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Comments

Name: Don Hennick

Nicely done Jason, Pushing the sequestration angle is the right approach. I have a different theory on the feed stock of terra preta , I think most of the charcoal was a byproduct of the pottery enterprise for which you would only use hard wood. To get the kind of fire you need to fire pots, only a nice stack of just the right sized dry fuel would have been used. It is possible that a separate charcoal enterprise could have developed for which chaff use makes sense, and then carbonizing chaff presents its own production challenges. Thats the problem I’m attempting to solve with steam pyrolysis, a rotary tort that can handle a continuous feed of damp biomass, fired with a field of solar collectors providing steam . Thanks for the update, I’m sure there will plenty of funding for us all in the near future. Don Hennick

Name: Stefan Doering

Jason,

Thanks for the BioChar 101 explanation. I think your biggest challenge will be in the scalability of your model.

I’d be happy to discuss this with you and introduce you to some people that might be quite helpful in building this out and possibly funding.

Stefan

Name: RALF CORD

dear Jason,

good to hear a young scientist go out and promote potential ways of rolling back the carbon emissions into tthe atmosphere. One question my colleague just asked me is where the energy comes from that people use while the biochar is being produced. If it comes from fossil fuels (say coal), then it kindof reverses the good work of the bio char burying.has accomplished. Is she right, that it woulld be better to completely burn the char to gain maximum energy from it instead of burying char while burning coal for eleectricity…. or were you suggesting that neither fossil fuels nor biofuel is used forr energy production? Also what perccentage of teh energy contained in cellulose is obtaianed by truning it to char? Is not most of the energy still in the char? We would love to hear from you.
thanks for the nice and stimulating talk.

Name: Jason Aramburu

Ralf,

Thanks for your comments. The energy to make biochar comes from the pyrolysis process itself. An initial amount of energy is needed to ramp up the process, but it is ultimately self sustaining. This means that a portion of the energy present in the original feedstock is used to generate the heat. Hope that answers your question.

cheers and thanks again,

Jason

Name: Rock The Reactors

How is nuclear cleaner?

Name: Jamie Clarke

Would love to hear more about this technology and how much biomass per kW is needed. It could be a potential solution to many farmers in the area that want to get off the grid.

Name: shreeram

AWESOME!
But after some years we might have too much of biochar we can also loose this by stocking this in the mines we dug for the last hundreds of years by this we might have fuel and so we can also get place to plant more plants.
Nice talk, and nice P.C.

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