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Southern Oregon Coast Mixing ­Nature, Tradition, and Economics for Sustainable Future – (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sldt/0509/#/24)

“Located in the headwaters of the Port Orford Community Stewardship Area in Southern Oregon, Ocean Mountain Ranch overlooks the newly-designated Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve and the largest remaining old growth forest on the southern coast in Humbug Mountain State Park. OMR is planned to be developed pursuant to a forest stewardship management plan which has been approved by the Oregon Department of Forestry and Northwest Certified Forestry under the high standards of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).”

Sustainable Land Development Goes Carbon Negative – (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sldt/0809/#/18 )

“Ocean Mountain Ranch is also serving as a pilot program and is expected to achieve carbon negative status through the utilization of low impact development practices, energy efficient buildings, renewable/clean energy systems, distributed waste management systems, biochar production, and other practices – with certification as a SLDI-Certified Sustainable Project.”

Terry Mock
Trustee, Ocean Mountain Ranch
Executive Director, Sustainable Land Development International
http://www.SLDI.org

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“Climate change is inevitable, proceeding and even accelerating.”

With those alarming opening words, British scientist James Lovelock, author of the new book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning,” is delivering a sobering message to large and influential audiences around the world. He says there’s nothing we can do now but adapt and survive. He claims it is too late for sustainable development and says civilization’s best strategy is “sustainable retreat.” If we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, he explains, it wouldn’t do much. We’ve already released enough carbon over the past hundred years to push us past the point of no return.

When prompted, Lovelock says, the only way we could do something meaningful to avoid catastrophe is to extract and permanently store CO2 from the atmosphere, in addition to dramatically reducing our emissions. And the approach with the most potential, says Lovelock, is to turn biomass material into charcoal, now re-branded as “biochar,“ in a process known as “pyrolysis” and then bury it. The biochar, unlike the original biomass, can’t rot and release CO2 into the atmosphere. It doesn’t oxidize. It is chemically stable for hundreds of years, meaning the carbon is permanently sequestered. “This makes it safe to bury in the soil or in the ocean,” writes Lovelock.

Lovelock isn’t alone in his enthusiasm for biochar sequestration. Australian biologist Tim Flannery, author of the bestselling climate-change book, “The Weather Makers,” is an avid supporter of the approach. James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor of Earth sciences at Columbia University, also sees an important role for turning biomass into charcoal as long as it’s done responsibly.

Regardless of whether you believe human action can ultimately impact climate change, the overwhelming sentiment throughout the world is that we must do everything possible to reduce and offset human-emitted greenhouse gases. Strategies are currently being considered about the best ways to do just that. If we’re serious about halting the rise of – and eventually lowering – CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, biochar could prove the best way. The challenge, as with all other carbon-mitigation approaches, comes with reaching scale.

Can biochar be produced to a large enough scale to make a measurable impact? The answer lies in the triple-bottom-line perspective. In other words, the only way it can happen is if it can be produced in ways that meet the needs of people, planet and profit.

What makes biochar perhaps the most compelling solution is that it also provides significant benefits that go way beyond carbon mitigation. It allows us to more sustainably manage organic waste from municipalities, croplands, and wastewater treatment plants. In addition, it can help manage a certain amount of residues from forested lands which are largely responsible for the rapid spread of forest fires.

Biochar and Sustainable Land Development

Key factors in developing the social, environmental and economic potential for biochar lie not only in its carbon-sequestration abilities, but in those other valuable properties that the process brings to sustainable land development best practices.

Biochar production is modeled after a process begun thousands of years ago in the Amazon basin, where islands of rich, fertile soils called “terra preta” were created by indigenous people. Anthropologists speculate that cooking fires and kitchen middens along with deliberate placing of charcoal in soil resulted in soils with high fertility and carbon content. These soils continue to “hold” carbon today and remain so ­nutrient rich that they have been dug up and sold as potting soil in Brazilian ­markets.

When added to soils, biochar’s impressive capacity to retain nutrients can reduce fertilizer requirements while increasing crop yields. It can also be used for commercial potting soils. Research is now confirming benefits that include:

- reduced leaching of nitrogen into ground water;
- possible reduced emissions of nitrous oxide;
- increased nutrient retention capacity;
- moderating of soil acidity;
- increased water retention; and
- increased number of beneficial soil microbes.

Plants simply grow better – far better – in biochar enriched soil! Biochar can improve almost any soil. Areas with low rainfall or nutrient-poor soils will benefit the most. Biochar systems can reverse soil degradation and create sustainable food and fuel production in areas with severely depleted soils, scarce organic resources, and inadequate water and chemical fertilizer supplies. Low-cost, small-scale biochar production units can produce biochar to build garden, agricultural and forest productivity. And with the addition of an engine or turbine, these systems can produce a biogas that creates distributed systems for heating, cooling and electricity.

The total benefits that potentially flow from biochar production and use include waste reduction, energy co-production, improved soil fertility and structure, and carbon emissions mitigation. Not all of these benefits are well accounted for under current economic systems, but under the carbon-constrained economy most are projecting for the near future, the carbon emission mitigation benefit is likely to be accounted for as an economic benefit.

Profitability of biochar systems will be especially sensitive to the cost and quality of the biomass feedstock that goes into the system, as well as to prices for energy and the carbon capping and trading markets. Farming and gardening systems stand to profit from the soil and water quality benefits biochar provides. Forested and agricultural land provides ready supply of the needed biomass feedstock. And as waste management systems and regulations “catch up” to this opportunity, therein lies another ­virtually unending supply of needed ­biomass.

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) was formed in July 2006 at a side meeting held at the World Soil Science Congress (WSSC) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the 2006 meeting, individuals and representatives from academic institutions, commercial ventures, investment bankers, non-governmental organizations, federal agency representatives, and the policy arena from around the world acknowledged a common interest in promoting the research, development, demonstration, deployment (RDD&D) and commercialization of the promising technology of biochar production.

The mission of the IBI is to provide a platform for the international exchange of information and activities in support of biochar research, development, demonstration, and commercialization.

IBI advocates biochar as a strategy to:

- improve soil quality;
- reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon; and
- improve water quality by filtering agrochemicals.

IBI also promotes:

- sustainable co-production of clean energy and other biobased products as part of the biochar process;
- efficient biomass utilization in developing country agriculture; and
- cost-effective utilization of urban, agricultural and forest co-products.

SLDI partners with Ocean Mountain Ranch in effort to go “Carbon Negative”.

Fossil fuels are carbon-positive — burning them adds more carbon to the atmosphere. Ordinary biomass fuels are carbon neutral — the carbon captured in the biomass by photosynthesis would have eventually returned to the atmosphere through natural processes — burning plants for energy just speeds it up. Biochar systems can be carbon negative because they retain a substantial portion of the carbon that would otherwise be emitted by the plants or waste matter when it rots. The result is a net reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Located in the headwaters of the Port Orford Community Stewardship Area in Southern Oregon, Ocean Mountain Ranch (OMR) is a mixed-use development project that will incorporate residential, agricultural, educational, recreational, and industrial uses. It overlooks the newly-designated Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve and the largest remaining old growth forest on the southern coast in Humbug Mountain State Park. OMR is planned to be developed pursuant to a forest stewardship management plan which has been approved by the Oregon Department of Forestry and Northwest Certified Forestry under the high standards of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

OMR will provide for long-term yield of high quality hardwood, softwood, and wildlife habitat. OMR is also serving as a pilot program and is expected to achieve carbon negative status through the utilization of low impact development practices, energy efficient buildings, renewable/clean energy systems, distributed waste management systems, biochar production, and other practices – with certification as a SLDI-Certified Sustainable Project.

The land development industry is uniquely positioned to utilize SLDI best management practices to take advantage of emerging ancient and new biochar technologies to help address a multitude of pressing environmental, social and economic concerns by balancing the needs of people, planet and profit – for today and future generations.

Terry Mock
Executive Director
Sustainable Land Development International
http://www.SLDI.org

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As usual, there’s a range of depths. Underwater logging of submerged trees (mostly in British Columbia) is done by remote saw and the depth can be arbitrary. Here in the east, the recovery of sunken boomed logs which you describe is normally done with SCUBA or surface-supplied rigs in comparatively shallow water. A firm recovered logs a few years ago from the lake my cottage is on. I’d estimate that they were working in 10-15 metres depth. I’d be surprised if they went below 20 metres. The conditions wouldn’t change much below that. The thermocline never gets much below 10 metres in our lake (although it’s unusually deep for the area, and therefore slow to warm up and cool off), so those logs have been sitting in 4C water since they sank.

The relevance of this is that you can probably dump wood into the middle of many lakes in Canada without seeing the carbon again for quite some time. No distillation of volatiles required. On the down side, the effect on the lake’s ecosystem will not necessarily be good and you’ll have trouble growing more trees if you continuously deep-six the fertilizer they need.

Boreal forests are being recognized as a major carbon sink. We didn’t have a lot of topsoil in this part of the world after it was pushed south during the last ice age, but it’s been coming back since as trees die and build up the earth. Not all rotted wood goes back into atmospheric CO2. As an ignorant layman, I’m guessing that biochar isn’t the answer in this part of the world and underwater biomass sequestration isn’t the answer either. Just let the forest do its thing.

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I’ve yet to organise for a physics teacher / engineer friend check out a local coke manufacturing plant that is currently moth-balled. According to the son of the engineer who designed & built it, it is a unique design in that it is a “continuous process” coke plant rather than a “batch” process plant. Considering the needs to exclude air, I can as yet only imagine how this concept was realised.

However despite the potential benefits of such a design, it is a large & stationary machine so it would require high cost transport of feedstock. When this plant was operating, coal gas was being flamed off, what a waste eh!!

Nonetheless, as you say things have moved on in the last 2 decades, but economic realities are still constraints. I don’t have the level of experience & interpretation that you have, however I believe that EECA are interested in the development of efficient use & production of renewable energies including biogas & solid biofuels. I also understand that their interests in energy conservation could be applied to the use of farm vehicles in food production methods, including conservation tillage (no-till) technology.

It may be possible to stretch the energy conservation interests of EECA to compare the energy costs of the production of fertilizers from different sources. I personally don’t have the tools to compare energy use / carbon footprints of manufacturing inorganic fertilzers – versus recovery & refinement of nutrient-rich biochar from effluent wastes.

However, as the raw materials for phosphates are not finite, I expect that we have yet to see how nutrient recovery costs will measure up against current & future costs of mining, transport & processing, … let alone the value of clean water otherwise affected by inefficient losses from animal excreta, leaching & runoff from non-point source agricultural production systems, & from point source discharges of urban & industrial treated effluent.

I may indeed be an idealist, but when it comes to the future of waste water treatment & combustion discharges to air, I’m hopeful that we may soon see an end to the prevalence of the old adage :
“The solution to pollution is dilution”
I believe that this type of so-called “pollution-solution” may be an economically low cost option, but it has usually been at the expense of under-valued enviromental & social costs’

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Many agricultural “waste products” were investigated in the 1980s and early 1990s by various DSIR divisions, and those reports, although less relevant in today’s world, will highlight some of the issues.

A couple of decades ago, I was involved in looking at viable utilisation of agricultural wastes. We looked at apple pomace, kiwifruit seeds etc etc. They all had some good features ( cheap, being unused wastes ), but the economics sucked – mainly because the collection, preparation, and processing costs.

Most of that research would be irrelevant in today’s world, but some have now found a niche market ( eg kiwifruit seed oil ). Our main interest was in using then as cheap fermentation feedstocks, which sounds simple, but is actually quite difficult, because fermenters are effectively 5-star hotels for all bugs, so you need to prevent/kill bad bugs and nurture good bugs you add, which often tend to be less robust.

Another programme we had was to make, via fermentation, biopolymers, especially polyhydroxyalkanoates ( PHAs ), specifically PHB ( polyhydroxybutyrate ), which possibly would be good replacement for polyolefin twine. We made some nice samples, but obviously nobody was prepared to pay the substantial green premium. I doubt that situation has changed.

The main disadvantages of biofuels is transportation of feedstock or product and labour costs, so if you can have small local systems with cheap labour, they are more likely to be viable.

I’ve lent lab equipment to some people trying to make small scale energy systems using biomass feedstocks. It’s been a difficult journey for them, as control of small systems is often more difficult than large systems.

Polyolefins are just so cheap that alternatives will struggle, especially against “biodegradable” grades. They are good fuels, however their unsaturated nature means that combustion can result in significant pollutant emissions.

With regard to air particulates, I suspect that you could look at what the USA is doing regarding urban wood combustion, including use of flue catalysts etc. If you could recover more of the heat whilst destroying pollutant and particulate precusors, that would be a win that homeowners could understand.

Don’t hold your breath though, there are people who believe taking the exhaust catalysts off vehicle engines improved the performance and fuel economy. Unless other modifications were performed, the main change was more exhaust noise, and I suspect they believed that more noise = more power. They’ll show similar attitudes to flue modifications.

As always, NZ lags behind Europe and the US, so you should look there first for solutions that may be applicable before starting work.

With regard to using charcoal as fuel, when I was young we used coke for our open fire because it was clean burning ( compared to coal ). It was a form of coal-derived charcoal and was common in some urban areas before natural gas was reticulated.

The earliest steam engines had to use coke as fuel to avoid poisoning their neighbours with sulphur and other toxins from coal combustion – later designs and better quality coal fixed the problem.

If you can make charcoal as a fuel economic in today’s markets, I have no real issues. I would suggest that some of the coke techniques, such as forming briquettes would make utilisation easier – especially if you want to use hopper feeds and automation. There’s also been research on using waste newspaper as a binder in waste fuel briquettes to obtain improved handling and combustion properties.

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Thanks too Bruce for your ongoing commentary, it’s been a pleasure to engage in this discussion group. I’ve been off work since breaking a collarbone 3 weeks ago, & my usual work commitments don’t allow me much time for blogging. I also need to make time to up-skill & develop my website so I can refer to URLs that visually illustrate some of the points discussed.

There are some quite large local sources of crop & forestry wastes in the Nelson Bays & Marlborough regions that could be suitable as biochar feedstocks. The winter air around Nelson Bays is often heavily polluted with thick smoke from orchard burnoffs, usually of green trees. Health statistics / estimates vary but in this region approx 10 – 16 people are thought to die from diseases associated with smoke particulates associated with poor air quality.

Despite regional council requirements re modernizing of domestic home heating fires, rural fires add considerably to levels of particulate matter & smog. Nelson, Stoke & Richmond are often blanketed in smog [Nelson's dirty little secret ] This isn’t a very good look for the many tourists passing through the region, I hear lots of negative comments from disillusioned & dismayed travelers who are surprised at the cavalier attitude of orchardists & others clearing land for conversion of pines to pastures or for residential subdivisions.

However I do understand the logistics of orchard production that requires trees be rapidly removed for replanting with new varieties, or for disease control measures. The general consensus of most orchardists is that there aren’t any viable alternatives available to burnoffs. I beg to differ, but there aren’t enough incentives or disincentives to encourage change.

Another zero-waste opportunity awaits for quite large volumes of hop bines in this region. As of 3 years ago the local hops industry used 16,500km of polythene twine per year to train hops bines. A couple of growers have tried using twine produced from corn starch, however that was a short-lived experiment due to increasing costs of corn starch resulting from biofuel production demands. Polythene twine makes if difficult to extract from hops compost, & it’s not possible to burn it in open fires due to TDC air-quality regulations etc. Many hops growers are simply burying this waste stream.

I have suggested that there may be a potential to recycle hops bine fibres for twine production or else for carbon-fibre. I have previously sent away hops bine samples to SCION (ex FRI) to test plant fibres for strength & flexibility qualities, ( the hops & hemp genera are both in the Canabidaceae family), … however I didn’t have funds to pay SCION to do these analyses. I am hopeful that his year the Hops Growers Assn may provide funding for such tests, I’ll keep you posted.

However, I’ve since learnt more about pyrolysis of mixed waste streams & I now understand that Polythene should volatilize / fractionate separately from plant wastes, & could be a good source of biogas. The hops industry use kilns that require a substantial quantity of fuels (coal, wood pellets etc) to dry hops flowers, thus biogas could be a useful byproduct to hops growers.

It may be that I’ve become a bit ‘fixated’ with seeing avoidable wastes, but lets face it, they’re all about us in this region & in many other regions. Another example is the quite large volumes of reject quality fruit, esp. apples & kiwis, … as well as fruit pulp from apple juice processing. The rejected fruit waste streams from packing sheds currently get buried, other fruit wastes remain unpicked on trees & become windfalls when the variety price is no longer marketable, or when picking costs make them not worthwhile sending to markets & jeopardize flooding apple supplies or storage facilities. Perhaps I’m being too idealistic, but the opportunity to produce ethanol fuels from these waste streams appears to have been ignored. Meanwhile, many orchards have a colourful carpet of waste fruit under trees, or else trees laiden with unpicked fruit that provide energy rich feed for flocks of birds that later breed & pester vineyards at other times of years.

Picking up from an earlier comment of Bruce re the clean burning qualities of charcoal, I’ve had an idea for a few years about producing charcoal during the summer season. Of course it would be messy to handle charcoal ‘logs’ unless they were covered with paper.

Perhaps the technologies that produce wood pellets could be used to process feedstocks prior to charcoal manufacturing, or to pelletize charcoal dust. Likewise charcoal pellets may be a suitable alternative to wood pellets to fire furnaces?

O.K. already Bruce, I can hear you commenting here about the energy costs & final product costs, but the biggest problem with air particulates derives from using wet wood. I don’t know if we’re ever going to put an end to public aesthetic demands to have fires to heat their homes, but can you imagine the marketing hype of using charcoal as a light weight & clean-burning fuel?

My fascination / obsession? with zero-waste & finding useful by-products from otherwise “useless” waste-products is by way of example an explanation of why I have become interested in using biochar for a variety of end uses, including soil carbon sequestration & as a carrier medium to introduce or improve soil biodiversity & for bio-protection of crops & degraded soils.

regards
Don

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That doesn’t mean others of us haven’t found it interesting and instructive. Thank you both for your exchange, which has been relevant to several themes which must engage the attention of anyone who cares about possible solutions to climate change.

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