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

[Bill Knauss]

Tom,

I think most of the confusion that is preventing us from making biochar in
the global South, at the scale we know is possible, is our failure to
understand the possibilities of how carbon credits can be used to finance
our efforts to reduce, avoid and remove carbon emissions.

ISO-compliant carbon credits verified by LCA are transferable financial
instruments representing the underlying commodity. The underlying commodity
is the reduction, avoidance or removal of one tonne of carbon dioxide or
its carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e).

Financial instruments representing a commodity are essentially privately
issued money that derives its value from the underlying commodity.

The underlying commodity represented in an unverified carbon credit is an
offset for countries to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_determined_contribution> (NDC)
commitments to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement>.

The latest carboncredits.com voluntary carbon market price quoted for
nature based carbon offsets is $1.27 a metric ton. On the other hand carbon
credits that have been verified by an ISO-compliant LCA are trading for
around $200 a metric ton, and in 2022 87% of all LCA verified carbon
credits in the world were for carbon removed and sequestered in biochar.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there still are no registries
that will issue carbon credits for the ISO-compliant verification of
reduced or avoided emissions.

The problem we face for ISO-compliant verification of carbon removals in
biochar is so expensive and time consuming that small biochar producers can
not afford to verify what they produce.

To me the obvious solution is that the big biochar producers, or would be
producers, enter into negotiated partnership  arrangements with city
dwelling cooks, who need the excess heat for cooking, to provide the labor
and stoves necessary to make the biochar for the producer, essentially in
consideration for the big producer aggregating and delivering suitable crop
waste feedstock  for the cooks.

The bad news is that to address climate change we need to avoid and reduce
emissions by a factor many times greater than can be removed in biochar.

Nevertheless, when cooks use the excess heat generated by removing and
sequestering carbon in biochar to avoid or reduce the emissions that would
have otherwise been generated by the fuel they would have used, they are
avoiding more emissions than are being removed in the biochar.

The ISO-compliant LCA used to verify the carbon removals in the biochar,
so the carbon credits can be issued to the producer, verifies that the
cooks have reduced and avoided emissions to the same standards as the
removals are verified.

If the fuel being replaced is artesian charcoal then,      as the FAO has
determined, 10 tonnes of CO2e emissions will have been avoided for each
tonne of charcoal that is replaced with the excess heat from making biochar.

Unfortunately, there are no registries that I am aware of that will issue
ISO-compliant financial instruments/(carbon credits) for the LCA verified
reduction and avoidance of carbon emissions.

Bill



On Thu, Feb 1, 2024, 9:40 AM Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> tom at biochar-us.org <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>
>
>
> 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> *On Behalf Of *Ronal
> Larson
> *Sent:* Tuesday, January 30, 2024 10:15 PM
> *To:* stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
> 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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