Source: Planet2025 News Network
By Mallika Nair

Careless development without regard for the earth’s natural balance, has led to potentially disastrous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Now, that we have to deal with the reality of climate change, we commonly find ourselves looking to modern technology to provide a solution.

NASA has just announced that in January 2009, it will make use of the latest technologies and equipment available to man, when it launches a new mission called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). The goal of the mission is to obtain accurate measurements of the level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and a more precise understanding of where it is being captured and stored on Earth.

For various reasons, precise information about how much carbon is being put into the atmosphere and where it is being absorbed by natural carbon sinks has been, up to this point, lacking. The OCO will use three high-resolution spectrometers to observe “sunlight reflected off Earth at the precise wavelengths that reveal the presence of carbon dioxide and molecular oxygen.”¹ and will be able to obtain the most precise data on this subject ever collected which should allow them to uncover unknown patterns and cycles in the Earth’s carbon dioxide.

It is true that advances in technology, such as this mission by NASA, can give us the opportunity to better understand the natural carbon cycle of our Earth. Yet, relying on modern technology alone is an expensive and therefore, for many countries, inaccessible route towards solving the climate change problem.

Instead, many experts are pointing to the potential of an ancient, low-tech, carbon sequestration technique once used by the Amazonian Indians, called biochar, that could provide an integrated solution for the current and related issues of climate change, food security, and sustainable energy production.

When trees and other organic materials decay or burn they release all the carbon they had stored during their lifetimes, as part of a carbon neutral cycle. The process of making biochar involves the heating or burning of organic materials (can be waste materials) in the absence of oxygen, a process known as pyrolysis, which results in the production of a carbon-rich, fine-grained form of charcoal that is then buried.  The heated, non-oxygenated decomposition that occurs in the “burning” stage, gives off energy that can be used as an efficient biofuel.

This process reduces the carbon that would be emitted by the natural decaying or oxygenated burn of the material by 90%, and stores that carbon in the leftover charred material. Therefore the production of energy in the biochar process, goes beyond being carbon-neutral and is actually considered carbon-negative because it takes carbon dioxide out of its natural cycle and sequesters it in the soil, for up to 5,000 years.

In addition, the resulting biochar is extremely helpful when added to soils, because it holds onto nutrients and water. In recent experiments on 10 farms, using biochar as a fertilizer resulted in up to three times greater crop yields than without it.² Biochar is also the secret ingredient behind the famously fertile terra pretta (dark earth) of the ancient Amazonians, that was first observed by European explorers in the 16th century.³  As reported by Reuters “Soils containing biochar made by Amazon people thousands of years ago still contain up to 70 times more black carbon than surrounding soils and are still higher in nutrients”.

The beauty of biochar is that it's a time-tested and integrated solution. Biochar minimizes waste, while producing energy, and sequestering carbon. It has also been shown to further reduce greenhouse gases by decreasing nitrous oxide and methane gas emissions from soil. It reduces the use of fossil-fuel based fertilizers, and increases soil fertility and crop yields. The “slash-and char” method, which involves slow smoldering of farm wastes to fertilize existing plots, could replace the less effective and more damaging slash-and-burn farming technique that generates greenhouse gases and destroys forests.

The main boundary to its use, is that it has yet to be proven on a commercial scale.  But perhaps that is about to change. Biochar is already being used on a number of small farms. For example, the Times Magazine recently reported on a chicken farm in West Virginia that uses chicken manure as the organic material for pyrolysis, which creates enough energy to run the farm. The farmer is also able to profit by selling the resulting biochar as fertilizer.

Just last Friday, a large-scale biochar enterprise created by British environmental entrepreneurs, Craig Sams, (one of the founders of the popular Green & Black organic chocolate company) and Dan Morrel, (co-founder of Future Forests, the first carbon offsetting company), got its first multi-million-pound investment from venture capitalists in California’s Silicon Valley.

This project will begin running trials with biochar in Sussex and Belize starting in early 2009, and hopes to build biochar into a worldwide enterprise. According to Mr. Sams, who called biochar “a treasure to be buried in the earth”, CO2 in the air could be reduced to pre-Industrial Revolution levels by 2050, if only 2.5% of the world’s productive land would be used to produce biochar.⁴

The ancient people of the Amazon who used biochar techniques could probably not have conceived of the OCO mission NASA will soon undertake, and yet they developed a land management technique that shows they had a superior understanding of the Earth’s delicate balance. Perhaps it is a sign of our true modernity that we are growing more willing to recognize and incorporate ancient knowledge alongside new technologies in our quest for solutions to the greatest crisis of our time.

Sources

1.    Discovery News “NASA Space Probe to Track CO2 on Earth” Dec. 5, 2008 by Irene Klotz. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/12/05/carbon-dioxide-space.html

2.    Reuters “Scientists say ancient technique cuts greenhouse gases” Dec. 5, 2008, by Gerard Wynn http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE4B45KB20081205

3.    Carbon: The Biochar Solution Dec. 4, 2008 by Lisa Abend http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1864279,00.html

4.    The Independent “Ancient skills ‘could reverse global warming’” Nov. 7, 2008, by Geoffrey Lean. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/ancient-skills-could-reverse-global-warming-1055700.html

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