Biochar- What Is It?

Biochar- charcoal with a fancy title

Yep that it all biochar is basically charcoal made from all natural material no petroleum chemicals needed.
What makes it so interesting,amazing and newfangled....

Well it’s certainly interesting and amazing it is not however newfangled in any sense of word.  There has been biochar for as long as there were organic materials to burn (couple billions years or so).  But what makes it interesting is when you combine the properties of biochar with soil some interesting things begin to happen.


Before we dive into that… a little history lesson.


Long ago in the deep dangerous jungles of the Amazon….

No really…Stay with me

For hundreds to thousands of years there was a flourishing urban civilization found all throughout the Amazon rainforest.  Early European explorers circa 15th to 16th century did report meeting people and seeing large urban centers as they hacked their way across the continent.  But by the time the colonial period came about these people and their cities had disappeared.


What Happened…..?

At the time they just thought those early explorers were either lying or had been made crazy the jungle heat and diseases they suffered from.  It wasn’t until the 1990’s using satellite imagery that we were able to spot networks of earthworks, canals and other obvious signs of large coordinated groups of people in area for a long time thought to be largely uninhibited.
One of the reasons this area was thought to be mostly empty was the fact that the soil was actually very poor and it was difficult to produce the large quantities of food needed to sustain lots of people.  So how do you get large widely distributed signs of human civilization in an area that to your knowledge couldn’t support that many people?

Biochar

Yep biochar the humble charcoal a.k.a burned stuff

They found upon investigation of these site areas of soil that were strikingly different from the surrounding soil.  The image you can see on the right is what I am talking about. The biochared soil known as Terra Preta locally is much darker in color and much more nutrient rich.  This is because the biochar does two things that improve soil quality.

Biochar is a stable long lasting source of carbon which is used by plants to build internal structures that allow them to grow.  It also acts a nutrient sink and any nutrients that are added to the soil via compost or manure is captured and held for use by plants to grow.  Then when the plants die and decompose the nutrients are recaptured for use the next plant.
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What this adds up to is that the Native peoples of the Amazon rainforest basically supercharged their soils and it allowed them to grow food in enough abundance to power a large and vibrant civilization.

Pretty good for burnt pieces of wood…   

What is really amazing about this is how long lasting it is.  The terra preta soils are hundreds to thousands of years old and they are still functioning exactly how they did when they were created.  The ramifications of this to modern agriculture and climate change mitigation are astounding when you think about it.

 Depending on what method you use you can get up to a 50% conversion rate of feedstock to biochar.  If that char is then incorporated in the soil you have essentially locked up the carbon contained in the char for the next couple of thousand years.  What this means is that if this was done on a large enough scale it could mitigate the effects of climate change by removing CO2 from the atmosphere and depositing it in a stable form in the soil.  

Wow…..   

Moral of the story

If you haven’t figured it out by now biochar is amazing material that deserves much more attention than it gets.  It is another tool that we can use to improve food production, reduce pollution, and maybe just maybe save ourselves a whole lot of pain in the future.  

For more information like this check out other article here on the Green Living Library.

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