaps this is a job for the headless horseman but not for me!

As I was trying to think up a ‘Boo-char’ experiment for this year, I settled on this: why not fill up a pumpkin that has had its innards outed (so I can toast the seeds and maybe, just maybe, char a few) with biochar and see what happens over the winter to the char-filled pumpkin. Maybe it will act as a desiccant and dry it out. Maybe it will prevent it from molding. Or maybe it will turn it into black cauldron!  We shall see..

Much as I like attending biochar related conferences to keep up-to-date on what is going on in the industry, I also like attending meetings with a broader sustainability orientation. Not too surprisingly few of the broader context conferences have biochar on the agenda. Such was the case for the NYS Conference on the Environment held last week in Binghamton, until, that is, I contacted the organizers and (rather brazenly) asked at the 11^th hour if they might have any speaker cancellations and need someone to fill in. Serendipitously they did so off I went to preach the gospel of biochar to an all new audience.

I arrived just in time to hear them mention the word biochar in the first General Session. Minutes later a brave woman in the audience raised her hand to ask “What is bio-char?” in that tone one often hears when one is trying out a whole new word and can’t quite figure out where to put the accent. I smiled, waiting to hear the response. The Climate Change panel organizer, a Climate Change Analyst from the NY DEC, gave an answer that made me really happy I pushed to get on the agenda. He said something to the effect that biochar seemed to be a very promising technology but that it hasn’t yet realized the potential that some have claimed it has, and that he was really looking forward to learning more about it. Then he said he sure hoped the presenter was in the audience and could shed more light on the subject.

So “What is biochar?” I have really come to love that question. There are so many possible ways to answer it. Not one of which should be a canned, never to be changed, 30 second elevator speech. Biochar cannot be so easily squashed into such a tiny immobile box. I think it is really important to figure out who is asking the question, what will most resonate with them and then provide an answer that will inspire them to want to know more about biochar. Are they environmentalists looking for some technology to give them hope that it might be possible to somehow mitigate the looming climate chaos? Are they farmers that care about the bottom line but want to be sustainable? Are they climate skeptics that will be turned off the minute you mention carbon sequestration? Are they investors looking to make a quick buck on the next big trend? Often it is some combination.  Often you may not know. Fortunately for me the conference context gave me a pretty big hint as to the type of folks likely to be asking that question!

There are many, many different ways to talk about biochar. The framework I use is outlined in the picture above. The rest of my presentation at the NYS Conference on the Environment can be found here.