Latest news with #Biochar
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Out of the ashes: Contraption could turn Helene debris into useful product
May 21—The machine looks and sounds like something out of a toddler's most enthusiastic and fevered imagination. But maybe, just maybe, it holds solutions to several challenges the region faces, from job creation to storm-damaged forest cleanup and restoration of flood-stripped farm fields. Matte yellow and dull black, the shipping-container-sized contraption belches fire into the afternoon air. Waves of heat waft from its open top, and various levers and buttons adorn its sides. The behemoth sits on treads, surrounded by a sea of mud, and it is, improbably for a machine its size, driven around via remote control. A narrow conveyor belt rises from one end, terminating more than 15 feet up in the air. From the end of this conveyor, tiny chips of an ebony substance rain down into a white bucket, tattooing a rhythmic counterpoint to the ever-present rumble of whatever is going on inside the machine. Even the thing's name sounds like something a four-year-old would dream up — The Tigercat 6040 Carbonizer. In many ways, it is a dream. The dream of revived economic opportunity in Western North Carolina. The dream of flood-depleted soil suddenly refreshed with plant-friendly nutrition. The dream of turning Helene debris into something useful rather than have it take up space in Haywood's landfills. That's John Fletcher's dream. Now he's just got to find somebody to help him pay for it. Fletcher, owner of Suncrest LLC and Canton Hardwoods, used to make a living purchasing pulpwood, making chips out of it, and selling the end product to the paper mill. When the mill closed, Fletcher pivoted to the mulch industry. But there's another product Fletcher's had his eye on for a few years — biochar. It's the tiny black chips being spat out from the conveyer at the end of the Tigercat 6040 Carbonizer. And according to Fletcher, it's the answer to a lot of WNC's pressing issues. An unassuming miracle product Biochar is essentially a specialized form of charcoal. It has an array of helpful applications in the agricultural world. For one thing, it can replenish soil that's had its nutrients stripped by flood waters, explained Bill Yarborough, chairman of the board of supervisors for the Haywood County Soil and Water Conservation District. "The value of that is huge," Yarborough said, especially in flood-prone WNC. "There are other uses. When you have toxins in the soil and you need to clean them up, there's nothing better, because it will absorb those materials and hold them tightly. It's also used heavily in water treatment and filtrations." Biochar is a valuable end product. But even better, both Yarborough and Fletcher said, it's a solution to two ongoing problems. When the paper mill closed, it negatively impacted the forestry market for hundreds of miles in every direction. And when Helene rolled in, it toppled trees in roughly the same area. "You've got 800,000 acres of public and private lands in Western North Carolina that have downed timber. It's gonna be the biggest fire we've ever seen if we don't do something with it," Yarborough said. "That's not a solution, that's a problem," Fletcher said, pointing to a nearby ridge, where a convoy of trucks trundled mulched Helene debris to the privately-owned landfill at the site of the former paper mill. Fletcher is a man who cares deeply about both the forests and the people of WNC. And he's spent his career turning trees into jobs (and money). Every time one of those trucks drives by, all he sees is a colossal waste. What he'd like to do with Helene debris is turn it into biochar. After that, he sees biochar coming out of construction sites, logging operations, and more. In his mind, it's a win all around — it would refresh WNC's forestry industry, keep Helene debris from taking up valuable space in landfills, and create a product that can facilitate both agriculture and environmental cleanup operations. Tigercat says its machine can turn 100 tons of woody material into ten to 15 tons of biochar. That ratio is one of the things Fletcher's company is testing, said Daniel Vaught, sales manager at Suncrest. Vaught was squelching through the mud as he tracked circles around the 6040 Carbonizer, pulling a lever here, pressing a button there. He took a moment offer a simplified version of how it all worked. "There is a big motor and a fan that is basically churning the air and keeping the heat on the inside," Vaught said. Once the fire is going, another big machine drops in more woody material ever so often. The material burns down to a precise size before falling through a grate and being bathed in water to halt the burning process at just the right moment. Then the machine spits the resulting biochar into a bucket. Voila. Unfortunately, Fletcher hasn't had much luck getting a contract for debris handling. And he's running out of time. He's currently leasing the Tigercat essentially as a visual proof of the concept to lead public and private partners to the light. Yarborough said he's not sure how much longer Fletcher can continue footing the cost for the multi-million-dollar machine. That's why Yarborough and his state level colleague Barbara Blieweis are going all in on biochar evangelizing. "Biochar is one of the answers. But the startup cost for something like this is immense. To do production and industrial application, you need many like this all across North Carolina so that everyone can benefit," said Bliewis, the president of North Carolina Association for Soil and Water Conservation Districts. "Our vision is to come up with a pilot that works, that shows the entire business supply chain. What we are is rebuilding an economy using mobile technology. But to be an official large-scale pilot, I continue to pursue state and federal funding for that." Meanwhile the Tigercat 6040 Carbonizer sits on borrowed time in Fletcher's hands, not-so-quietly waiting for its chance to turn the byproduct of a natural disaster into black gold. Yarborough said that interested folks should contact their public officials and "say that this idea has value. It can actually benefit us." "It could create jobs, it could create lots of opportunities," he said. "But the main thing is it's just, it makes sense."
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years
For all its plant and animal life aboveground, the Amazon rainforest's soils are surprisingly poor in nutrients necessary for growing food. Thousands of years ago, the region's Indigenous peoples solved this problem by creating 'terra preta' from table scraps and charcoal and tucking it away in the hostile soil. Today, that ancient bit of ingenuity is a powerful climate solution. As biomass like trees and crops grow, they sequester carbon in their leaves and branches. Heat that biomass up without fully consuming it and it turns to nearly pure carbon known as biochar, which farmers soak in compost or fertilizer to 'charge' it with nutrients, then add to their soils. (In 2023 the global biochar market was worth $600 million, and is expected to grow to $3 billion this year.) That simultaneously improves crop yields and better retains water, all while locking carbon away from the atmosphere. Rising demand from farmers and big business is expected to push the global market for biochar from $600 million two years ago to $3 billion this year. The nagging question, though, is exactly how long that carbon stays in the soil. A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that scientists have been underestimating the staying power of biochar, meaning the technology is actually an even more powerful way to store carbon than previously thought. 'I'm talking about over 90 percent very easily surviving multi-thousands of years,' said Hamed Sanei, a professor of organic carbon geochemistry at Denmark's Aarhus University and lead author of the paper published in the journal Biochar. The research suggests that biochar is much more resilient than currently calculated by researchers. 'The current model that we're talking about is saying 30 percent of almost all biochar that's being produced will be gone in 100 years.' Nailing down exactly how long biochar can hold onto carbon is crucial for the carbon-removal credit industry, where companies like Microsoft and Google fund projects to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. These credits reached 8 million metric tons of carbon in 2024, a 78 percent jump from the prior year. So scientists have been running experiments monitoring how microbes degrade biochar over a few years in soil, then extrapolating that over longer time scales. Doing that sort of modeling, the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other research groups have reckoned that after a century, between 63 and 82 percent of the biochar will stay in the ground. The critical clue for Sanei was a naturally occurring material called inertinite, a stable form of organic carbon in Earth's crust, formed when wildfires char forests, and the burned vegetation fossilizes. Biochar is just the result of humans replicating that process: If the biomass is exposed to sufficiently high temperatures — over 1,000 degrees F is ideal — the carbon should transform into a material that soil microbes struggle to digest, which is how the charred plants in inertinite were able to last long enough to fossilize. Much as humans eat food off dishes instead of eating the dishes themselves, bacteria and fungi choose to eat organic matter like leaves over biochar. 'It's kind of like if you have a nice piece of cake and they bring it to us on a plate, we're going to eat the cake,' Sanei said. 'If we are very hungry, we eat it much faster. But still, we're not going to eat the plate.' Read Next This simple farming technique can capture carbon for thousands of years Matt Simon Much as inertinite survived over vast stretches of geologic time, biochar should be able to last for millennia, Sanei and his coauthors calculate. The fact that scientists are finding intact biochar in the Amazon's ancient terra preta suggests that it's happening. 'Biochar is already a compelling solution,' said Thomas A. Trabold, a sustainability scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology and CEO of Cinterest, a company developing biochar technology. 'This data just suggests that the benefits are even greater than we already assumed.' Not all biochar is created equal, though. For one, woody biomass turns to better biochar because it has a higher carbon content than leafy material or grass. And the higher the temperatures used in the manufacturing process, the better chance that carbon will stay in the soil. The local climate matters too, as warmer soils lead to more microbial activity that can degrade biochar. Still, by carefully controlling the production of biochar, companies can produce a material that they know contains a given amount of carbon. This becomes a carbon removal credit, which companies buy to show they're investing in removing carbon from the atmosphere (even if they're not doing all they can to reduce their own emissions). Most carbon removal credits have a standard time frame of 100 years, according to Erica Dorr, who leads the climate team at Riverse, a carbon crediting platform in France. But if scientists are now talking about biochar lasting for thousands of years instead of centuries, that makes it more appealing for corporations buying credits, Dorr said. 'It wasn't very interesting to issue a 500-year or 1,000-year biochar removal credit, because the model would tell us that there's not much remaining after that long,' Dorr said. 'Now, the new research is really unlocking this 1,000-year argument.' That would put biochar on par with other carbon removal techniques like direct air capture, in which giant machines suck carbon out of the air and pump it underground. But direct air capture remains expensive, and the technology is nowhere near widespread enough to put a meaningful dent in carbon emissions. Biochar, on the other hand, is a proven technique that's been used for thousands of years, capable of improving agriculture and, according to this new research, locking carbon away for millennia. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This ancient bit of ingenuity keeps carbon trapped for thousands of years on Mar 3, 2025.
