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1. Biomass
Earlier (May 2011) posted at the Geo-engineering blog
Traditionally, biomass has been used in four ways:
1. For industrial purposes (shelter, building materials, furniture, utensils, etc)
2. Burning (for domestic energy use such as heating, lighting and cooking, and for land clearance)
3. Conservation (left on land or added to soil as compost, to enrich soil and biodiversity, avoid erosion, etc.)
4. For food (including livestock feed, while using fertilizers and with waste dumped in landfills or sea)
In the light of rising costs of fossil fuel (i.e. direct cost, health cost and climate cost), further uses are now under consideration, specifically:
5. Low-footprint food (see below)
6. Commercial combustion in power plants, furnaces, kilns, ovens and internal combustion engines
7. Burial
8. BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture & Storage)
9. Biochar (Pyrolysis resulting in biochar, syngas and bio-oils)
10. Biochar + BECCS (Biochar + Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture & Storage)
Table 1. Comparison of methods to process biomass (Energy and Carbon)
| 6. Combustion | 7. Burial | 8. BECCS | 9. Biochar | 10. Biochar + BECCS | |
| Energy - year 0 | 1.0 | -0.1 | 0.8 | 0.5 | 0.5 |
| Carbon - year 0 | -0.1 | 1.0 | 0.8 | 0.5 | 0.9 |
| Energy - out years | 0.4 | 0.4 | |||
| Carbon - out years | 0.5 | 0.5 | |||
| Total | 0.9 | 0.9 | 1.6 | 1.9 | 2.3 |
Above table by Ron Larsen, from this message, shows five methods to process biomass, rated (with 1.0 being the highest score) for their ability to supply energy and for their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Above table shows that each way to process biomass waste has advantages and disadvantages:
6. Combustion may seem attractive for its supply of energy, while having negative impact due to emissions.
7. Burial can minimize emissions, but it doesn't provide energy, in fact it costs energy.
8. BECCS can score high on immediate energy supply as well as on avoiding carbon emissions.
9. Biochar scores well regarding immediate energy supply and emissions, with additional future benefits.
10. Biochar + BECCS has all the benefits of biochar, in that biomass is pyrolyzed to produce biochar, while emissions are also captured and processed, and subsequently stored or used (i.e. carbon, hydrogen, etc.)
The table below also incorporates above-mentioned traditional use of biomass, while using a wider footprint, i.e. with scores not only reflecting the ability of the method to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but also looking at emissions other than carbon.
Table 2. Comparison of ten uses of biomass (Energy and Footprint)
| Energy - year 0 | Footprint - year 0 | Energy - out years | Footprint - out years | Total | |
| 1. Industrial | -0.1 | 0.1 | 0.0 | ||
| 2. Burning | 1.0 | -1.0 | 0.0 | ||
| 3. Conservation | -0.2 | -0.2 | |||
| 4. Food | -0.3 | -0.3 | |||
| 5. Low-footprint food | 0.0 | ||||
| 6. Combustion | 1.0 | -0.1 | 0.9 | ||
| 7. Burial | -0.1 | 1.0 | 0.9 | ||
| 8. BECCS | 0.8 | 0.8 | 1.6 | ||
| 9. Biochar | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.4 | 0.5 | 1.9 |
| 10.Biochar+BECCS | 0.5 | 0.9 | 0.4 | 0.5 | 2.3 |
Biochar gets its positive 'out years' scores for increasing vegetation growth over time, as it improves soil's water and nutrients retention, while also reducing the need for chemical fertilizers.
Use of the term low-footprint food may be confusing, since the rating gives a negative score to traditional food, and a higher score (zero) to low-footprint food, which refers to a diet seeking to reduce meat and reduce the use of chemical fertilizers during growing, with waste processed to avoid runoff and emissions. Traditional ways of conservation and growing (and disposing of) food come with large footprints due to the associated emissions. Such emissions could be reduced when using clean, renewable energy for all purposes (i.e. production, refrigeration, transportation, etc) and when using the above 'Biochar + BECCS' method of waste handling.
2. Biochar
Pyrolyzing biomass and then adding the resulting biochar to soil can remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and can avoid many emissions that would otherwise occur.
By contrast, both composting or burying biomass will each result in more emissions, since the biomass will decompose and that will add CO₂ and methane (CH₄) to the atmosphere. When biomass is buried, it may take a bit longer before it will decompose, but decomposition will eventually occur, and such emissions will be more and it will typically occur earlier than in the case of biochar, which can remain in the soil for hundreds if not thousands of years.
As temperatures keep rising, there's increased risk of flooding (causing more CH₄ emissions) and of wildfires (which besides emissions of CO₂ and CH₄ also come with soot and CO emissions). This growing risk makes biochar an increasingly attractive method.
Turning biowaste into biochar through pyrolysis and then adding the biochar to soil can prevent wildfires in two ways: firstly, because the biomass is removed from the land, this biowaste can no longer fuel wildfires; and secondly because the biochar increases the soil's capability to retain moisture and helps soil become more fertile, thue result is more and healthier vegetation growth (and thus CO₂ capture) while the extra moisture in the soil gives additional protection against wildfires.
Biochar is also beneficial in regard to flooding. Firstly, the biochar makes that the soil can absorb more water. Secondly, the healthier vegetation that results from biochar will be deeper rooted and can better withstand flooding in general and this will in turn also prevent erosion.
Soil becomes more fertile when adding biochar to soil, which makes that application of pesticides and chemical fertilizers can be reduced and avoided. Nitrogen fertilizers are responsible for dead zones in lakes, seas and oceans, and for nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions. Adding a combination of biochar and olivine sand to soil can make the soil become more fertile (without adding chemical fertilizers), enabling both the olivine and the healthier vegetation to take more CO₂ out of the atmosphere. It can be economic to add both biochar and olivine sand to soil simultaneously, which can reduce the overall cost of adding soil supplements and keeping vegetation healthy in general.
Heating up biomass through pyrolysis can turn half the carbon that's contained into biomass into biochar, while turning the other half into bio-oil and syngas. As said, this will avoid emissions of greenhouse gases that would oterwise occur when the biomass was left to decompose or get burned in wildfires. The energy needed to heat up the biowaste can come from the biomass itself, but it can also come from clean power sources such as wind turbines.
The other half of the carbon that goes into bio-oil and syngas can be burned for energy, but it can also be turned into hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc. The hydrogen can then be used as clean energy, while the carbon can be used in construction or to produce carbon fiber, graphite, etc.
In conclusion, adding biochar to soil can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and can avoid many emissions that would otherwise occur, all with little or no emissions, at least for a very long time. This makes biochar an excellent method to reduce levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
Biochar is discussed in more detail at the Biochar group.
3. Vegetating the Deserts
The above benefits and qualities of biochar are also helpful in efforts to bring vegetation into the desert by means of desalinated water, as proposed by a number of scientists. A study by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and climate modelers David Rind and Igor Aleinov of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, all based in New York City, concludes that it's worth while to do so.
Authors envision building desalination plants to pump seawater from oceans to inland desert areas using pumps, pipes, canals and aqueducts. The idea is that this would result in vegetation, with the tree cover also bringing more rain -- about 700 to 1200 millimeters per year -- and clouds, which would also help reflect sunlight back into space.
This would not only make these deserts more livable and productive, it would also cool areas, in some cases by up to 8°C .
Importantly, vegetation in the deserts could draw some 8 billion tons of carbon a year from the atmosphere -- nearly as much as people now emit by burning fossil fuels and forests. As forests matured, they could continue taking up this much carbon for decades.
The researchers estimate that building, running, and maintaining reverse-osmosis plants for desalination and the irrigation equipment will cost some $2 trillion per year.
4. Desalination
[2018 links added to 2010 paragraph on desalination]
Scientists have developed water filters that can make highly polluted seawater drinkable after just one pass. The technology could provide drinking water, as well as water for irrigation, while the resulting brine could be processed to provide resources such as salt, lithium, etc.
5. Vortex Towers could vegetate the Deserts
[Posted with image at the Biochar Economy blog, before that at knol, October 12, 2011. ]
PLANS TO BRING WATER AND VEGETATION TO DESERTS THROUGH VORTEX TOWERS AND BIOCHAR
Vortex towers are typically seen as ways to produce electricity. They could also help to vegetate deserts, in a number of ways.
The vortex towers that I envisage would be a cross between the VortexEngine.ca and the Solar Tower by enviromission.com.au. Making a spiral groove inside the surface of the tower could enhance the vortex updraft effect. This has all been discussed for years, e.g. in the Economist Sept. 29, 2005.
Vortex towers can produce huge amounts of electricity, that can be used for purposes such as:
- Desalination of sea water and transport of the resulting fresh water into the desert
- Capturing CO₂ from ambient atmosphere and capturing CO₂ produced in the process of making biochar. The CO₂ could be used for cloud seeding, carbon building material and char (see below).
- Surplus water could also be sprayed into the sky, using the vortex tower's updraft, to further induce cloud formation to create both albedo change and rain.
- Split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, by means of electrolysis. The hydrogen could then be used as fuel, or to produce ammonia by drawing nitrogen from the air. The ammonia could then be used to produce fertilizer.
- Carbon that is captured from the atmosphere could be turned into char, similar to biochar, with its benefits as a soil improver and as a safe way to store carbon. This char could be applied to the soil simultaneously with olivine dust and fertilizer as produced in the way described above. Application of such fertilizer together with char could not only reduce the need for fossil fuel-based fertilizers, it can also reduce runoffs that cause N₂O emissions and dead zones in the sea, since the char will improve retention of fertilizer in the soil. The carbon could even be combined with ammonia to produce urea, and all this fertilization would benefit vegetation growth.
The benefits of vegetating desert are many; it would take CO₂ out of the atmosphere, it could produce food and vast areas could be made suitable for many plants, animals and people. By selling land for settlement, projects to vegetate the deserts could pay for themselves, as part of the Biochar Economy.
Projects that involve afforestation, water desalination, biochar production, olivine grinding and building of vortex towers don't require access to high-tech equipment or scarce resources. This means they can be started at many places around the world, with many global benefits.
Forests have many benefits. Trees take carbon out of the atmosphere to grow. Trees can provide food and building material. Forest waste can be turned into biochar. Forests can have a cooling effect by shading the soil, thus preserving moisture. Furthermore, forests release volatile organic compounds that can have beneficial effects, as follows:
When you're walking through a forest you can smell a kind of piny odour and that's because of these other compounds, volatile organic compounds. And they're things like isoprene, monoterpenes.
When they're released into the atmosphere they undergo reactions with a class of compounds called oxidants and that's things like ozone. Following those reactions they're able to form tiny particles in the atmosphere.
While they're present in the atmosphere they can kind of interact with incoming solar radiation - the energy from the sun essentially and kind of perturb its path so that it doesn't make it to the earth's surface and scatters it.
Additional to this is the role that these particles play in brightening the clouds that are above the forests. And they do this because when they're in the atmosphere they grow and they get to a certain size where they're able to form cloud droplets. And the more of these droplets that there are in a cloud the whiter and brighter that it becomes. And that means that it will reflect away more of the incoming solar radiation that's falling on that particular part of the earth's surface.
[italics part edited from National Environment Research Council, May 18, 2011, podcast and transcript]
6. FeeBates
Energy feebates can best clean up energy, while other feebates (such as pictured in the above diagram) can best raise revenue for carbon dioxide removal and further action. Energy feebates can phase themselves out, completing the necessary shift to clean energy within a decade. Carbon dioxide removal will need to continue for much longer, so funding will need to be raised from other sources, such as sales of livestock products, nitrogen fertilizers and Portland cement.
A range of methods to remove carbon dioxide would be eligible for funding under such feebates. To be eligible for rebates, methods merely need to be safe and remove carbon dioxide.
There are methods to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and/or from the oceans. Rebates favor methods that also have commercial viability. In case of enhanced weathering, this will favor production of building materials, road pavement, etc. Such methods could include water desalination and pumping of water into deserts, in efforts to achieve more vegetation growth. Fees could be added to local council rates where land is eroding through neglect; conversely, growing a forest where once was a desert could be made more attractive through rebates on local council rates.
Some methods will be immediately viable, such as afforestation and biochar and enhanced weathering and combinations of those. It may take some time for additional methods to become economically viable, but when they do, they can take over where afforestation has exhausted its potential to get carbon dioxide back to 280ppm.
7. Towards a Sustainable Economy
[from the 2011 post 'Towards a sustainable economy']
Feebates are the most effective way to facilitate the shift towards a sustainable economy
Local feebates are proposed to facilitate a shift away from fossil fuel toward clean energy. Further feebates are proposed (i.e. fees on livestock products, nitrogen fertilizers, Portland cement and similar products with high emissions), to finance rebates on methods that can remove large amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, such as biochar burial and olivine grinding. In general, feebates are most effective in dealing with pollution. The post below was written in 2011.
Cycle A: Inorganic Waste
We're all familiar with recycling. Reusing waste to manufacture new products can help resolve two problems: the economic problem of scarcity of resources and the environmental problem of waste. Dedicated bins can help separate waste and collect glass and plastic containers, to be reused in new products.
Where needed, surcharges can be levied on items, to ensure they are returned at collections points for recycling. Items such as bottles and car batteries have also been successfully recycled in this way for years by retailers and garages.
Recycling is possible for much of our inorganic waste. The concept of recycling can also be used in a wider sense, in efforts to take surplus carbon out of the atmosphere and oceans, e.g. by adding olivine to materials for building and road construction. This effort will require more recycling than the traditional recycling of inorganic waste.
Cycles B and E: Biomass and Organic Waste
Dr. James Hansen once calculated that reforestation of degraded land and improved agricultural practices that retain soil carbon together could draw down atmospheric carbon dixode by as much as 50 ppm, adding that this and using carbon-negative biofuels could bring carbon dioxide back to 350 ppm well before the end of the century.
Recycling of organic waste constitutes another cycle in a sustainable economy. Soil can be degraded by deforestation and by a failure to return nutrients, carbon and water to the soil. Manure and sewage have long fertilized the land, but are increasingly released in rivers and in the sea, and combined with fertilizer run-off from farms, this causes low-oxygen areas in oceans.
Many people now compost kitchen and garden waste, thus returning many nutrients to the soil. Composting, however, releases greenhouse gases. Pyrolyzing organic waste from households, farms and forests can avoid such emissions.
Pyrolysis is an oxygen-starved method of heating waste at relatively low temperatures that will result in the release of little or no greenhouse gases. With pyrolysis, organic waste can be turned into hydrogen and agrichar, or biochar, which can store carbon into the soil and make the soil more fertile.
There is an abundance of soil to sequester biochar. Estimates range from 363 tonnes of CO2 per hectare to 303.8 tons C per hectare. The U.S. has some 475 million hectares of agricultural land. Australia has almost 762 million hectares of land, mostly desert. Desert soils can contain between 14 and 100 tonnes of carbon per ha, while dry shrublands can contain up to 270 tonnes of carbon per ha. The carbon stored in the vegetation is considerably lower, with typical quantities being around 2–30 tonnes of carbon per ha in total. Eucalypt trees grow rapidly and eucalypt forest can store over 2800 tonnes of carbon per hectare. The FAO-OECD Agricultural Outlook 2009-2018 says (on page 11) that over 0.8 billion ha of additional land is available for rain-fed crop production in Africa and Latin America. In total, the world has 3.842 billion hectares of land, which could sequester up to 1166 Gt of biochar carbon. 
The need to feed a growing world population also makes it imperative to look at ways to increase soil fertility. Biochar will result in better retention of nutrients and water. Once applied, biochar can remain useful for hundreds of years. Increased vegetation in many ways feeds itself. It results in additional input for pyrolysis and thus additional biochar. There are also studies indicating that an increase of vegetation goes hand in hand with an increase in rain. Healthy soil will contain numerous bacteria that increase rain, both when they are in the soil where they break down the surface tension of water better than any other substance in nature, and when they become airborne.
Furthermore, there are indications that forests generate winds that help pump water around the planet, resulting in increased rainfall for forests. This would explain how the deep interiors of forested continents can get as much rain as the coast.
In the 1990s, U.S. farmers needed to implement a soil conservation plan on erodible cropland to be eligible for commodity price supports, and the no-till farmland increased from 7 million hectares in 1990 to 25 million hectares in 2004. Similar policies could be implemented to add biochar, such as making local rates dependent on carbon content.
Using published projections of the use of renewable fuels in the year 2010, biochar sequestration could amount to 5.5 to 9.5 Pg Carbon per year, says Lehmann et al. in Bio-char sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems (2006). That would take carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down by about 1ppm per year.
Cycle C: Clean & Safe Energy
In case of energy, there's not so much a scarcity problem of fossil fuel, but a scarcity of clean energy; a rapid shift to clean ways to produce energy is needed, while additionally surplus carbon needs to be taken out of the atmosphere and oceans, as part of a huge recycling effort to restore natural balance. To achieve this, it's imperative to electrify transport and shift to renewable energy. Pyrolysis of organic waste can not only produce biochar (as discussed above), but also bio-oils and bio-fuels for use in long distance flights (shorter flights can more easily use batteries or hydrogen). Surplus energy (see box on right) can close the energy cycle, resulting not only in clean energy, but also leading to a range of new and clean industries, such as water desalination which could in turn result in the production of lithium for car batteries and magnesium for clean concrete. Electrolyzers can now be made without a need for platinum and there's also interesting research into using electricity to turn seawater into hydrogen. When vehicles run on hydrogen, their output is clean water, rather than emissions. Cycle D: Air Capture A rapid shift to clean energy and transport would help bring down levels of carbon dioxide, not only by avoiding emissions, but also by making available large amounts of clean energy at times of low demand. As such off-peak energy will be relatively cheap, it can be used for purposes such as capture of carbon dioxide from ambient air. Such technologies can be used to power aviation, to feed carbon dioxide to greenhouses, to produce urea and to supply carbon to industry, e.g. for manufacture of building material, plastic, carbon fiber and other products. Fees on polluting kilns, furnaces, stoves and ovens can also fund rebates on products that avoid emissions, such as clean kilns, efficient electrical appliances, solar cookers, etc. |
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Instead of burning fuel and throwing things away, there are more sustainable ways to do things. Not only are they environmentally more sustainable and healthy, they also provide good job opportunities and investment potential. While some of these technologies are controversial, in that they aren't natural and their consequences aren't fully known, the need to act on global warming makes that they should be further explored.
Such technologies include:
- clean and safe electricity generation with solar, wind, tide, wave and geothermal power
- using electricity and hydrogen to power transport
- carbon dioxide captured from ambient air
- spraying seawater into the sky, to change albedo above oceans
- pyrolysis to produce biochar, hydrogen and synthetic fuel
- enhancing soil quality with biochar and olivine,resulting in extra biomass for pyrolysis, thus removing more carbon dioxide while young growth is also lighter in color, reflecting more sunlight back into space
- producing rain by means of cloud seeding, using dry ice and urea, produced by means of pyrolysis and from carbon dioxide captured from ambient air
- water desalination for irrigation, residential and industrial purposes
- algae bags
Because many such technologies complement each other, their combination can make them more commercially viable than when looked at in isolation.
The way back to 280 ppm describes how two types of feebates can help bring down carbon dioxide levels both in the atmosphere and in oceans. Energy feebates (yellow arrows in the top half of above image) will encourage the use of solar cookers and clean electricity in transport, lighting, cooking, heating and industrial processes, which will also reduce a range of emissions other than carbon dioxide, such as methane and soot. Biochar and olivine feebates (bottom half of above image) will also reduce a range of pollutants.
Feebates
Feebates are the most effective way to facilitate the shift to technologies that reduce greenhouse gases. Communities can select feebates to suit local circumstances; in fact, feebates are best implemented locally. Feebates can also be implemented in budget-neutral ways, merely insisting on safe and clean products which maximizes the use of market mechanisms to sort out what works best where. Similarly, feebates aiming to have carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere and the oceans merely need to insist that, to be eligible for rebates, methods need to be effective and safe.
The following seven feebates (the yellow arrows on above images) are particularly recommended:
1. fees on nitrogen fertilizers and on livestock products, funding local rebates on biochar
2. fees on fuel, funding local rebates on clean and safe electricity
3. fees on engines, funding local rebates on electric motors
4. fees on aviation, funding CO2 capture from ambient air
5. fees on ovens, kilns and furnaces with high emissions, funding rebates on building insulation and clean ovens, kilns and furnaces, as well as on solar cookers and on electric appliances for cooking and heating
6. fees on industrial processes with many emissions, funding similar processes that are powered by clean electricity and that incorporate carbon in their products
7. fees on Portland cement, metals, glass, pavement and further conventional construction materials, funding clean construction materials, as described in carbon-negative building and olivine rock grinding.
Feebates can be well combined, e.g. feebate 7. and feebate 1. could produce beneficial soil supplements containing both biochar and olivine, while pyrolysis of organic waste can also produce bio-oils that can in turn be used to make asphalt and be combined with road construction methds that use olivine. In short, many such feebates are complementary, i.e. one feebate can help another feebate, making the combination even more successful and thus effective.
As another example, industry may at first be reluctant to switch to, say, electric arc furnaces in metal smelting, arguing that it was more efficient to burn coal directly in blast furnaces than to burn coal in power plants first and then bring the resulting electricity to electric arc furnaces. But as other feebates facilitate the shift from fossil fuel to clean ways of producing electricity, it increasingly makes more sense to shift from the traditional blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces.
Energy feebates, pictured in the top half of the image below, can clean up energy supply within a decade as well as lower the price of off-peak electricity, which will help enhanced weathering and other activities (see box Surplus Energy).
In conclusion, feebates are highly recommended to deal with global warming and to help achieve a sustainable economy.
Links
• Biomass | by Sam Carana
https://geo-engineering.blogspot.com/2011/05/biomass.html
• Forest a Desert, Cool the World | ScienceNow Daily News
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/914/2
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/09/forest-desert-cool-world
• Ornstein et al. 2009 in press | Goddard Institute for Space Studies
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=or02000x
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/or02000x.html
• Animations of 10-year average precipitation anomalies | Goddard Institute for Space Studies
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/afforest/
• Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming | Springerlink
http://www.springerlink.com/content/55436u2122u77525/
• Sahara Forest Project
http://www.saharaforestproject.com/
• Green machine takes root in Jordan
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/21/5892625-green-machine-takes-root-in-jordan
• Afforestation - bringing life into the desert | by Sam Carana
http://geoengineering.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977821494
• Vortex Towers could vegetate the Deserts | by Sam Carana
https://biochareconomy.blogspot.com/2012/04/vortex-towers-could-vegetate-deserts.html
• Biochar | by Sam Carana
http://global-warming.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977155102
• Anti-fouling graphene-based membranes for effective water desalination
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02871-3
• CSIRO makes high-quality graphene with soybeans
https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2017/CSIRO-makes-high-quality-graphene-with-soybeans
• Towards a Sustainable Economy
