Hmm? What? No one told me about a new, carbon negative way of sequestering carbon. The last time I paid attention to carbon sequestration, it was all about deep sixing CO2 in the Marianas Trench or the Norwegian North Sea, which came with big price tags and fretting about the CO2 leaking from its sequestered places. Now it appears we can just burn up some agrichar and throw it in the dirt, where it remains, inert and sequestered.
Here's the process. Put organic waste (corn stalks or chicken manure, say) in a vacuum sealed tube, heat from the outside. The gases produced can be made to be as clean as natural gas using conventional air pollution control devices. This gas powers an engine to make electricity (and, the exhaust heat it makes is looped back to heat the corn stalks).
The other byproduct, the burned remains, is agrichar: a solid, inert, high carbon char. It is not bio-available and so its CO will not be taken up by plants or organisms. It is sequestered. Agrichar improves low quality soils, reducing the need for fertilizers and the amount of water needed by the soil.
So how would this process pay for itself?
- Selling off the energy excess to that used by the process itself
- Selling the agrichar
- Earned carbon credits
- Avoided cost of transporting biomass waste to landfill; avoided landfill tipping fees
Of course, a chief value would be agrichar's ability to address CO2 issues, which may not be valued, or properly valued, right now by the marketplace.
This sounds to good to be true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe its marketplace hurdles are surmountable, maybe they aren't. Maybe somebody like stomv needs to jump all over this and try to poke holes in it.
For starters, go here for a couple of videos on biochar efforts in Australia. Let me know what you find out, because this is powerful stuff, if true.
Photo: Ellie Van Houtte on flickr
Tags: Alternative Fuels, Alternative Power Sources, Carbon Emissions, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Neutral,
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