Request for Comment on a Charcoal (Terra petra) Use Question

["Ron Larson" <ronallarson@qwest.net>]

Stovers (apologies in advance for a too-long message):

	1.  As most of you know, I am quite morbidly fixated on charcoal as a part
of the stoves options.  But I do other things; as a member of its Board of
Directors,  I am helping the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) in
fighting our US Department of Energy on its apparent decision to move
emphasis on hydrogen away from renewables towards coal and nuclear
production approaches. In the mention this past week by list-member Tom Reed
of list-member Tom Milne's April submission to us on the relationship
between Hydrogen and Biomass (his report for the IEA) - I reread that Milne
report and had the following (inspiration, dumb idea, wild thought,...?).
The idea is that maybe there is a relationship also with the world of global
warming (GW) and climate change.  I hadn't earlier seen much connection to
"stoves", except through our (very important!) work to improve efficiency
and reduce emissions.  Our best stoves work on these GW topics has come from
people like Kirk Smith, Dan Kammen, Tami Bond,.....

	2.  So this most recent idea is that maybe we should be thinking of stoves
as a way to assist even more on GW (and maybe hydrogen - see below) through
not just having a GW-neutral stove - but one that actually pumps CO2 out of
the atmosphere.

	3.  The only two (Stovers - is this true?) ways I know to do this are
	a): to put the CO2 back deep into the ground or oceans as is being studied
by the coal and natural gas folks.  I see no hope for this (at least at the
level of stoves) - but ask if anyone on our list sees this (CO2, not C,
removal) as a realistic possibility.
	b):  sequester the charcoal itself (from stoves or any other biomass
operation) - do not consume it at or near the place of charcoal manufacture.
This is virtually impossible for the coal and natural gas people to argue
for at the stoves level, I believe - so we have this field to ourselves.
[added note for John Davies and others working on coal-fired cooking and
heating stoves - this following idea might also apply to you - after you
obtain coke.  I can conceive of that being considered sequestration as
well.)

	4.  Now one obvious choice for the charcoal to stay out of circulation is
as a carbon filament - useful for its nice (except for cost) properties
(weight, strength, etc).  My friend Morey Wolfson today supplied me with
this reference for those who might want to pursue this nice option further:
http://www.byu.edu/news/releases/archive02/May/pyramatrix.htm

	5.  The other option only became obsessive to me when I spoke on Thursday
with list member Ralph Overend (I think  the most knowledgeable biomass
person I have ever met).  Ralph pointed me to the August 9 Issue of Science
magazine (pp 920-923)- which is on the subject of "terra petra".  A little
time on "google" got me this web site for one of two Thomas Mann news
stories on this topic:
http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/uvmclips/Augustclips/SciencePetersonDirt.html
It is also available for a fee from the Science Magazine website - and
probably with the photos.  As this is maybe the most popular science
magazine - you may find it at your local library, which was my first
approach.

	6.  To whet your appetite, let me say that I found this article to be very
fascinating on many other levels than any so far mentioned by me.  To not
keep you in suspense, the article reports that there are big parts (10%?) of
Brazil with a highly productive soil - much different from the typical soil
that we hear is in such danger from the felling of the Amazonian forests.
The difference is that terra petra is a man-made soil - with the main
ingredient (I think and I think they think) being charcoal.  It was man-made
starting maybe 1500 years ago with 1/2 to 2 meter depth.  Terra petra's
significance was only discovered in the past decade or two.  This August
"Science" article reports on the first-ever conference in July on the Terra
petra (dark earth in Portuguese) topic.  The big questions raised are:  Why
does it work?,  How was the charcoal produced?  Why are there so many pot
shards in the soil along with the charcoal?  Is there some other magic
ingredient in this soil besides the charcoal? Was the reason for man-made
soil (with same-site agricultural longevity measured in millennia) that it
was too difficult to practice slash-and-burn agriculture when your best tool
for cutting big trees was a stone axe?  I expect our botanists on this list
like A.D Karve, Harmon Seaver, and Dan Dimiduk to give us these answers.  I
personally am going to start putting some charcoal in my (meager) background
garden - just to see why Terra Petra (or charcoal?) works.  (There seems to
be no doubt that it does work.)

	7.  From my limited reading so far, I think that this July meeting was
mainly attended by anthropologists, archaeologists, and soil scientists.
But there may have been some people present thinking sequestration or even
charcoal making - (I intend to ask those there).  The idea should certainly
have come up if any Terra Preta Conference attendee had ever been involved
with GW or stoves - as we are talking huge increases in soil productivity
and apparently a long life for the charcoal when placed in the soil.  Five
hundred years of dormancy and these terra petra soils are still fantastic
(is the way I interpret the news story).

	8.  The hydrogen side of this is that some on our list (especially Mike
Antal and Tom Milne) have been involved in the conversion of biomass to
hydrogen - and they (do or could) end up with charcoal as a "waste" material
I believe.  There are plenty of others on this list (not me) who know how to
produce hydrogen from biomass - and so I hope they will chime in on how hard
or easy it is to produce mainly H2 and C (with maybe some left over CO2 and
waste heat to do some cooking). I can't think of a better fuel for cooking
than hydrogen (forgetting the issue of cost) - as the only possible (NOX?)
effluent is water.  So this alone is a good reason for this list to think
hydrogen once in a while.

	9.  So I am admitting to have come full circle.  I first began developing a
charcoal-making stove in late 1994 and reported first on the "bioenergy"
list in December 1995 (see
http://www.crest.org/discussion/bioenergy/199512/msg00069.html .  My highest
value was being then placed on a charcoal-making stove's ability to decrease
the desertification caused by rural charcoal-makers (generated by having
lived in Sudan in 1982 and 1983). Efficiency and emissions reductions were
foreign to me then.  In my first message to the Tom-Miles-led-"bioenergy", I
was responding to a Dec. 21 question from Sven Erik-Tiburg (set@mt.luth.se
at that time - haven't heard from Sven in a long time).  The stoves list
began a few weeks later because of all this strange talk on charcoal-making
stoves (see http://www.crest.org/discussion/stoves/199602/msg00000.html for
the first issue of "stoves" - as we were kicked out of "bioenergy" by Tom -
who I ask if there were any earlier stoves discussions on Bioenergy" before
Sven's?).    So now almost 7 years later, I am talking about the
advisability of throwing into the ground that which I was striving initially
to obtain.  Part of this rationale is my concurrence with the wisdom of what
Tom Reed said in his first message to "stoves" (two later than my first
"stoves" message given above) - that it was better to not burn the charcoal
in a natural draft version of an "inverted down draft" stove.  I of course
concur - little useful energy is available after the biomass has been
pyrolyzed - unless the charcoal is moved to a device like a "jiko".  What I
have been getting more convinced of over time is that it is the pyrolysis
gases that are most useful for cooking - not the charcoal.

	10.  Now one last paragraph about this list after seven years. I cannot
think of a better group to approach with this issue.  We are unlike most
discussion groups because so few of us think there is any money to be made
in stoves - we are either pyromaniacs or just trying to solve one of the
world's toughest problems.  Stoves problems are affecting more people (3
billion?) adversely than any other energy (and health) problem I know of.
We all know that we can contribute to developing better devices - that have
to cost less than $10-$20.  We are also very diverse in interest and
background.  So with this buttering up - the question for you all is -
should we mention this idea of stoves (and many other pyrolyzers [not
gasifiers]) removing CO2 from the atmosphere out loud?  Where does the idea
go wrong?  Could the use only of pyrolysis gases for cooking be sufficient
motivation for putting the resulting charcoal back in the ground?
(sufficient because of promised future higher agro-forestry yields)  Do we
need to be promoting dollar incentive transfers from the "North" to the
"South" as is being proposed by most sequestration analysts? (and which I am
sure we would need without the apparent advantages of terra petra.)  Would
this solve the obstinacy of our President Bush to the Kyoto treaty - if the
South (G-77) was "suddenly" the only group not only reducing their inputs to
GW, but actually taking out our (meaning developed country, for most of us)
own CO2 contributions out for free (or low cost?)?  Or will transfer
payments be taken by poor Southern farmers and the charcoal still be burned
anyway?  Or can we develop fool-proof methods for ensuring that the charcoal
is indeed sequestered?  How does one perform a convincing (to George Bush)
economic argument?  How much biomass could be harvested/converted that is
now being digested into unwanted methane (20 times worse than CO2 for GW) by
us (mainly the Southern part of the human race)?  How much should those in
the north be willing to pay per consumed Joule to avoid having to cut back
our own wasteful and GW lifestyle?  What have I left out?

	11. The only people who are doing something outside of what I am suggesting
here are maybe Elsen and Matthew in Nairobi - and A.D and Priya in India -
with their flaring of pyrolysis gases.  To them I am saying that perhaps the
charcoal they are preparing is (perhaps - not yet for sure) better (in a
societal sense) put into the ground (maybe with a subidy) to improvev local
growing conditions.  To those like Richard Stanley making briquettes out of
ag wastes - I say that is great.    (Same for Priya and others with sawdust
stoves.)  If this pans out, we just stop the consumption of the briquette
after its pyrolysis phase.   To Ray W. in Sri Lanka - this should make your
coppiced tress grow two or there times faster.  (I fear that A.D. will tell
me I am wrong - but hope he will first read and analyze the Science article
on which all this is based.)


	12. I go into this with this much (but still very sparse) detail so I can
sit back and let others have some sleepless nights.   Any sequestration web
sites I should be looking at?  (I have found a few that look helpful - and
will pass them on to anyone interested, as this note is already long enough.
I now recognize that the idea of sequestering charcoal is not new - but
maybe using stoves and terra petra is.)  Your thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

Ron



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