Biochar for real

So biochar will have to catch on right? I have been traveling all over the Midwest following some new tillage equipment and see the potential, but noting by skepticism. It's like ethanol has soured the taste of renewable fuel for these guys. Options are still out there though. POET had a field day a few weeks ago to demonstrate several methods of collecting biomass, some collected just corn cobs, and others collected as much field residue as possible. This was really good informationa and a step in the right direction. The POET spokesperson also noted their expected operating costs reduced significanlty. This is good, but also only means they are reduced, and not "very profitable." But I digress, back to biochar. building a pyrolysis reactor is easy, still getting good biomass to process will be the hard part. What incentive can you give a person to haul $500 worth of cobs to you when they could be hauling $2,000 worth of corn instead, and these are just small wagons. It is icing on the cake for farming operation, but it requires another operator (good ones are hard to come by and too expensive) and wear and tear on more equipment.

I will be putting together some of these numbers for a report soon to find how financially benificial biochar will need to be in order to make it valuable to a farmer to remove the biomass form a field to process into bio-oil and bio-char. I am certian that biochar will be a key in convincing farmers to begin to collect and sell biomass. This can only be done effectively with pyrolysis, or at least thermochemical conversion. Ethanol can have biochar to offer, but it will still require gasification of the slurry that remains at the ind of the process including the waste mash and the removed lignin during pre-processing.