Nate: Silvicultural treatments for timber harvest, fuel reduction, and forest restoration
produce a lot of woody biomass.
Typically this biomass is burned on-site to reduce fire risk and open space for regeneration,
but it can also be used as a feedstock for biofuel production.
A lot of the technologies that are used to produced biofuel from biomass
produce biochar as a byproduct or a co-product.
If the biochar is put in the soil as a soil amendment,
it improves the carbon balance of the biofuel through carbon sequestration,
and it can also improve the soil properties for plant growth.
It's been very difficult for us to spread biochar on forested sites efficiently,
and the technology we're looking at today
is really a great step forward in our ability to to use biochar as a soil amendment
on forested sites, in difficult terrain, on forest roads, and other challenging environments.
I'm really looking forward to working with the National Forest Systems
and other foresters to apply biochar to forested sites
both to look at the operations of doing this in an industrial context,
but also monitoring and measuring the response that we get from biochar application.
Debbie: One of the reasons that we're interested in using biochar on an operational scale
is because we can amend log landings and skid trails by applying biochar.
It increases water-holding capacity, and it also decreases compaction
so that the area that had been in detrimental soil condition becomes over time
much more amenable to plant growth.
If we can put one percent organic matter back in the soil,
we can hold 27,000 gallons of water per acre in a six inch surface soil.
And so that means that as climate changes, we can hold more water in the soil
and plants will grow longer into the growing season and reduce the risk of fire.
Karl: We looked at how we can actually pelletize this material.
It's pretty easy to pelletize if you can add some resins to it
and a bunch of other stuff that are expensive.
But one of the things that we were also looking at is the
mobile aspect of this whole operations, and so we wanted to be able to utilize
the resources in the forest to be able to make these pellets.
But they're also made out of the leaf litter that's left over in the slash pile,
and we wanted to utilize the really low-value stuff that nobody wants at all.
Most of it was the needles, leaf litter, and the small stems is what we used,
and so we hope that the resins and extractives that are in the needles
act as binder and hold that thing together.
And that's how we made a contiguous pellet out of it.
Keith: Our center was tasked to develop a means of spreading
the biochar out on forests skid trails.
What we chose in the end was to use a highways-type salt / sand spreader
and modified it so it could be adapted to a logging forwarder.