[Stoves] re Charcoal in Gambia/ WorldStove char in Rwanda

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

On Sunday 14 August 2011 02:20:23 Fireside Hearth wrote:
> Maybe even there should be a new list for the arguing of bio
> char.....and let the stove list be for stoves which create less
> controversy, I don't know.


Richard and Bridget

There are four lists set up by the owner of this [stoves] bioenergylist to 
discuss various aspects of biochar.

biochar at yahoogroups.com
biochar-policy at yahoogroups.com
Biochar-production at yahoogroups.com
biochar-soils at yahoogroups.com

There will be others and web based forums too.

There is some inevitable crossover when those stoves which produce a char 
residue are discussed.

What I would like to avoid on [stoves] is discussion on the wider (global) 
pollution and strategic economic issues. Local air pollution and resource 
depletion will be relevant, as will any local economic or agronomic 
benefit of biochar produced from these stoves.

As we have seen there is disagreement at the strategic level but I think 
Crispin (who I also would like to count as a friend from our 
correspondence over the years even if our conclusions may differ) was 
wrong to take personally things that Ronal and Paal said. Inevitably as 
this is a stoves oriented group there is less expertise on biochar here, 
Crispin ventured comments about biochar which Paal and Ronal felt the 
need to respond to lest an unbalance view was left dominant. Had Crispin 
been subscribed to a biochar list more would have been said.

There are a number of posters to [stoves] who see no merit in biochar, A D 
Karve because he sees no increase in plant productivity being one and of 
course Crispin who cannot understand the loss of energy to the cooking 
process, especially as he is working with coal burning stoves where the 
coal is necessarily largely carbon dug from the ground.

My current [stoves] related take on this is:

TLUD (and possibly other char producing stoves) produce less sooty 
particulates, because they produce an energy rich, easily combusted 
flame, compared with currently available conventional biomass cook 
stoves. They are thus capable of reducing indoor air pollution which 
demonstrably shortens lives. They need some different understanding and 
instruction to use which may be difficult, they are more expensive than 
three stone fires and there is/may be cultural reasons why they are not 
adopted. Even in developed counties there was a 50 year period before the 
bulk of the population would accept cigarette smoking was an economic and 
health problem enough to restrict an individuals right to smoke where it 
affected the public, so it's a long road.

There may be economic AND/OR agronomic gains by adding char to soil, 
agronomic benefits have been demonstrated in some circumstances and there 
is long term evidence that soils with large amounts of recalcitrant 
carbon ( probably derived from pyrolised biomass) have developed and 
maintained physical properties that enhance a plants access to vital 
chemicals. There is little doubt that soil contains a vast amount of 
sequestered carbon and recalcitrant carbon persists for millennia. I am 
firmly optimistic that there are long term benefits to using char from 
char making stoves locally to amend soils and see little possibility of 
harm from the practice. Many soils have had pyrolytic carbon in them from 
wildfires in the past.

There is currently little other economic benefit a subsistence farmer can 
gain from applying biochar to soil. Any non agronomic financial benefit 
will have to be financed by those people that see the value in biochar, 
have the money and probably have benefited from increasing atmospheric 
CO2 historically. I'm firmly with Crispin in being sceptical of 
governments ability to agree and equitably running carbon trading schemes 
and like Crispin believe interventions like this are likely to have 
unforeseen consequences. Personally, and not necessarily [stoves] 
related, I would like to be able to reward the distributed sequestration 
of char as an alternative to the export of a cash crop by a poor farmer.

I see intervention into the natural carbon cycle of photosynthesis, 
growth, death, decay to CO2 by pyrolysis of biomass as being a benign 
means of sequestering Carbon.

AJH