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).