[Stoves] Carbon credits for briquettes that replace charcoal in Africa

Thu Feb 1 10:35:30 CST 2024

Dear Ron

I think Tom has covered the subject pretty well.  Plants consume carbon in the soil – not everything used for growth comes from the air.  Soils can become carbon-depleted.  If carbon is extracted indefinitely by crops, and at least some of that carbon is replaced in the form of charcoal, that charcoal is almost completely unavailable to the bacteria and plant roots.  Tom uses the terms liable and recalcitrant.  I like the terms soluble and inert.  Dr AD Karve uses the terms to describe his process of feeding bacteria to liberate inert potassium, for example, into a soluble form.  They eat the rock, die and leave the element available to the plants.  This happens with charcoal but pretty slowly.

My point is that the carbon cycle is not simple, and harm can be done by creating charcoal willy-nilly and implanting it into the soil from which the biomass emerged. It would be strange if, after decades, you have a soil completely depleted of available carbon, crunching underfoot with lump charcoal.  Obviously there is a balance needed.

Whether any of this has an effect on the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is not nearly as important as its influence on food production.  If any, the atmospheric effect will be small and temporary.  If you are offered carbon trading money, smile, take it and run.  And don’t become dependent on it.

I concur with Tom’s perspective that there is no approved protocol for assessing a stove-char-sequestration project.

Regards
Crispin

From: tmiles at trmiles.com <tmiles at trmiles.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2024 10:42 AM

I do not know of an offset carbon credit protocol for using biochar to displace charcoal for cooking. Biochar is used to sequester carbon in the soil, not to be used as fuel.

Attached are two presentations that explain how biochar works. It is successfully being deployed by thousands of smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially by two related projects. Warm Heart Malawi has expanded to Kenya, DR Congo and adjacent countries where soils are substantially depleted in carbon. An affiliate project, Biochar.Life, helps growers get carbon credits from making biochar and applying it to soil. Made from maize stalks and other residues the biochar is combined with manure. Some of the char can be labile and used by microorganisms. The recalcitrant portion provides a variety of benefits. It increases the biological carbon and enhances the carbon flow in the soil. We now have more than 30,000 peer reviewed papers and more than 3,000 meta studies (studies of studies) on the topic that demonstrate the positive and negative impacts in different soils and circumstances. You’ll find that the attached presentation by Dr. Stephen Joseph and the paper by Dr. Annette Cowie et. al. provide thorough explanations of our collective experience to date.

Biochar Life is the first application of a protocol called Artisan C-Sink intended to benefit smallholders when making biochar from waste materials and using it in the soil. Biochar Life has an extensive monitoring and verification program which was described in December at an International Biochar Initiative Symposium.

The Warm Heart methods (engineered pit kilns and simple TLUDS) are intended make biochar from maize stalks instead of open burning them. Stalks and cobs are carbonized and combined with manure. The blend is placed in the planting hole at planting and as top dressing during the growing season. The practical results have been increased yields with substantially reduced watering, healthier plants and no need for synthetic fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. Biochars fed to animals have reduced disease and increased egg, meat, and milk production. The results are there to see after more than five years of implementation. Each day the local project teams report training in villages of 30-100 people. These are low lost techniques deployed by very low budget programs.

The concentration of carbon added to the planting hole is far higher than in an open burn. Maize residues can still be left on the soil. There would be about 7 tonnes per hectare in the unburned stubble, more than if the stubble was open burned.

The methods promoted by Warm Heart/Biochar Life make more biochar that with cookstoves but there can be benefits from making biochar in stoves and recovering the heat from the process. I reported biochar developments this weekend to the ETHOS conference in Washington. Those who are developing cookstoves to make biochar report about 300gm per stove per day. If that results in approximately 1 metric tonne of biochar per year and the biochar is used in the soil than one household would sequester about 2.5 mt of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) have resulted in a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) potential of about 2.5 mtCO2e/mt biochar. I do not know of an ISO compliant Life Cycle Assessment of biochar producing cookstoves. I understand that an improved cookstove can offset about 1 mtCO2eper year.

Kind regards,

Tom

Tom Miles
Executive Director
U.S. Biochar Initiative
“Promoting the Sustainable Production and Use of Biochar”
www.biochar-us.org<http://www.biochar-us.org/>
tom at biochar-us.org<mailto:usbiochar at gmail.com>
Facebook US Biochar Initiative<http://www.facebook.com/USbiochar/?fref=ts>
Youtube US Biochar Initiative<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKE_YQA_eZsUXPXx21bzbqA>
[cid:image001.jpg at 01DA546F.B200C970]
https://www.warmheartworldwide.org/what-is-biochar.html#:~:text=Biochar%20is%20pure%20carbon.,that%20contribute%20to%20global%20warming.

https://www.biochar.life/

https://www.ethoscon.com/meeting-2024-info

From: Stoves <stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org>> On Behalf Of Ronal Larson
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2024 10:15 PM
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Carbon credits for briquettes that replace charcoal in Africa

Crispin and stoves list

              1.  I’’ve been following stoves and biochar for more than 25 years.  I’m sure I’ve read at least 1000 biochar articles.  Never have I seen anything in print that resembles your sentence from 2/3 down (that I also highlighted there).  My added emphasis.
 "Char created on the land and buried in it depletes the soil carbon because it goes from a soluble form to an insoluble form"

              2.  Please give any citation that caused you to assert what the biochar world believes to be untrue and violates the reason for biochar growing more rapidly than any other CDR approach.

              3.   Or give your rationale, if you have no citation, given that insolubility is considered a principal virtue in the biochar community

Ron

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