A group of MTU students is currently exploring the feasibility of establishing the Biochar @ MTU Project as an Enterprise team or affiliating it with existing campus projects and initiatives. The impetus and commitment remain that the project is a reciprocal project with the local community, with shared access to resources, planning, and participation.
If you are interested in joining this university and community effort — as a community member, as a student, staff, or faculty member — write to Michael and we will add you to our biochar-l mailing list and update you on future plans.
Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education article “Campus Planners Discuss Challenges in Attaining Sustainability” poses a series of questions, including, “do colleges have a role or even an obligation to try out unusual energy technologies and track their performance?”
James E. Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and colleagues mention biochar in a report, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?”:
Carbon sequestration in soil also has significant potential. Biochar, produced in pyrolysis of residues from crops, forestry, and animal wastes, can be used to restore soil fertility while storing carbon for centuries to millennia. Biochar helps soil retain nutrients and fertilizers, reducing emissions of GHGs such as N2O. Replacing slash-and-burn agriculture with slash-and-char and use of agricultural and forestry wastes for biochar production could provide a CO2 drawdown of ~8 ppm or more in half a century.
The full report can be found here: www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf
The September 2008 issue of National Geographic has an article on soil that contains an extended discussion of biochar — beginning on page 7 [of 9]:
Sombroek had wondered if modern farmers might create their own terra preta—terra preta nova, as he dubbed it. Much as the green revolution dramatically improved the developing world’s crops, terra preta could unleash what the scientific journal Nature has called a ‘black revolution’ across the broad arc of impoverished soil from Southeast Asia to Africa.
Key to terra preta is charcoal, made by burning plants and refuse at low temperatures. In March a research team led by Christoph Steiner, then of the University of Bayreuth, reported that simply adding crumbled charcoal and condensed smoke to typically bad tropical soils caused an ‘exponential increase’ in the microbial population—kick-starting the underground ecosystem that is critical to fertility.
