Beware the Biochar Initiative

ISIS Report 07/09/09

Turning bioenergy crops into buried charcoal to sequester
carbon does not work, and could plunge the earth into an
oxygen crisis towards mass extinction Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

The story goes that charcoal buried in the soil is stable
for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years and
increases crop yields. The proposal to grow crops on
hundreds of millions of hectares to be turned into buried
‘biochar’ is therefore widely seen as a “carbon negative”
initiative that could save the climate and boost food
production.

That story is fast unravelling. Biochar is not what it is
hyped up to be, and implementing the biochar initiative
could be dangerous, basically because saving the climate
turns out to be not just about curbing the rise of CO2 in
the atmosphere that can be achieved by burying carbon in the
soil, it is also about keeping oxygen (O2) levels up.
Keeping O2 levels up is what only green plants on land and
phytoplankton at sea can do, by splitting water to
regenerate O2 while fixing CO2 to feed the rest of the
biosphere [1] (Living with Oxygen, SiS 43).

Climate scientists have only discovered within the past
decade that O2 is depleting faster than the rise in CO2,
both on land and in the sea [2, 3] (O2 Dropping Faster than
CO2 Rising, and Warming Oceans Starved of Oxygen, SiS 44).
Furthermore, the acceleration of deforestation spurred by
the biofuels boom since 2003 appears to coincide with a
substantial steepening of the O2 decline. Turning trees into
charcoal in a hurry could be the surest way to precipitate
an oxygen crisis from which we may never recover.

Burying charcoal to save the climate

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI), according to its
website [4], was formed in July 2006 at a side meeting of
the World Soil Science Congress at Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, in the United States, by people from academic
institutions, commercial ventures, investment banks, non-
government organizations and federal agencies around the
world, dedicated to research, development, demonstration,
deployment, and commercialisation of biochar on a global
scale.

IBI has introduced biochar into the 2008 US Farm Bill, so it
now counts among a handful of “new, high-priority research
and extension areas”. IBI is also working with the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification to promote
biochar in the post-Kyoto climate agreement. And the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has already
included biochar in a section entitled: “Enhanced Action on
Mitigation” to serve as basis for negotiations during pre-
Copenhagen meetings [5].

Biochar is just charcoal, produced by burning organic matter
such as wood, grasses, crop residues and manure, under
conditions of low oxygen (pyrolysis). A number of different
pyrolysis techniques exist depending on temperature, speed
of heating, and oxygen delivery [6, 7], resulting in
different yields of biochar and co-products, “bio-oil” (with
energy content value approx 55 percent that of diesel fuel
by volume) and “syn-gas” (a mixture of hydrogen, carbon
dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons), which can be
used to generate electricity, or as low-grade fuel for
ships, boilers, aluminium smelter and cooking stoves.

IBI has encountered strong criticism as a “new threat to
people, land and ecosystem” in a declaration signed by more
than 155 non-profit organisations worldwide [8]. But patent
applications have been made, and companies formed for
commercial exploitation of biochar production. Intense
lobbying is taking place for biochar to be included in the
Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism for mitigating
climate change [9, 10], so people implementing that
technology would be able to sell certified emission
reduction (CER) credits.

Things have moved forward so fast with so little public
awareness and debate that critics are alarmed, especially
over the proposal from some prominent advocates that 500
million hectares or more of ‘spare land’ could be used to
grow crops for producing biochar [11, 12], mostly to be
found in developing countries; the same as was proposed in
the biofuels initiative several years earlier.

Read the rest of this report here
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/bewareTheBiocharInitiative.php

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This article can be found on the I-SIS website at
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/bewareTheBiocharInitiative.php