This unassuming bit of burnt wood
is supposed to help fight air pollution,
generate energy
and reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And It's called biochar.
Sounds incredible, doesn't it?
Well, some say the hype around this char
is just greenwashing.
What is it about biochar that makes it so controversial?
We came to a biochar plant to get some answers.
This is a brand-new biochar plant.
And it produces much more than that.
And we'll come to that in a second.
Biochar is wood
or any other organic material
that is burned up to 700 or 800 degrees
in the absence of oxygen.
And that is called pyrolysis.
The heat evaporates the substances inside the biomass.
They are emitted as combustible gases and bio-oil,
which can be used to generate energy.
And what we are left with at the end of the process
is pure, stable carbon.
Once the biomass starts burning,
most systems can sustain themselves
without using additional energy.
As part of the planet's carbon cycle,
plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere
and grow as biomass.
But when they die,
they decompose
and most of the CO2 they sucked up
is released back into the atmosphere.
But instead of decomposing or burning,
if we turned them into biochar,
we could lock half of their carbon into the soil
or elsewhere for hundreds of years.
"The people are more and more aware of that.
We need to store more and more carbon."
This is Casper Ziegner, the CEO of NovoCarbo.
They are planning to be fully operational
by the first quarter of 2024.
Until then, they are optimizing their systems.
The experiments with different uses of biochar
kicked off over the last decade.
But actually, from mound kilns to clamp kilns,
we have produced charcoal in many ways
for thousands of years.
There are many ways of making biochar,
but not many of them look like a spaceship.
The key is to keep oxygen out.
If we can't,
the biomass will continue to burn,
turning to ash,
and most of the carbon inside
will go back into the atmosphere,
which is exactly what we want to avoid.
But here the process is much more complex.
Because this plant, while producing biochar,
it makes sure that it uses all the combustible gases
feeds them back into the system,
keeps the temperatures high
and this way captures as much carbon as possible.
Depending on the biomass and the pyrolysis process,
up to 80% of the carbon it contains
can be sequestered.
That is why biochar is now being presented by the industry
as a good way to store carbon dioxide.
But not everyone is cheering.
"Going down that route in the name of carbon sequestration
and carbon negative emissions,
will create a huge new demand for biomass."
Almuth Ernsting
and her team at British NGO Biofuel Watch
have been following the debate
and scientific data on biochar since 2008.
"It would inevitably mean more land conversion
to growing dedicated crops
and/or more logging of forests,
both of which would have really devastating impacts
on nature."
And sadly, we have already seen that happen elsewhere.
Biofuels were once hailed as an ecofriendly source of energy,
produced mainly from corn or sugarcane.
But many experts say biofuels can often do
more harm than good
because of the way we grow them.
Critics worry that we could be making the same mistake
again with biochar.
Deforest an area,
plant fast-growing biomass,
chop it down
and turn it into biochar,
destroying ecosystems
and biodiversity in the process.
But we don't have to.
Because there is a huge amount of biomass
we are currently wasting.
"Stubble burning"
"Stubble burning in Northern India..."
According to a recent study,
in India alone, 120 million tons of rice husks
and other agricultural waste
are burned in open pits every year.
And this contributes significantly to air pollution
around the country,
which kills up to two million people per year.
According to Prof. Priyanka Kaushal biochar can help.
"So if we convert these 120 million tons
that we see into biochar,
we see about roughly 350 million tonnes
of CO2 emission production
if that is converted into [biochar].
which is about roughly about 10 to 13%
of the total GHG emission that India does."
That would be a huge contribution
to mitigating the climate crisis!
India is currently the third highest CO2 emitter in the world.
And the farmers producing the biochar
could use it to increase their yields
or sell it for extra income.
"What we are proposing
is to have a mobile unit, small units."
That can produce biochar in the field itself.
Maybe not in every field,
but maybe every district has a centralized location
where you can produce.
You can bring your regular residues there,
convert it into char.
We could replicate this in many other places in the world.
Estimates of how much biochar can reduce
climate-warming gases without harming ecosystems vary.
But it is a technology that has the potential
to address many environmental challenges at once.
The difference between this huge pyrolysis plant
and the smaller ones
is what you can do with the excess energy,
here they heat up water and sell it to the grid.
And this is a very convenient and eco-friendly way
of heating homes.
Other companies like this one in Australia
use excess energy to heat their greenhouses,
and use the biochar for growing plants.
Some people call it carbon negative energy,
as at the end of the process
we will have carbon locked in biochar.
If it is produced with excess local biomass,
it could make it a great way of producing energy.
But ultimately it depends on how we get the biomass,
and what we do with it.
If it was transported from hundreds of kilometers away,
or if the forests had to be cleared.
Or if it is used to replace coal burning,
then it is no longer eco-friendly.
NovoCarbo may sell hot water to the city,
but its main product goes to farmers!
"We mainly sell to horticulture companies,
mainly to Scandinavia at the moment."
More and more agricultural businesses use biochar
to enhance soil quality and increase yields.
"We see that in poor soils
it seems to work better than in very rich soils
and also if you have sandy soils,
you improve the water holding capacity usually."
This is Claudia Kamann.
She has been researching biochar for the last 15 years.
"After more than a decade of biochar research
we know from meta studies
which compile a lot of knowledge
from different scientific studies
that we have on average increases in yields."
But critics say that these "average" biochar results
hide inconsistencies,
and in some cases actually cause harm.
"Impacts on soil can be negative,
can be neutral,
can in some cases be positive,
and nobody can predict
how it will play out at any one time."
Many scientists say they do not fully understand
why biochar does what it does,
but they can measure the results.
In many cases, these are positive,
but scientists struggle to create conditions
where biochar's effects are 100% predictable.
"The critics are not totally incorrect.
It's not a black fairy powder
that works the same kind of miracle everywhere,
but you can normally extract cases
where it works quite well."
And these cases are widely known.
Biochar works wonders in the nutrient-poor soils
of the tropics.
That is because biochar has an incredible surface area.
This will sound crazy:
but one gram of high-quality biochar
can have more surface area than a basketball court.
This makes biochar an amazing host
for all the fungi, bacteria and microbes
that are essential for plant health.
It can also retain the nutrients,
making them available for the plant.
The same goes for water
because biochar can store up to 5 times its own weight.
That is why biochar can help increase yields,
particularly in sandy soils,
that otherwise easily lose water and nutrients.
And...
it also has other surprising effects.
"Nitrous oxide is a very powerful greenhouse gas
that has on average more than
280 times of warming potential
than CO2 has over 100 years.
And nitrous oxide is mostly formed
from the huge amount of fertilizers that we use."
Bacteria in the soil
can break down nitrate-based ammonium fertilisers into N2,
which is not a greenhouse gas.
But we put so much fertiliser on the land
that the microbes can't process it all,
and it goes into the atmosphere
as the climate-killer nitrous oxide.
Up to 75% of the world's nitrous oxide emissions
come from agricultural activities.
"Several meta studies now exist
to show that on average we have a reduction of about 40%
of these nitrate emissions
if you use biochar in soils together with fertilizers.
But in some of the production studies
we did at Geisenham University
we've seen reductions of up to 80%."
A 40 to 80% reduction in this climate killing gas!
That is really promising!
Back on the Baltic coast,
NovoCarbo is looking for a return
on their considerable investment of 8.5 million euros.
That's why they are also selling another product
that is somewhat controversial.
"Producing the biochar, our core product,
we bring this biochar into applications,
for example into soil, a soil amendment
Once having brought the biochar into the soil,
a carbon credit can be issued
because we have stored the carbon,
the biochar, permanently in the soil
and then it's fixed there.
We produce at this site
roughly 1700 tons of biochar per year
and this means roughly 3200 tons of CO2."
That is equivalent to
around what 400 Germans emit on average in a year.
It's not much, but it's a start.
The system of buying carbon credits
to balance out emissions can be controversial,
and we spent a whole episode digging into that.
Definitely check it out
if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
But carbon credits aside,
biochar looks like a very promising way
of tackling many of the climate-related problems
we face today:
From enriching the soil and increasing yields
to reducing CO2 and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.
It can help us use less fertilizer and water.
We didn't even mention other potential uses of biochar
like in concrete
that could reduce the carbon footprint of construction.
BUT Biochar comes with a big caution:
It's only useful if we have a lot of
otherwise wasted local biomass.
"That's why we focus on waste streams and looking into
all these circular economy approaches we have.
There will be much more
biomass available in the in the future.
But presenting it as a massively scalable global solution
to all our climate problems
is just another way of trying to come up with simple solutions
to our complex problems.
What do you think about biochar?
Could it be a good tool to mitigate the climate crisis?
Would you start using it?
Let us know in the comments.
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