USDA researchers simplify pyrolysis for bio-oil production

Biomass Magazine


By USDA, Ann Perry | April 21, 2014


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U.N. report explores bioenergy's potential for pulling CO2 out of the air

E&E Publishing, LLC

Umair Irfan, E&E reporter

ClimateWire: Thursday, April 3, 2014


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Cool Planet announces commercial trials of biochar

Biomass Magazine

By Erin Voegele | October 17, 2013

 

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Biochar quiets microbes, including some plant pathogens

Biofuels Digest
Thomas Saidak | October 7, 2013

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ACR accepting comments on biochar methodology for carbon credits

Biomass Magazine

By Erin Voegele | October 02, 2013

 

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Biochar slashes bioenergy soil emissions

Planet Earth Online

29 March 2013, by Tom Marshall

 

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New Pyroformer developed by Aston University

recyclingportal.eu



Birmingham -- As fuel prices continue to increase, researchers from the European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI) at Aston University in Birmingham, have developed an innovative bioenergy solution that uses waste products to generate cost-effective heat and power and that could reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The market opportunities of the new Pyroformer also offer business benefits to the West Midlands region. It is anticipated that 35 jobs will be directly safeguarded or created and over 1,000 indirect jobs created in the West Midlands by 2022 as a result.

The Pyroformer - developed by Professor Andreas Hornung of EBRI - overcomes many of the problems other renewable energy solutions have generated. Tests have shown that unlike other bioenergy plants, the Pyroformer has no negative environmental or food security impacts. It can use multiple waste sources and therefore does not require the destruction of rainforests or the use of agricultural land for the growth of specialist bioenergy crops. In fact biochar - one of its by-products - can even be used as a fertiliser to increase crop yields.

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Cooking better biochar: Study improves recipe for soil additive

Science Codex
Posted On: March 22, 2012 - 4:30pm

HOUSTON -- (March 22, 2012) -- Backyard gardeners who make their own charcoal soil additives, or biochar, should take care to heat their charcoal to at least 450 degrees Celsius to ensure that water and nutrients get to their plants, according to a new study by Rice University scientists.
The study, published this week in the Journal of Biomass and Bioenergy, is timely because biochar is attracting thousands of amateur and professional gardeners, and some companies are also scaling up industrial biochar production.

"When it's done right, adding biochar to soil can improve hydrology and make more nutrients available to plants," said Rice biogeochemist Caroline Masiello, the lead researcher on the new study.

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Exciting time for ethanol

Iowa Farmer Today
Posted: Thursday, November 17, 2011 7:50 am Updated: 9:44 am, Thu Nov 17, 2011.
By Gene Lucht, Iowa Farmer Today Iowa Farmer Today

AMES --- Forgive Robert Brown if he sounds a bit more upbeat about ethanol and other biofuels and bio-renewable products than most of the politicians and business leaders who offer their opinions on the subject.

It’s not that he’s a Pollyanna. It’s more that he’s a researcher and he sees plenty in the laboratory to make him smile.

“It’s a very exciting time,” says Brown, director of the Bioeconomy Institute at Iowa State University and director of the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies (CSET).

One of the keys to several potential new products or technologies is a method called fast pyrolysis. Instead of using enzymes and microorganisms to make biofuels, researchers are simply using heat. Fast pyrolysis quickly heats biomass such as corn stalks or wood chips and in the absence oxygen to produce liquid, solid and gas products. These end products, are known as biochar, bio-oil and syngas.

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Could Biomass Technology Help Commercialize Biochar?

RenewableEnergyWorld.com
By Robert Crowe, Contributor
October 31, 2011

A nascent biochar industry is emerging in connection with biomass power technologies that coproduce electricity and char via gasification and pyrolysis.

A single source of biomass could ostensibly create multiple revenue streams, with systems calibrated to produce more electricity, biochar or bio-oil when one is more profitable than the other.

Research shows biochar improves soil fertility, decreases water pollution and even mitigates heavy metals. The charcoal-like substance has enthusiastic support from researchers and the sustainability movement, but it has been slow to commercialize.

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SDSU Studies Production of Biochar, Bio-Oil from Biomass

DomesticFuel.com
Posted by Joanna Schroeder – July 27th, 2011

South Dakota State University (SDSU) is researching the future, one is which rural landscapes would no longer be dotted with grain elevators but rather with pyrolysis plants that would convert energy crops to fuel or “bio-oil”. This bio-oil would be passed along to other refiniries to produce products such as drop-in fuels or biochemicals while the plants would recycle the syngas produced during the process into an emerging product – biochar. Biochar can be integrated into the soil to help rebuild soil nutrition and sequester carbon.

The USDA has given SDSU a $1 million grant, $200,000 for the next five years, to help scientists design a feedstock production system for optimum energy production of bio-oil while also exploring the possible benefits of biochar.

“We’re looking at this from a whole system approach, and we’re looking at various components in this whole system,” said SDSU professor Tom Schumacher, the project director “Historically, the distributive nature of crop production gave rise to a network of grain elevators to separate and coordinate the flow of grain to the processing industry. A network of rail lines added new infrastructure to improve efficiency. For lignocellulosic feedstocks, a corollary to the grain elevator would be a collection point that would be within 10 to 30 miles of production fields.”

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Biochar And The Biomass Recycling Industry

Biocycle
BioCycle August 2011, Vol. 52, No. 8, p. 50
Jim Grob, Art Donnelly, Gloria Flora and Thomas Miles

To realize its full potential as a tool for carbon cycle management and to sustainably increase soil productivity, biochar should be tested in combination with other organic waste streams.

BIOCHAR, the high carbon content remains of organic biomass heated in the absence of oxygen, has been a topic of intense interest and growing experimentation in the past five years. The rediscovery of terra preta (or black earth) soils in the Amazon has sparked the imagination and curiosity of researchers around the world. These “human-built” soils are dark, productive deposits — a composite of charcoal (biochar), pottery shards and organic matter such as plant material, animal feces and fish and animal bones. Significantly, these soils are several thousand years old, yet continue to maintain high plant productivity and high soil carbon content despite existing in a region well known for low soil productivity and rapid organic matter decomposition. Charcoal presence is not unique to the tropics. U.S. farmland soils can vary in charcoal content from 10 to 35 percent of the total organic carbon (TOC), with charcoal-enriched areas in regions with a wildfire-dependent ecology (Skemstad et al., 2002).

Much of the published terra preta research to date has focused solely on the biochar component. A full picture of “biochar-only” effects is yet to be fully understood. Most of the best-documented studies have used a single addition of biochar, which is intensively measured over a number of years, but data to date suggest a wide range of outcomes. Biochar additions have been seen to be positive, neutral and even negative. This wide range in outcomes may be due to differences in the specific biochar used, time since addition, the crop species tested and the particular starting soil properties/deficiencies.

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New Biochar To Replace Activated Carbon?

earthtechling.com
by Caleb Denison, May 29th, 2011

We recently took a look at a new type of “spongy carbon” developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin which shows great promise in creating a supercapacitor with the ability to store much more energy than is currently possible. The development is hailed as a breakthrough because of the potential it has to considerably improve energy storage technologies but we now learn that scientists at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey have come up with a development of their own that shows promise in improving supercapacitors whilst also taking advantage of a natural by-product of biomass incineration.

In a statement, the student scientists at Stevens point out that the problem with existing supercapacitors is that they use activated carbon to store energy and that the material is both unsustainable and expensive. The alternative that the students came up with uses “biochar.” Biochar is what is left over when organic matter is burned and, as the team points out, biomass energy facilities are already producing it. Now the students have designed, fabricated, and tested a prototype supercapacitor electrode using biochar and, apparently, the project was a success.

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Study warns against hyping carbon-fixing biochar

cnet news
November 29, 2010 9:22 AM PST
by Martin LaMonica

Of all the approaches to cutting carbon emissions, making charcoal and putting it in the ground as fertilizer would seem one of the least controversial. But a report published today offers words of caution around expecting too much from biochar.

Biochar, also called man-made charcoal, is made by decomposing plants and other organic materials into charcoal through pyrolysis, or slowly burning biomass at high temperatures with no oxygen. The resulting biochar can be used as a soil fertilizer, a technique used by ancient civilizations in the Amazon.

Unlike naturally decomposing organic materials, biochar holds onto carbon dioxide for hundreds or even thousands of years. For that reason, it's been touted by everyone from Virgin CEO Richard Branson to environmentalist James Lovelock as a promising method for fixing carbon dioxide in the ground. Biochar has also attracted detractors in the past few years who say that growing plants to create biochar would be a "false solution" to climate change.

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Beyond the Hype

Biomass Magazine
September 2010
By Anna Austin

The hype surrounding biochar as a climate change mitigation tool, soil amendment or power source is mesmerizing with promises of miraculous results. Too much talk and not much action, however, has raised doubts about its potential.

Market development has been inching along for years, but with no price on carbon there are no incentives for regions with decent-quality soil to use biochar as a soil amendment or for carbon sequestration. In addition, the capital costs of building production facilities are high and often unattainable.

However, new research is confirming biochar's climate mitigation potential and discovering additional applications. A recently published research paper authored by some of the world’s leading soil scientists shows that biochar has the potential to mitigate up to one-tenth of current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The study takes into account the utilization of biomass resources untapped today and does not propose converting any additional acreage into cropland.

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Biochar research yields significant results

Biomass Magazine
August 2010
By Anna Austin
Posted August 12, 2010, at 12:18 p.m. CST

Although it will not solve climate change entirely, biochar has the potential to mitigate up to a tenth of current greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.

The extensive research paper, which has been in the works for several years, centered on the carbon sequestration capabilities of biochar was published this week in Nature Communication, and co-author James Amonette hopes it will have great influence on those in the scientific community who doubt biochar’s climate mitigation potential.

Amonette, a soil scientist at the U.S. DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said he has wanted to conduct a solid biochar study for the past several years and finally got started in 2009 after discussions with study co-author Dominic Woolf of Swansea University in Wales. “We are extremely concerned about climate change and ways to mitigate it, and independently arrived at the conclusion that biochar is something that nobody has done a real thorough study on,” he said. “We’d done some quick calculations, but nobody knew whether the numbers would be at 90 gigatons or 1 gigaton of carbon per year.”

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Biochar Could Offset Up to 12% of Greenhouse Gases, Says Study

inhabitat.com
by Jasmin Malik Chua, 08/13/10

When it comes to solving our climate-change pickle, it might be time for deus ex machina-type proposals to take a back seat to something a little more homegrown: biochar. While the charcoal-like substance has often been pooh-poohed as a crackpot hippy idea — burning organic matter to capture carbon dioxide, really? — a new study in the August issue of Nature Communications concludes that the black stuff could sustainably offset as much as 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon emissions annually, or up to 12 percent of global greenhouse-gas production.

When left to its own devices, biomass (such as plants, wood, and livestock manure) breaks down and releases its carbon into the atmosphere within a decade or so. Subjecting that same biomass to high temperatures and creating biochar, however, locks the carbon in a stable state for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Biochar’s amazing properties don’t stop there. It’s also great for soil fertility and agricultural productivity, as ancient civilizations have long known. About 2,500 years ago, farmers in the Amazon improved their soil’s ability to retain water and nutrients by tilling it with charcoal. (Portuguese settlers later dubbed this terra preta, or “black earth.”) Plus, the addition of biochar can also reduce the amount of methane and nitrous oxide released by decaying plant matter in the soil.

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DOE develops biomass in Colombia

Biomass Magazine
April 2010
By Lisa Gibson
Posted April 29, 2010, at 3:40 p.m. CST

As part of the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas, the U.S. DOE and some of its national laboratory experts will team up with scientists and technology experts in Colombia to optimize the production of biochar from palm residues and sugarcane for power generation.

The project, titled “Forming a Research, Development and Innovation Hub with Expertise in the Sustainable Energy Use of the Biomass in Colombia,” is still in the early stages and the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colombian consortium are currently in the process of developing a technical plan.

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Scientists see biochar as promising fuel source

The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA)
By Kevin McCullen, Herald staff writer
Published: 02/28/10 1:39 am Updated: 03/01/1010:15 am

Scientists in Eastern Washington are at the forefront of research into an ancient practice that shows promise as a clean fuel source, a way to improve soil condition and to capture carbon that otherwise would be released into the atmosphere.

Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the federal Department of Agriculture's research station in Prosser and Washington State University have been integral figures in studies of biochar and its potential uses.

Biochar, a charcoal-like material, is produced when biomass -- including wood, plant and animal waste -- is burned in the absence of or under low oxygen conditions so the material doesn't combust.

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Sustainable Corn Production Supports Advanced Biofuel Feedstocks

USDA ARS
By Ann Perry
November 24, 2009

Researchers worldwide are trying to economically convert cellulosic biomass such as corn stover into "cellulosic ethanol." But Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have found that it might be more cost-effective, energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable to use corn stover for generating an energy-rich oil called bio-oil and for making biochar to enrich soils and sequester carbon.

Stover is made up of the leaves, husks, cobs and stalks of the corn plant, and could provide an abundant source of feedstock for cellulosic ethanol production after the grain is harvested. But removing stover from the field would leave soil more vulnerable to erosion, deplete plant nutrients and accelerate the loss of soil organic matter.

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