A Carbon Hat Trick?

Terra Preta. I don't know where I've been, but I had never heard of it until last week. But I'm starting to get very interested in Terra Preta. "Dark Soil", in Porteugese. A sort of miraculous earth found in the jungles of the Amazon, and apparently, for quite some time posing a mystery to science as to how it was formed. No natural process explains it.

Well it turns out that the answer was under the nose of the scientists. It is, in fact, the creation of technology -- a technology of the native peoples of the Amazon, who effectively used it to terraform amazingly productive food forests.

Terra Preta was formed by a type of slash and burn agriculture, not the kind we today associate with the loss of biodiversity and destruction of the forests, but a technique that did just the opposite. In actuality, there was no burning - the technique seems to have involved allowing the biomass to smolder, creating an incredibly carbon rich biochar.

This method, of thermally converting organic matter in the absence of oxygen, actually absorbs prodigous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locks the carbon into the biochar. In other words, its an excellent carbon sink - something we need right about now.

Moreover, this biochar material makes for very productive soil, something else that seems pretty useful.

OK, now that's very cool. But what really got me going is yet to come.

You see, the method to produce this biochar - from organic wastes of any type, really - is pretty much precisely the same as the used to produce woodgas.

And woodgas, my friends, can be burned directly in a gasoline engine. Or it can be converted into liquid fuel. Or it can be converted into hydrogen.

So just to make sure I've got this straight. A fuel cycle that converts waste to usable, transportable energy while absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and locking it into a highly fertility enhancing soil amendment. Wow.

So I got turned on to all this from the Mechabolic project, spearheaded by Chicken John and Jim Mason . The famed Burning Man artists / engineers / tinkerers have already built a gasifier in the bed of Chicken John's truck and drove it around Berkeley. But that's just the start. The Mechabolic project is audacious and super cool; check it out.

Meanwhile, hey, this is America. It seems like you could make a good living from something like this. Well, if I was the first one to think of it, would I be telling you? Seriously though, there is a company out there commericalizing this, Eprida. It looks like good stuff.

That said, the potential here is clearly enormous. From a commerical perspective, this may not be the most lucrative proposition - since the basic concept was put into practice thousands of years ago (talk about prior art!), and woodgas has been around for 150 years or so. But I'm sure there are tweaks to take it to scale.

Moreover, this is just the ticket for the Permaculture scene. And if the petroleum economy takes a dump, boy will gasification come in handy!

All that said, what I'm really excited about is witnessing the creations of these Burning Man folks; massively fire-spewing mechanical monsters that suck CO2 out of the sky and deposit in their wake fecund black earth.

Wild.