Show Notes
For Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZYX News for Friday, Nov. 5. I’m Sonia Waraich.
Climate change is intensifying and the window to make changes that can stop that intensification is closing. Many scientists and engineers around the world are racing to invent or improve technology that can mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis. One of those technologies is being tested out in our own backyard in Jackson Demonstration State Forest.
A little gray fan is whirring on this contraption that looks kind of like an air duct standing at a 45 degree angle. It’s attached to a black barrel with a short, black plastic tube. Behind it, there’s a huge pile of slash, or chopped down trees.
“So this is where the residue comes down, and there’s this mechanical system here.”
Kevin Kung is a researcher from MIT and one of the people who built this prototype. He’s explaining how the residue that goes into the machine basically gets roasted through a special chemical reaction. Residue is just another word for slash and agricultural waste like coconut shells and rice husks.
“And as it goes up, we do inject air at certain places, it’s called oxygening torrefaction, that’s why you can sort of hear the whirring of the blowers, we’re trying to start those right now. Once it goes up, it gets collected in this chamber here, and that’s where the final product is.”
The final product is a charcoal-based fertilizer called biochar. That’s not the only thing the prototype makes, but has been a focal point for Kung and another researcher named Vidyut Mohan. The two of them started a company called Takachar to make
“Small-scale, low-cost portable systems that can latch onto the back of tractors and pickup trucks that could be deployed to rural, hard-to-access regions.”
This prototype offers big hopes for reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires locally and air pollution globally. It takes things that loggers and farmers would otherwise burn, like slash and agricultural waste, and turns it into things they can sell like biochar.
“Biochar is simply charcoal that has been made intentionally for the purposes of adding to soil.”
Dr. Caroline Masiello is an expert on biochar from Rice University in Texas. She says people have been putting charcoal in their soil for thousands of years..
“When I moved to Houston, I went to the local nursery and I noticed they had big bags of charcoal out and I asked the guy, ‘Hey, so why are you selling charcoal?’ and he said, ‘Oh, you put it in the bad gumbo soil here and things grow better.’”
The charcoal-based soil amendments have different properties depending on the type of residue that’s being used to make it.
“Biochar made from forestry, from wood products, is going to be extremely low in nitrogen and phosphorus. So you’re not adding a nutrient to the system, but it does add reactive surfaces to the system and those reactive surfaces do a good job of holding onto nutrients.”
Biochar also reduces carbon dioxide emissions by taking residue that would have rapidly decomposed and turning it into a substance that decomposes more slowly.
“If the lumber industry has sawdust waste, that’s a great source for biochar because that material would decompose to CO2 very rapidly otherwise and if you convert it to charcoal then it’s not going to decompose to CO2.”
However, Masiello cautions you have to make sure the trees being used to make biochar weren’t already serving an important role in the forest for it to make sense as a climate strategy.
“You wouldn’t cut down an intact forest to make biochar.”
Back in Jackson State, Kung explains how most residues in the forest and on farms are often very loose, wet and bulky. That makes them difficult to transport and leads to farmers and loggers doing things that aren’t exactly climate friendly to get rid of them.
“So if you are on a farm, often what you have to do is burn down residues in the open air and if it’s in a forested area, the buildup of that residue can exacerbate wildfires. So in both cases it’s not only a waste but also a lot of pollution that could be caused because of the burning and so forth.”
The Takachar prototype being tested in Jackson State is supposed to incentivize putting a stop to that polluting behavior. And it isn’t just for use in forests. The technology has already been successfully used in a pilot program with 5,000 farmers in Kenya.
Now, the company has a couple of pilots running in Indian rice paddies alongside the one in Mendocino. Kung says the objective is to learn more about adapting what they’ve developed in the lab to real-world settings.
“Thinking about, well if people are using this kind of Bobcat, how does it load stuff? And if people are chipping things, then how could we potentially just take the output of that directly into our reactor. So we have to design in a way that’s appropriate for these other machine forms that are working onsite.”
Researchers are expecting to demonstrate the prototype for interested community members this spring.
To learn more about the biochar prototype, including how to work with the pilot program, visit KZYX’s Report for America partner The Mendocino Voice at mendovoice.com.
For the KZYX News, I’m Sonia Waraich, a Report For America corps member. For all our local coverage, with photos and more, visit KZYX.org. You can also subscribe to the KZYX News podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.