Biochar and disease

There is not much litterature on this issue as of yet but I found this intriguing article:

Elad, Y. et al. Induction of systemic resistance in plants by biochar, a soil-applied carbon sequestering agent. Phytopathology 100, 913–921 (2010).

I confess, I haven't read it through but the pictures are nice :) I will probably come back to this issue later on since my master's thesis discusses plant disease.

Stress peas update

Left: biochar, right: control

It is very exciting for me to tell you that the pea experiment is showing more and more results. Note: there are still flaws in the setup and the experiment is for proof of concept only.

The picture is telling us two stories. First, the biochar peas are now suffering from what I think is some kind of infection or insect feeding. Small marks on the lower parts of the stem are clearly visible. The yellowing leaves could also be a sign of too much water (we had a few days of heavy raining and the pots have no hole for excess water to drain out). This only proves the water binding capacity of biochar. This hypothesis is also supported by higher moisture in the biochar pot. (note to self: get a moisture meter)

Biochar peas under attack!

Secondly, there are now peas growing on the biochar plants as a result of earlier flowering. I can only speculate on what effects earlier flowering and thus earlier formation of peas can have on agricultural uses of biochar, but I think it is a good sign.

Biochar and stress

Observation: Just to see the effects of biochar on plants in my own garden I planted peas in two pots. The pots doubled as weights for the barbeque cover. Accidentally the pots were covered with the cover and were thus deprived of light for a while. I can only assume that the pots were covered for the same amount of time since it happened by accident and I wasn’t there doing measurements. However, when I uncovered the already germinated peas this was the result:

Left: biochar amended soil (1/5), Right: control. Plant: Pisum sp.

 

Hypothesis: There could be a number of reasons for this phenomenon but I can narrow them down to the two most likely:

1.       Biochar has speeded the growth of the pea making it thicker and thus more resistance to cover (the cover was quite heavy ~thin raincoat) Also if you look closely at the pictures the one grown in biochar is thicker and has a little greener leaves.

2.       Biochar helps the pea recover more easily from stress. Senescent leaves are absent from the pea grown in biochar.

Future prospects: Whatever the exact reason I plan to make further experiments where I include more samples and have some plants covered by pressing down the stalks and some where I only deprive the plants of light for a period. Stay tuned for more.

World bio energy @ Elmia Jönköping, Sweden

I'm back from a wonderful 3 days of bio energy fair (and conference) in Sweden. My personal experience from this event is that biochar is not (yet) that interesting for the big companies (Metso and others) since they mainly focus on burning of biomass such as wood or pellets.

However, I got in touch with a guy involved in testing of a biochar facility in Costa Rica. The company was specialized in pyrolysis of hazardous materials and e.g. rubber tires. I am about to mail him soon and hopefully he can give some insight of what is going on with biochar in South America. There were also a few companies that are producing biochar through pyrolysis or that are using pyrolysis for gas production and one of them, Volter, even was from Finland. They have built a test village outside of Oulu in northern Finland that produces its heat and electricity from pyrolysis. The sales person didn't mention biochar but where there is pyrolysis there is biochar...

Potassium hydroxide

 So, I read this interesting article(1) about applying KOH(potassium chloride) to biochar making more micropores and WSOC (water soluble organic carbon) available. This is what they did, using different biochars from different feedstock:
"5 g of each biochar was heated with 200 ml of 1 M of either H3PO4 or 0.1 M KOH for 1 h at 90 C, then cooled down to room temperature. The solid (treated biochar) was separate from the solution by filtration. The treated biochar, once isolated, was dried at 60 C for 24 h."

They sell this stuff (Niagara-450) which consists of 98-99% KOH, as pipe cleaner for about 6 euros. I plan starting some pot trials as soon as the weather turns a bit warmer.

(1) Y. Lin et al. / Chemosphere 87 (2012) 151–157

The birth of the Primusstove

The "Primusstove"

So I mentioned, well, actually I  talked about biochar with my dad for hours and somehow got him inspired. He teamed up with his cousin and my brother and with over 100 years of DIY experience between them, they came up with the "Primusstove" in just a few days.

The idea is based on the Anila stove which is of TLUD (Top Lit Up Draft) design. They took an old propane (?) tank and cut out the bottom and made it the outer shell. The center tube is made of an old fire extinguisher. I think this design and especially the choise of materials has great potential to spread considering all the junk (sorry, underestimated resources) lying around in pretty much every back yard of the Finnish country side.

My prezi on biochar

Simple math

I think the following statement from the bio energy list explains why making biochar is so important:
" A common Miombo forest in Africa will give about 3 ton wood per ha a year. 3 ton of dry wood will give 800 kg of charcoal. A household of 5 consume 2-3 kg charcoal a day or about 800 kg a year. To produce 3 kg of charcoal you need 10-12 kg of dry fire wood in a common kiln. That will give one day cooking on a charcoal stove, and almost no biochar. 10-12kg dry chopped wood will give 3 days of cooking on a TLUD-ND or another FES and 2.5 kg of biochar" -Paal Wendelobo

The main message is: Stop making coal for burning and instead use dry wood for cooking while making biochar simultaneously.  Less polution and more cooking value.

This morning at 5am

Up till now I have pretty much ignored all talks about biochar kilns but having read a few blogs and sites on the additional benefits (other than producing biochar) I have changed my mind.
Kilns are great, especially the simple and effective ones. My eyes set on the Anila kiln (remember to add ref.) which is easy and cheap to produce.
Another thing that popped into my mind this morning was clay. Why not use clay to build a biochar kiln? I will get back to you as soon as I have more references (if there are any).

This is what my mind looks like at the moment

So the picture is pretty much self explanatory and nothing is in scale. I am searching for litterature that could be inserted along side the arrows. The picture has no numerical data but I hope to include that in the future as well. The miniatures are rendered bitmaps of "borrowed" pictures so please avoid spreading this picture. Made with CorelDRAWX3.

Meanwhile...

I’m not dead if that is what you think. A lot of studies, family life and other stuff have made blogging fall down on my list lately. That doesn’t mean, however, that my enthusiasm for biochar has fallen. On the contrary, bamboo as a source for biochar came to my attention through the following videos:

 

The first one is made by a PhD from Hawaii and the second one is from India where bamboo has been grown in new parts of the country.


I am also working on the metareview part II but that may take some time still.

If this doesn't quench your daily dose of biochar, head over to re:char and take a look at what they have been up to.

Another idea takes form

What if one could retrofit an old diesel locomotive to run on wood gas? It has been done with cars and tractors. Imagine a gas-train that gets its fuel from stations along the way. I was thinking rural Russia and the trans-Siberian railway. You could have a pyrolysis carriage that little by little produces gas for the train and the biochar could be deposited on farms along the route.

Now I'm no engineer and as such I have no idea how much gas is required for a regular sized train and how big the pyrolyser would have to be.

If biochar is such a good thing, why aren't everybody doing it?

That question was posed today at the coffee table. A very non-scientific question perhaps but I think it contains a few points.
1. We (in the west) are too distanced to energy production and consumtion to realize the amount of resources it demands. As long as the light goes on at the turn of a switch and the water is hot in the shower nobody really cares.
2. We have no or very little connection to the food we consume. Some state that we would eat far less meat if we somehow could see the cow behind the beef. All this leads to less interest in conserving farmlands and protecting forests.