Futurity said:
This is different from adding wood ash. The wood or other dead plant material is burned with little oxygen, so it produces charcoal.
Bob
Terra Preta - Adding Charcoal to Improve Poor Soils
- Thread starter deluxestogie
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This is different from adding wood ash. The wood or other dead plant material is burned with little oxygen, so it produces charcoal.
Bob
Bob, There was a guy years ago that was featured in "Acres, USA" . I think his name was Leonard Ridzon ( not sure of the spelling). He was a big proponent of using carbon as a soil amendment. He went on to start a company that sold the stuff.
Randy B
Randy B
years ago we were paving the '' loading dock'' of a lumber company that also made potting soil,,,
thier was 500 lb. bundles of swamp material from canada,,, lots of perlite,,,,,and CHARCOAL,,,,they mixed massive ammounts in a hopper, it got mixed,,,,and the end product was bagged,,,
a guy gave me a big 70 lb. bag of this charcoal, which i still have in my shed,,,,,
ive mixed it in my soil for potting plants,, but didnt know the true bonuses of having it till now,? THANKS,
i thought they used it like perlite, to retain moisture,
thier was 500 lb. bundles of swamp material from canada,,, lots of perlite,,,,,and CHARCOAL,,,,they mixed massive ammounts in a hopper, it got mixed,,,,and the end product was bagged,,,
a guy gave me a big 70 lb. bag of this charcoal, which i still have in my shed,,,,,
ive mixed it in my soil for potting plants,, but didnt know the true bonuses of having it till now,? THANKS,
i thought they used it like perlite, to retain moisture,
wazzappenning
Well-Known Member
i get lots of charcoal in my firepit ashes. it seems to be good for plants, but i wonder why. i looked at how to make soap, and read that plain wood ashes with water added works. problem is it turns to lye i believe very (acidic? or base?) anyway soap made like this needs to sit on a shelf for months or you can severely burn yourself. so the question is how can it possibly be good for plants? more water washing/diluting the acid away?
The Establishment of Soil Carbon as the Universal Measure of Sustainability
The Bio-Refining Technologies to Harvest Carbon.
The photosynthetic "capture" collectors are up and running all around us, the "storage" sink is in operation just under our feet, conversion reactors are the only infrastructure we need to build out. Carbon, as the center of life, has high value to recapitalize our soils. Yielding nutrient dense foods and Biofuels, Paying Premiums of pollution abatement and toxic remediation and the growing Dividend created by the increasing biomass of a thriving soil community.
Since we have filled the air,
filling the seas to full,
soil is the only beneficial place left.
Carbon to the Soil, the only ubiquitous and economic place to put it.
The Paleoclimate Record shows agricultural-geo-engineering is responsible for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. The unintended consequence, the flowering of our civilization. Our science has now realized these consequences and has developed a more encompassing wisdom. Wise land management, afforestation and the thermal conversion of biomass can build back our soil carbon. Pyrolysis, Gasification and Hydro-Thermal Carbonization are known biofuel technologies, What is new are the concomitant benefits of biochars for Soil Carbon Sequestration; building soil biodiversity & nitrogen efficiency, for in situ remediation of toxic agents, and, as a feed supplement cutting the carbon foot print of livestock. Modern systems are closed-loop with no significant emissions. The general life cycle analysis is: every 1 ton of biomass yields 1/3 ton Biochar equal to 1 ton CO2e, plus biofuels equal to 1MWh exported electricity, so each energy cycle is 1/3 carbon negative.
Beyond Rectifying the Carbon Cycle;
Biochar systems Integrate nutrient management, serving the same healing function for the Nitrogen and Phosphorous Cycles.
The Agricultural Soil Carbon Sequestration Standards are the royal road for the GHG Mitigation.
What we can do now with "off the shelf" technology, what I proposed at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, (CEC) to the EPA Chiefs of North America.
The most cited soil scientist in the world, Dr. Rattan Lal at OSU, was impressed with this talk, commending me on conceptualizing & articulating the concept.
A Report on my talk at CEC, and complete text & links are here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bioch...ssage/3233
Titled;
The Establishment of Soil Carbon as the Universal Measure of Sustainability
The Bio-Refining Technologies to Harvest Carbon.
The photosynthetic "capture" collectors are up and running all around us, the "storage" sink is in operation just under our feet, conversion reactors are the only infrastructure we need to build out. Carbon, as the center of life, has high value to recapitalize our soils. Yielding nutrient dense foods and Biofuels, Paying Premiums of pollution abatement and toxic remediation and the growing Dividend created by the increasing biomass of a thriving soil community.
Since we have filled the air,
filling the seas to full,
soil is the only beneficial place left.
Carbon to the Soil, the only ubiquitous and economic place to put it.
The Paleoclimate Record shows agricultural-geo-engineering is responsible for 2/3rds of our excess greenhouse gases. The unintended consequence, the flowering of our civilization. Our science has now realized these consequences and has developed a more encompassing wisdom. Wise land management, afforestation and the thermal conversion of biomass can build back our soil carbon. Pyrolysis, Gasification and Hydro-Thermal Carbonization are known biofuel technologies, What is new are the concomitant benefits of biochars for Soil Carbon Sequestration; building soil biodiversity & nitrogen efficiency, for in situ remediation of toxic agents, and, as a feed supplement cutting the carbon foot print of livestock. Modern systems are closed-loop with no significant emissions. The general life cycle analysis is: every 1 ton of biomass yields 1/3 ton Biochar equal to 1 ton CO2e, plus biofuels equal to 1MWh exported electricity, so each energy cycle is 1/3 carbon negative.
Beyond Rectifying the Carbon Cycle;
Biochar systems Integrate nutrient management, serving the same healing function for the Nitrogen and Phosphorous Cycles.
The Agricultural Soil Carbon Sequestration Standards are the royal road for the GHG Mitigation.
What we can do now with "off the shelf" technology, what I proposed at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, (CEC) to the EPA Chiefs of North America.
The most cited soil scientist in the world, Dr. Rattan Lal at OSU, was impressed with this talk, commending me on conceptualizing & articulating the concept.
A Report on my talk at CEC, and complete text & links are here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bioch...ssage/3233
Titled;
The Establishment of Soil Carbon as the Universal Measure of Sustainability
Dear Forum,
After following biochar systems for six years I'm most impressed with CoolPlanet Biofuels, and in this last year GE, Google, BP & Conoco have concurred.
A Cool 4,000 Gallons Per Acre,...
4,000 gallons/acre biomass to gasoline conversion.... in the lab that is.
The 4000 headline is total "best" case scenario, but when you start with 25 tons/acre FREEDOM Mississippi giant Miscanthus, with a BTU Value of 400M, than1000 gallons of gasoline equivalent at 125M BTUs, looks great enough, 4000 at 500M BTUs, seems to push the envelope too far, unless I'm missing something in my conversions.
As big a head line is the 25 tons per acre Mississippi giant Miscanthus, http://www.repreverenewables.com/ ,
the highest I've ever seen, of any biomass crop hybrid.
The perennial beauty of miscanthus is in the land use issues, out-year gains in SOC and soil structure with reduced compaction, erosion and nutrient use.
CoolPlanet Biofuel's CEO Explains his energy cycle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYVlZ9v_0o
CoolPlanet is cool far beyond the $1.00-$1.15 per gallon, because;
There is no fuel blending wall, the more you blend, the lower the C-foot print.
Is it fossil fuel ?...or is it biofuel? ... only your radiocarbon isotope tester knows for sure.
Wee-Beastie Real estate at Land Rush Prices;
The farm scale reactors are producing a high surface area biochar, 600 sq meters / gram, Or, One ton of has a surface area of 148,000 Acres!!
Now for conversion fun: 148,000 Acres is equal to 230 square miles!! Rockingham Co. VA. , where I live, is only 851 Sq. miles
Now at the middle of research application rates of 1 lb/sq ft or 20 tons/acre, this yields 4,600 Sq miles of surface area per Acre. VA is 39,594 Sq miles. An eighth of Virginia in every acre.
What this suggest to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts of carbon just in the soil alone, without counting the forest on top.
So here are Jim Lane's numbers from Biofuel Digest;
" A ton of miscanthus contains 940 pounds of carbon, a gallon of gasoline contains 5.2 pounds of carbon – so theoretical maximum is around 180 gallons of gasoline from a ton of miscanthus. 160 gallons of gasoline? That’s 88 percent of theoretical – so, you need to access all of the carbon, and make no CO2 along the way."
The way Cool does this is by breaking as few chemical bonds as necessary to liberate the hydro-carbon molecules.
Cool Planet’s systems are based on a series of reactions:
A carrousel of fractionating discs on an oval track heating biomass into a gas, pass over a catalyst, cool into a soup of liquid molecules, pull off the ones you need (e.g. the gasoline-range molecules); then repeat the process numerous times, with different temperatures and pressures at each reactor “station” and unique catalysts, until you have converted all the volatile gases into gasoline-range molecules. You are left with a residual bio-char,
Key points in the patent;
The process;
" is scalable in that it can be expanded in two dimensions to any practical working throughput while retaining a constant thickness for heat treatment of incoming materials."
Three catalyst; a dehydration catalyst, an aromatization catalyst, a gas-upgrading catalyst,
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/20...the-bells/
One of the wonderful aspects of doing the eclectic research I do is the occasional crossover & coincidence.
The thread I started about Prion protien folding in epigenetics; ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bioch...ssage/3669 ) lead to looking at other bioscience work at the Advanced Light Source (ALA), finding Dr. Jansson's work with tobacco, and sending him the prion work, and of course, with a note on Nikolaus Foidl's work with Biochar/aspirin plant signaling.
ALS is literally shining a whole new light on biological structure, converging nanotech and biotech.
So this morning's coincidence was from Jim Lane of Biofuel Digest;
Hemingway’s Cats and Tobacco Road
Dr. Jansson's research team believes that an acre of tobacco could produce as much as 1,000 gallons of drop-in, hydrocarbon fuels.
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/20...acco-road/
Whether your Cooley Coking 25 tons of Miscanthus, or squeezing tobacco juice into your tank, the bio-refining economy will be taking you places.
Doing both, the Miscanthus char amended tobacco could be yielding 1,200 gallons per acre here in Virginia. Hand in hand, with Miscanthus perennially building SOC in marginal lands, then using the Miscanthus-char to mitigate the historical problems with tobacco exhausting the soil, a great synergy.
The ironies of the Columbian Exchange run deep, first, the pandemic die off which lost the Terra Preta soil culture - which extended the little ice age, starving Europe's bread eaters, while saving the adaptive potato eaters - while the legacy of tobacco kills six million people each year - while the study of Terra Preta charcoal soils modern versions, provides a major wedge to save our climate. A new genetic legacy of Tobacco joins in the climate solution.
Your Eclectic Collaborator Riding the Carrousel of Carbon,
Erich,
After following biochar systems for six years I'm most impressed with CoolPlanet Biofuels, and in this last year GE, Google, BP & Conoco have concurred.
A Cool 4,000 Gallons Per Acre,...
4,000 gallons/acre biomass to gasoline conversion.... in the lab that is.
The 4000 headline is total "best" case scenario, but when you start with 25 tons/acre FREEDOM Mississippi giant Miscanthus, with a BTU Value of 400M, than1000 gallons of gasoline equivalent at 125M BTUs, looks great enough, 4000 at 500M BTUs, seems to push the envelope too far, unless I'm missing something in my conversions.
As big a head line is the 25 tons per acre Mississippi giant Miscanthus, http://www.repreverenewables.com/ ,
the highest I've ever seen, of any biomass crop hybrid.
The perennial beauty of miscanthus is in the land use issues, out-year gains in SOC and soil structure with reduced compaction, erosion and nutrient use.
CoolPlanet Biofuel's CEO Explains his energy cycle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkYVlZ9v_0o
CoolPlanet is cool far beyond the $1.00-$1.15 per gallon, because;
There is no fuel blending wall, the more you blend, the lower the C-foot print.
Is it fossil fuel ?...or is it biofuel? ... only your radiocarbon isotope tester knows for sure.
Wee-Beastie Real estate at Land Rush Prices;
The farm scale reactors are producing a high surface area biochar, 600 sq meters / gram, Or, One ton of has a surface area of 148,000 Acres!!
Now for conversion fun: 148,000 Acres is equal to 230 square miles!! Rockingham Co. VA. , where I live, is only 851 Sq. miles
Now at the middle of research application rates of 1 lb/sq ft or 20 tons/acre, this yields 4,600 Sq miles of surface area per Acre. VA is 39,594 Sq miles. An eighth of Virginia in every acre.
What this suggest to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts of carbon just in the soil alone, without counting the forest on top.
So here are Jim Lane's numbers from Biofuel Digest;
" A ton of miscanthus contains 940 pounds of carbon, a gallon of gasoline contains 5.2 pounds of carbon – so theoretical maximum is around 180 gallons of gasoline from a ton of miscanthus. 160 gallons of gasoline? That’s 88 percent of theoretical – so, you need to access all of the carbon, and make no CO2 along the way."
The way Cool does this is by breaking as few chemical bonds as necessary to liberate the hydro-carbon molecules.
Cool Planet’s systems are based on a series of reactions:
A carrousel of fractionating discs on an oval track heating biomass into a gas, pass over a catalyst, cool into a soup of liquid molecules, pull off the ones you need (e.g. the gasoline-range molecules); then repeat the process numerous times, with different temperatures and pressures at each reactor “station” and unique catalysts, until you have converted all the volatile gases into gasoline-range molecules. You are left with a residual bio-char,
Key points in the patent;
The process;
" is scalable in that it can be expanded in two dimensions to any practical working throughput while retaining a constant thickness for heat treatment of incoming materials."
Three catalyst; a dehydration catalyst, an aromatization catalyst, a gas-upgrading catalyst,
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/20...the-bells/
One of the wonderful aspects of doing the eclectic research I do is the occasional crossover & coincidence.
The thread I started about Prion protien folding in epigenetics; ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bioch...ssage/3669 ) lead to looking at other bioscience work at the Advanced Light Source (ALA), finding Dr. Jansson's work with tobacco, and sending him the prion work, and of course, with a note on Nikolaus Foidl's work with Biochar/aspirin plant signaling.
ALS is literally shining a whole new light on biological structure, converging nanotech and biotech.
So this morning's coincidence was from Jim Lane of Biofuel Digest;
Hemingway’s Cats and Tobacco Road
Dr. Jansson's research team believes that an acre of tobacco could produce as much as 1,000 gallons of drop-in, hydrocarbon fuels.
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/20...acco-road/
Whether your Cooley Coking 25 tons of Miscanthus, or squeezing tobacco juice into your tank, the bio-refining economy will be taking you places.
Doing both, the Miscanthus char amended tobacco could be yielding 1,200 gallons per acre here in Virginia. Hand in hand, with Miscanthus perennially building SOC in marginal lands, then using the Miscanthus-char to mitigate the historical problems with tobacco exhausting the soil, a great synergy.
The ironies of the Columbian Exchange run deep, first, the pandemic die off which lost the Terra Preta soil culture - which extended the little ice age, starving Europe's bread eaters, while saving the adaptive potato eaters - while the legacy of tobacco kills six million people each year - while the study of Terra Preta charcoal soils modern versions, provides a major wedge to save our climate. A new genetic legacy of Tobacco joins in the climate solution.
Your Eclectic Collaborator Riding the Carrousel of Carbon,
Erich,
Erich,
Welcome to the Fair Trade Tobacco forum. I suspect that the thrust of most members of this forum is to convert the biomass of their arduously grown tobacco into flavorful and additive-free smoke, rather than to squeeze it into the tank of a combustion machine.
One issue that you appear to be overlooking in proposing to harvest tobacco (a heavy feeder) for biomass fuel is that complete removal of the carbon of the stalk as well as the leaves from the ground constitutes a mineral mining operation (comparable to clear-cutting rain forest) that then requires all of that mined carbon to be returned in some way.
Bob
Welcome to the Fair Trade Tobacco forum. I suspect that the thrust of most members of this forum is to convert the biomass of their arduously grown tobacco into flavorful and additive-free smoke, rather than to squeeze it into the tank of a combustion machine.
One issue that you appear to be overlooking in proposing to harvest tobacco (a heavy feeder) for biomass fuel is that complete removal of the carbon of the stalk as well as the leaves from the ground constitutes a mineral mining operation (comparable to clear-cutting rain forest) that then requires all of that mined carbon to be returned in some way.
Bob
The Terra Preta reference tripped my Google alerts and I thought the epigenetic work with Tobbacco would be of interest showing that stimulating the long dormant genetic potential could create a plant that can create tank ready gasoline type molecules without further processing in any type of fractionating thermal reactor.
A long term rotation between perennial SOC building crops like miscanthus along with biochar building SOC, could counter tobacco's heavy feeding land degradation.
The CoolPlanet pathway and this fuel making tobacco could free any farmer from fossil fuel using 5% or less of their acreage, if you extrapolate from this recent USDA study considering camelina bio-diesel production;
Farm Fossil Fuel 7% Solution;
Their results also suggest that it could take anywhere from 50 to 70 acres for a farmer with 1,000 acres and an onsite crusher and biodiesel facility to grow enough canola to produce the fuel needed to run on-farm operations.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-advancing-biocrop-alternatives-pacific-northwest.html
Also,
A few years ago I was told by a DOE engineer about the polonium / apatite fertilizer interaction in us commercial tobacco production. How apatite phosphorous fertilizer causes high polonium accumulation. Natural polonium adsorption in food crops is not a health issue, but tobacco since it is put through a pyrolysis process by smoking it, concentrates the polonium and is thus the major carcinogen.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/tobacco.html
A long term rotation between perennial SOC building crops like miscanthus along with biochar building SOC, could counter tobacco's heavy feeding land degradation.
The CoolPlanet pathway and this fuel making tobacco could free any farmer from fossil fuel using 5% or less of their acreage, if you extrapolate from this recent USDA study considering camelina bio-diesel production;
Farm Fossil Fuel 7% Solution;
Their results also suggest that it could take anywhere from 50 to 70 acres for a farmer with 1,000 acres and an onsite crusher and biodiesel facility to grow enough canola to produce the fuel needed to run on-farm operations.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-advancing-biocrop-alternatives-pacific-northwest.html
Also,
A few years ago I was told by a DOE engineer about the polonium / apatite fertilizer interaction in us commercial tobacco production. How apatite phosphorous fertilizer causes high polonium accumulation. Natural polonium adsorption in food crops is not a health issue, but tobacco since it is put through a pyrolysis process by smoking it, concentrates the polonium and is thus the major carcinogen.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/tobacco.html
Home Made, Low Tech, Clean Biochar;
One of the best home made TLUD (Top Lit Up-Draft) stove designs to make biochar;
JRO; TLUD / Retort hybrid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg95KYrH8PI
The simplest can-in-can retort;
http://holon.se/folke/carbon/simplechar/simplechar.shtml
One of the best home made TLUD (Top Lit Up-Draft) stove designs to make biochar;
JRO; TLUD / Retort hybrid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg95KYrH8PI
The simplest can-in-can retort;
http://holon.se/folke/carbon/simplechar/simplechar.shtml
wazzappenning
Well-Known Member
good to know someone with a scientific background saying that the main carcinogen is the commercial tobaccos choice of fertilizer.
while researching the subject of polonium online i found some non smokers attitude to be along the lines that smoking is bad anyways, so some radioactive polonium/fsc paper isnt going to make any difference. to me that mentality is the same as a cook saying that the food is greasy anyways, so a little lead and msg for flavoring wont make any difference.
i wrote an email to the alberta health minister on the subject and got no reply. it is hard to say whether or not canadian tobacco is also radioactive since a call to the cig companies usually result in a pack of lies read from a script the phone operator has. i imagine though, that any large company will follow the easiest way to turn a profit.
if it is true that polonium is the greatest carcinogen, then that would mean my fathers death resulted from big tobacco using the easiest /cheapest/most convenient growing practices with no concern for human health. as you and your colleagues seem to be people of science, who better to bring the issue up with governments or media and put a stop to this un-necessary health risk.
From what I understand, ALL fertilizers with phosphorous in them are radioactive. This includes the so called "good, natural" ones like soft rock phosphate, Desert Dyna-min etc. I borrowed my brother's Geiger counter last fall to test some fertilizers but never got around to it and eventually gave it back to him. Basically, if it is mined from the earth it has minute amounts of radioactive substances. This might be one of the reasons that cigars ( and I would hope pipes too as long as you are smoking pure tobacco in them) are a lot safer than cigarettes. With a cigarette, once you inhale you get everything in your body.. good and bad.
SmokingCrow
Active Member
This is an interesting ten minute bio char TedX talk that explained how biochar works and sense to me.
With bio-char/charcoal, my view is that raw charcoal is not put into the soil as it will initially suck all the nutrients, microorganisms and fungi out of the soil. Over time, the soil will improve when the charcoal is charged/activated.
To activate or charge biochar/charcoal, put it into some compost tea, into the compost pit or just in a bucket with compost, worm castings, molasses and other organic nutrients.
One of my mistakes was not crushing it up enough, so I'm saving the big chunks to crush and return to the compost pit. I'm aiming be able to get through 1/4" riddle, and not grind it to dust.
Like all these 'new fangled' ideas, albeit resurrected, I'd not plow tons of the stuff into a field, but do a few trials to see how well it works with tobacco and/or other crops. My seedlings are growing like mad, but that may be because of great compost, addition of perlite and coco, Korean Natural Farming amendments and some precharged biochar.
With bio-char/charcoal, my view is that raw charcoal is not put into the soil as it will initially suck all the nutrients, microorganisms and fungi out of the soil. Over time, the soil will improve when the charcoal is charged/activated.
To activate or charge biochar/charcoal, put it into some compost tea, into the compost pit or just in a bucket with compost, worm castings, molasses and other organic nutrients.
One of my mistakes was not crushing it up enough, so I'm saving the big chunks to crush and return to the compost pit. I'm aiming be able to get through 1/4" riddle, and not grind it to dust.
Like all these 'new fangled' ideas, albeit resurrected, I'd not plow tons of the stuff into a field, but do a few trials to see how well it works with tobacco and/or other crops. My seedlings are growing like mad, but that may be because of great compost, addition of perlite and coco, Korean Natural Farming amendments and some precharged biochar.
ChinaVoodoo
Moderator
I watched a YouTube video recently on that compost tea prep for biochar and it made sense.
I plan on using it around my cedar trees because I have a theory that the growth suppressing hormones they release will be chemically filtered by the charcoal. This is based on a documentary I saw about how abandoning the practice of burning stubble results in certain weeds with similar hormones taking over.
I plan on using it around my cedar trees because I have a theory that the growth suppressing hormones they release will be chemically filtered by the charcoal. This is based on a documentary I saw about how abandoning the practice of burning stubble results in certain weeds with similar hormones taking over.
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