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

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Andrew

I omitted my thanks and make it up now, for this long post of yours. You
should write more, if you have time. It is almost entirely correct.

Thanks!
Crispin


+++

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