Biochar on Craigslist

[larry3228]

http://nashville.craigslist.org/grd/2849052584.html

It looks like this guy is selling the coals from his stove at $1.50 per pound by calling it biochar. From the picture it looks like it has been rinsed clean from the ashes. Load up the Blaze King with 80# of wood, heat the house for a day, take out the ashes a little early so there is still plenty of coal and sell it for $15. He makes $450 per month from his stove. This should end all discusisons about what to do with our ashes.

Larry.

 

[amateur cutter]

Huh..... & to think I've been just dumping all that ash in my lawn for years when I could have been selling it. A C

 

[Blazin]

It gets better, read the wiki page on BioChar. :cheese:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

Suppose this was written by environmentalists?

 

[Adios Pantalones]

Terra preta is a very real thing, but $1.50 a pound?? Yikes!

That is basically organic/real charcoal. It should have more value as grilling coals than as a soil amendment.

 

[Wood Duck]

I sift the coals from my stove ashes and I am using the coals, I mean biochar, as a soil amendment for my vegetable garden. I wonder if I can take a $1.50 per pound tax credit for reducing greenhouse gas emmissions. Major tax refund here I come!

By the way, even though I make no effort to reduce the amount of coals I remove from the stove (because I want the coals for the garden) I get a surprisingly small smount of charcoal. When I am shoveling it from the stove it always seems like a lot, but piled in the garden it looks like less than a trash can full from about two cords of wood.

 

[peakbagger]

Be aware that Biochar needs some organics mixed in with it for it to become Terra Preta. Just dumping straight charcoal into the ground is not the same as Terra Preta. I met an advocate down at a show in Mass selling units to make bio-char and his method of activating the bio-char was to urinate in it. Urine is sterile and contains urea and other dissolved solids which are good for plants. The urea is a fertilizer precursor and is captured by the biochar so that it is available to the plants. He said that he knows it is ready to use when its starts smelling. The biochar works like activated carbon, it absorbs nutrients (as well as contaminants) and makes it availlable to plants. Otheewise the nutrients tend to wash out of the soil and eventually the soil loses its fertility.

Other advocates suggest mixing it with pig or chicken manure. My concern with that concept is that any pathogens in the manure dont get killed unless the mix is heated.

If the US did give credits for sequestering carbon, biochar would become a major industry. The wood would be heated to drive off the volatiles which could be used to generate power (wood gas generators) and the remaining char would be buried, segregating the carbon. There was an entrepeneur in VT that was skipping the biochar and mixing manure in with his soil. He measured the amount of carbon in the soil prior to application and after the application and then sold the carbon sequestration rights to some green entity.

A lot of folks dont know that when they are voluntarilly buying carbon offsets, that a large amount of the offsets are just scams. China makes billions off of the Europeans selling carbon credits that are suspect at best and fraud at their worse.