Interest, demand continue to grow

As interest in biochar grows as a tool to help address climate change and reduce wildfire risk, C6 Forest to Farm, the Methow’s biochar nonprofit, is gearing up for the rapidly emerging market.

Interest in biochar has been increasing among scientists at the federal and global level. Big oil companies are also taking notice, C6 Executive Director Tom McCoy said.

Last year’s federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Act includes funding for vegetation removal for biochar projects. There are also steps toward including biochar in a federal grant program for farmers who want to use it as a soil amendment, McCoy said.

In its 2018 special report on climate change, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mentioned biochar for its ability to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And the current demand for biochar carbon credits significantly exceeds the global supply, C6 board chair Gina McCoy said.

With oil companies like Shell, BP and ExxonMobil moving into pyrolysis and bioenergy, C6 has to act now or be left behind, Tom McCoy said. So C6 has hired two full-time employees — an engineer and a business planner — to fast-track plans for a local biochar plant that would process wood from local forests. They’re currently looking for a suitable location, he said.

Learn about biochar C6 Forest to Farm has been hosting presentations about biochar and its benefits. Links to presentations are on the C6 website at https://c6f2f.org. There’s also a video about C6’s vision for biochar to reduce wildfire risk, create jobs, and improve air quality.

When added to soil, biochar helps retain moisture and nutrients and reduces composting time. And once it’s in the soil, the biochar will sequester biomass from the wood it’s processed from for hundreds of thousands of years, Tom McCoy said.

C6 has been working on a local biochar project to use slash from forest-thinning projects for several years. They conducted a pilot project in the Methow last summer and fall, using a small test pyrolizer. When properly calibrated, a pyrolizer produces no polluting emissions, but the test unit couldn’t be adjusted to consistently handle the sawdust and wood chips they were processing, Tom McCoy said.

So, after numerous test runs, C6 decided to dedicate its energies to a full-scale plant, rather than invest in an expensive retrofit of the test unit.

While C6 couldn’t guarantee emissions that would comply with their air-quality permit for the pilot project from the state Department of Ecology, the test runs proved they could produce high-quality biochar — and that there was significant demand for it.

Farmers and gardeners have shown considerable interest in using the biochar as a soil amendment, said Tom McCoy, who estimated they’d be able to sell thousands of tons of biochar once they start producing it.

The process for making biochar in a pyrolizer heats biomass beyond typical combustion temperatures in a nearly oxygen-free environment, which prevents the material from burning and eliminates the volatile compounds. When the equipment is calibrated properly, it doesn’t emit any smoke, but only carbon dioxide and water, according to C6.

Pyrolysis is a similar process to the way carbon is captured in coal, oil or natural gas — except it takes 30 minutes, not 30 million years, Tom McCoy said.

“At a minimum, biochar takes at least 50% of the carbon from the biomass and sequesters it in soils for hundreds of thousands of years,” Gina McCoy said.

The source of biochar is also important. To qualify for credits, biochar must be made sustainably, from waste biomass, rather than growing biomass for the purpose of turning it into biochar, Gina McCoy said.

C6’s ultimate goal is to reduce the risk of extreme wildfire by supporting wide-scale forest health treatments and removing small-diameter trees that aren’t commercially viable as timber. Being able to process wood chips, slash and sawdust from forest-thinning projects could be a key factor in reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change, Gina McCoy said.

“Converting waste plant material into a charcoal-like substance called biochar and burying it in soil can also be used to store carbon away from the atmosphere for decades to centuries,” according to the IPCC special report on climate change.

People think of biochar as a garden supplement for tomatoes, Tom McCoy said. “They’re not grasping that it’s one of the world’s premier carbon-sequestration strategies,” he said.

“The take-home message is, this is happening in a big way. If we wait, we will lose more forest and others will suck up the resources,” he said.

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