A few years ago, Malcolm Fowles, a technology professor in the UK, published a paper in Biomass and Bioenergy claiming that burying carbon-rich charcoal could significantly decrease the release of carbon into the atmosphere. As more costly and technical strategies to curb climate change have emerged, many people are giving charcoal burial a second look. Charcoal is formed when biomass, like wood pellets or agricultural residue, are burned in an oxygen-depleted environment (known as pyrolysis).

Normally, bio-leftovers from logging, farming, and municipal waste break down and slowly release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Instead, Fowles asserts that bio-wastes can be turned into charcoal and buried at a cost significantly lower than other carbon capture and storage (CCS) methods that involve capturing carbon dioxide at emission points and storing it in old oil fields and aquifers.  

Johannes Lehmann, an associate professor of crops and soil sciences at Cornell University, agrees with Fowles and points out that there are also agricultural benefits to burying charcoal.  When buried, charcoal reduces the irrigation and fertilizer requirements for cultivated soil and may also reduce nitrous-oxide emissions from the soil. David Laird (US Department of Agriculture) neatly summed up the benefits in a paper titled The Charcoal Vision: A Win-Win-Win Scenario for Simultaneously Producing Bioenergy, Permanently Sequestering Carbon, while Improving Soil and Water Quality.

It is hardly surprising that James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, is another proponent of burying charcoal. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis views the earth as one simple organism - made up of closely integrated complex systems that maintain climatic and biogeochemical conditions. Charcoal burial combats climate change by addressing the earth's natural carbon cycle instead of focusing solely on human inputs.

In fact, the biosphere produces a significantly higher amount of annual carbon emissions than human activity through the breakdown and consumption of bio-matter by worms and bacteria. Thus, capturing the carbon in biomass before it is released into the atmosphere can have a significantly larger impact on the "earth organism" than focusing just on human created emission points.

While there are still some skeptics who believe that biomass should only be burned for energy, there is growing evidence that charcoal burial is catching on. Carbonscape, a New Zealand start-up, is banking on this new carbon solution. In 2008, they opened their first carbon sequestration plant in Marlborough to start turning biomass into charcoal.

Related Reading:
Biochar: Applying Ancient Knowledge in the Information Age
Carbonscape: The Potential for Fixing Carbon