Biochar in Delaware’s Future?
With that new whiz-kid wunderkind heading here to helm DNREC, the Beast Who Slumbers has become intrigued at possible ways to turn the First State into Green Acres.
Today, he’s fixated on biochar, a ‘highly-porous charcoal made from organic waste’. When not listening to REM, research scientists at the University of Georgia in Athens are cooking up batches of the stuff:
Biben’s specialty is “Biochar,” a highly porous charcoal made from organic waste. The raw material can be any forest, agricultural or animal waste. Some examples are woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells, even chicken manure.
Biben feeds the waste — called “biomass” — into an octagonally shaped metal barrel where it is cooked under intense heat, sometimes above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the organic matter is cooked through a thermochemical process called “pyrolysis”.
In a few hours, organic trash is transformed into charcoal-like pellets farmers can turn into fertilizer. Gasses given off during the process can be harnesed to fuel vehicles or power electric generators.
To prove that there is nothing new under the sol, South American natives have used charred animal waste and wood to produce what the Portuguese call ‘terra preta’ -or black earth-for centuries.
Delaware’s scientific and economic development communities would do well to explore both the potential uses and commercial opportunities biochar offers. They should do it quickly, lest they suffer from “pyrolysis through ynolysis”.
Which would be ‘the end of the world as we know it.’
Tags: The Environment
It sounds interesting. I hope some enterprising Delawareans are forming businesses now.
The point is that biochar is a way to sequester the organic material’s carbon into the ground, instead of letting the carbon be released by naturally rotting or burning. The captured fuel gases and fertilization properties are nice but secondary.
Some chicken house manure is already recycled, it gets baked in massive furnaces and turned into fertilizer. One such plant is a few miles from my house. Smells like chicken poop, and the people who work there are some of the most miserable SOB’s on the planet.
I have nothing to add, just wanted to say.
We don’t need to worry about recycling carbon obtained from stuff less than 500 years old. We need to worry about recycling carbon from stuff we mine, drill and pump which happens to be millions of years old.
Talk about spinning your wheels.
By the way, where is the energy coming from that is to heat all this stuff to 1000 degrees? The sun? The wind? Political spin?
I thought the same thing as Joe – where does energy used for the pyrrolysis come from? After reading a couple of the studies (very long read, kind of dry) and the wikipedia article directed towards the lay-public, it seems that the consensus is that there is only a 15% energy cost for the “fast” process in relation to the amount that it produces. The gasses that are produced during the process are sufficient to power the plant as well.
Ecologically speaking, if (when) we humans mess with mother nature, things come back into balance after some time, and it just ain’t the same. Most humans don’t even notice, because most don’t have any relationship with nature. There is no solution to our energy problems that isn’t going to have some negative ecological change. There are many different levels of “green energy”
Yeah, massive furnaces operating at 1000 degrees never produces CO2.
Yeah, massive furnaces operating at 1000 degrees never produces CO2.
Where do you get your science from, the Bible?
pyrolysis