Agriculture Carbon Trading

David Yarrow, May 21, 2008

spent all day at a workshop on
trading carbon credits for agriculture at the albany county cooperative extension office. the workshop was targeted for government staff and educators who advise farmers, and farmers themselves. it seems this is a step in the complex process of gearing up for RGGI (www.rggi.org) -- the regional greenhouse gas
initiative cap and trade carbon exchange involving 10 northeast & mid-atlantic states -- which will be implemented beginning 2009. considerable effort was required to get complete agreement from all 10 states on standards, protocols and policies, but the system is open to admit new states.

RGGI is currently being set up for
large electric power producers, since they account for 24% of GHG
emissions, and represent just a few players who are easy to organize and induce to participate. beginning next year, each state will impose emissions caps, focusing on the three principal GHGs: CO2, CH4 (23x C equiv) and N2O (289x C equiv). power plants that reduce emissions under the cap will have "allowances" to sell. power producers that exceed their cap will have to purchase allowances or offsets. the first auction will take place later this year.

farms can qualify to sell
"offsets" to emitters as credits against excess emissions, primarily by sequestering C. offsets must be: REAL, ADDITIONAL, VERIFIABLE, ENFORCEABLE, and PERMANENT. but only three strategies for farms will be recognized:

1) avoided or destroyed methane
(primarily from anerobic manure handling)

2) afforestation (replanting land
with no recent history with trees)

3) conservation grassland (no
till, except ridge till & planting grassland set asides, no hay or
grazing)

in addition, farms can qualify for
renewable energy credits by converting from fossil to renewable fuels.

i am disappointed, but not
surprised, RGGI doesn't recognize any soil sequestration strategy except
conservation grassland. after all, soil is the start and end of the C
cycle, and stores 2.5 times more C than plant biomass, and more
than the atmosphere. yet, no credit is offered for raising soil
organic matter (SOM), largely because such C storage sinks are not permanent, ony remove C for 5 to 25 years, depending on the biomass source -- leaves vs. stems & stalks vs. tree trunks -- and are hard to quantify and verify. and also, RGGI rules currently offer no recognition of the win-win-win strategy of C sequestration with biochar, which removes C for at least centuries, and likely millennia.

during the day, two questions came up from the audience about "charcoal in soil" and "black carbon," but not one speaker knew more than the least about biochar, and none realized that char's reduced C is retained in soil for centuries, or its effects on soil fertility, capacity and microbial complexity.

i handed out copies of the attached
papers, plus the Catalyst article on "Carbon Farmers,"
and brochures about SEA-90 sea minerals and "nutrient dense"
foods. i made two good contacts which will likely lead to biochar
workshops in NY this summer, and i will go talk to RGGI-NY staff in their albany office.

see the website below for further
details. click the "Learn" keyword to download facts sheets
from the C trading training workshop:

http://www.agcarbontrading.org/

Carbon Trading

Market
Opportunities for Agriculture

Carbon Trading:
Market Opportunities for Agriculture

8:30am-5:30pm,
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, free and open to educators at
any of the 4 sites:

Voorheesville,
New York (live); Greensburg, PA (videoconference);

Georgetown,
DE (videoconference); Boscawen, NH (videoconference)

A
workshop for the Northeast on Carbon Trading -- a method to reduce
global greenhouse gas emissions by allowing market mechanisms to find the most
cost-effective way to reduce emissions from a variety of sources. There
are opportunities for farm, forest and land management to participate in
greenhouse gas mitigation.

Carbon Trading: Market Opportunities for Agriculture is
hosted by Central New
York Resource Conservation and Development, Inc. (CNY RC&D) with
funding from Northeast Sustainable
Agriculture Research and Education (NESARE). The objective is to give
agricultural educators a basic understanding of the complexities of carbon
trading, while providing them with a set of tools to educate farmers and
landowners about carbon trading.

This workshop is geared primarily to extension agents, soil and water
conservation district staff, USDA staff, and non-profit agricultural educators,
and is open to landowners and farmers as well.

Topics:

• Introduction to Cap & Trade and Agricultural
  Offsets –Jeni Wightman (Consultant)
• Agricultural Practices and Carbon Offsets
  –John Duxbury
  (Cornell University)
• Chicago Climate Exchange and Agricultural Offsets
  –Neil Sampson (Consultant)
• Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Ag Offsets
  –John Marschilok (NY DEC/RGGI)
• Basic Do’s and Don’ts of Contract Law

  –David Watson (Council of Community Services)

• Carbon Credits and Whole Farm Planning
  –Phil Metzger
  (USDA-NRCS/CNYRC&D)
• Farm Experience with Selling Credits

  –Connie Patterson (Patterson Farms)

• Carbon Credit Economic Scenarios

  –Steve Bulkley (Consultant)

Resource Guide: Attendees
will receive the Carbon Trading: Market Opportunities for Agriculture
Resource Guide with modular Fact Sheets. These and the Power Point
Presentations will also be available to attendees and the public on this
workshop’s web site after May 20.

Primeval Forest Mining
Folke Gunther, May 21, 2008

More Trials
Max Henderson,May 12, 2008

If you can bear with me here is some info from last weekend’s
trials. Various conclusions are probably of little scientific merit and may well be blindingly obvious but I’ll include for those who maybe don’t have one of these exciting toys.

1. The original second–hand house brick kiln had 15cm/6” (when will the US
   join the rest of the world?) gaps between the drum and the bricks on both
   sides, and a relatively shallow space under the drum for the initial fire.
   The idea was that it would be easier to add fuelwood on the sides, but in
   fact this reduced the effectiveness of the insulation.
2. I re-laid the bricks to give a greater fire space under the drum for the
   initial fire, and moved the side walls inwards so that the only gap was
   between the ridges of the drum and the bricks. The basic concept was to
   apply the heat from underneath, and to insulate as best possible (under
   the primitive circumstances) against any unnecessary heat losses
3. The drum was loaded with around 100kg of old dry dense hardwood, plus 2 x 75mm
   thick telephone books and some tyre scraps I had collected from beside the
   highway.
4. Scrap dry wood was loaded under the drum and fired at 17:00. Once that achieved
   a significant burn I added bricks to the open front to further improve
   insulation
5. I’ve learnt that a slow initial burn is best as opposed to a blast. The
   assumption here is that the mass of material in the drum (despite MC of
   maybe less than 12%), needs gradual heat (given the substantial insulating
   properties of dry dense wood) well before the stage when pyrolisis can
   begin and be sustained. I’ve done the opposite –high initial heat, quick
   gasification, and then no continuation. There is a lot to discuss here,
   including the use of ‘waste’ heat to raise the temp and reduce MC, in the
   following batch.
6. By 18:00 the first gas burn had started and by 18:15 the 8 x 8mm holes in the
   base of the drum were all roaring
7. This was about the 10^th trial, and with each the seal on the drum
   lid has become less effective. This photo shows the burn of the escaping
   gases through these leaks. In a totally un-scientific guess I’d suggest
   that at least a litre of gas/second was burning happily through the gaps.
   None of this energy was in any way contributing to the char process. These
   waste gases burnt for 2 hours.

8. With all the jets alight I then added bricks to the top of the drum, giving
   better insulation.

9. By 19:00 the drum was glowing red hot when seen through the gaps in the top
   bricks, except for a small strip down the centre of the top. I dropped
   some glass from a broken bottle in a couple of the gaps, and within
   minutes the glass became malleable.
10. Around 21:00 the gas burn started to slow down, and by 22:00 the last flame was
    gone.
11. The front bricks were removed at dawn, and by midday the drum was cool enough
    to be opened without a risk of the char catching alight.

12. The
    charring was complete, including the tyre rubber, the 2 phone books, and
    dense hardwood as large as 20cm/8” in diameter.
13. Volume
    loss was in the region of 20% at a guess.

It is the energy output that continues to stun me. The
volume of gas that escaped through the poor lid seal was very substantial and
burnt for over 2 hours. In addition, the gas burning under the drum was
obviously far in excess of the volume required to maintain the char process,
just using the red heat of the drum as an indicator. And on top of that was the
vast heat energy given off to the atmosphere despite the attempts to provide
insulation.

I’ll continue making batches using this crude system
every weekend, but there’s not a lot more to prove and I now really need to
take the lessons learnt and build a decent drum and kiln. In particular the
effectiveness of the insulation will be a considerable determinant in the efficiency
of the process. I will aim for a castable refractory kiln in a similar shape to
the current brick one, with relatively narrow gaps between the drum and the
refractory except for the “firebox” underneath. It will have two hinged doors
at the front – the upper one allowing the drum to be slid out above the lower
firebox door. A similar upper door also for the rear, and this will also have
an adjustable vent to allow heat to escape rearwards. This would lead into a
second chamber where another drum loaded with wood is waiting its turn in the
queue, being pre-heated at the same time. When one drum has completed the char
process, it will be slid out to cool, the drum in the heat chamber at the rear
is slid in to take its place, the refractory is at high temp already, the gas
jets are lit, doors closed, the third drum is loaded and slid into the warming
chamber….

The drums to be fabricated from boiler plate, and
maybe with domed lids and toggle screws to clamp down. Then I need to work out
how to plug in a pipe or hose to vent off excess gas, plus a compressor and a
pressure vessel to store. And that pre-supposes a capacity to record
temperatures inside the drum so that this info can be fed to a controller that
will make decisions when and if to pipe off some gas for storage. Plus a
serious gas burner system under the drum, because I believe we can eliminate
the need for wood fuel and just use some of the stored excess gas. And then
some boiler tube at an upper level through which water can be piped and fed into
a large storage tank as a heat bank, and then into the house and/or a
greenhouse in winter through sub-floor piping, radiators, or a concrete storage
tank under the slab. I don’t have a house at the farm yet or even a greenhouse
much less an electricity supply but that just adds some more interesting
challenges. Its down to time and dollar availability.

In the meantime I’m continuing with the garden trials,
and certainly there is visible evidence of improved growth and vigour in the
plots which had the char added. The best is the one that also had some cocopeat
organic matter added, as well as some worm castings. Digging down a few inches
and grabbing a handful gives this sweet-smelling crumbly mix, laden with
organic matter and just seeming to be bursting with goodness. Hardly a
scientific analysis but I’ve been handling and smelling soil for a long time
and this lot is just about good enough to eat.

Max H

In Our state We are having 70% Forest .Mainly Pine forest in every summer it is cause of forest fire . We face huge loss of trees, properties and life too.This is cost to Forest department . We develop the method to convert pine needle into CHARCOAL BRIQUETTE. Which use as cooking fuel. Now they are not cutting the tree for fuel.Save the forest use this method. This low cost method. for rural area. Apart of that it is produce local emplyment. Get the chrcoal with cutting tree.Like  LANTANA,PINE NEEDLE.

Casmance Kiln

Benjamin Domingo, Argentian, April 29, 2008

Agrichar Video
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2007

Video on Agrichar, International Agrichar Initiative conference (April 2007), BEST Technologies, and use of agrichar in Australia.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/broadband/catalyst/asx/Agrichar_hi.asx

Simple charcoal kiln
Folke Gunther, April 24, 2008

A wonderfully simple method for making charcoal at home or on the allotment.

"http://picasaweb.google.se/folkeg/TheSimplestOfTheSimple

--

There is a wide demand for charcoal kilns to be used by anybody having an allotment or garden sized plot. The idea of making char of surplus biomass instead of firing it is widely spread in Latin America (and Japan?). Burning the pyrolysis gasses instead of emitting them makes the method comparatively safe, although not efficient regarding their potential utilisation of gasses.

I agree that his is a very small scale method, bu imagine 2 billion people having it, making 1 kg char a week for their lots. That would imply about 0.1 Gt annually, or 5% of what would be necessary to sequester for making a change.

Naturally, this is not the method to save the world from entering a tipping point, but it could well be of some help.

Besides, making 50 kg of char annually, would certainly make a change for the production form a normal sized allotment, certainly so if you go on for several years.

I don't agree that using barrels for making char automatically would imply methane emissions. That must certainly be a consideration depending of the charring method, not the material used.

----------------------------------------
Folke Günther
Kollegievägen 19
224 73 Lund
Sweden
Phone: +46 (0)46 141429
Cell: +46 (0)709 710306
URL: http://www.holon.se/folke
BLOG: http://folkegunther.blogspot.com/

Pyrolysis Reactor Tower Assembly
Sean Barry, April 21, 2008

I assembled the Pyrolysis Reactor Tower today. I had it fabricated over the winter.

Regards,

SKB

On the Practical Side
Max Henderson, SE Queensland, Australia, April 19, 2008

(Select photo to enlarge)

Dear All,

For those on the list who haven’t had the opportunity to experiment, here are some photos of my first trials. Apologies to those who are well ahead of this stage.

Photo 1 shows the very basic kiln, constructed of un-bonded second-hand bricks and sized to take a 200 litre drum (55 gallon in he US). This particular drum has a removable lid held in place with an over-centre clamp.

Photo 2 shows the drum in place and loaded with seasoned offcuts of local hardwoods such as Ironbark (Euc piniculata), which is hard and dense. The drum is raised off the brick floor the height of 2 bricks to allow firewood to be placed under. The base of the drum (on its side) is drilled with 8 x 8mm holes in a line evenly spaced. These permit the generated gases to exit and burn.

3 shows the flames after the load has started to gassify. Depending in the intensity of the external fire and the sizes, moisture content and density of the timber load, the beginning of the gasification phase can take from 30 minutes upwards.

4 and 5 show the char output.


Photo 6 gives an idea of the vast amount of energy released. At this trial the front of the kiln was also bricked up once the fire had started, to further concentrate the heat. For pure spectacle this is best done at night, preferably lubricated with copious cold beers. This is indeed hot and thirsty work. What you can’t hear is the whistling of the gas as it exits the holes in the drum, and the roar of the fire. Obviously there is huge opportunity to capture surplus gas and compress to store.

7 shows the first experimental vegetable bed prior to planting, approx 4m x 1.2m. The char was broken up before adding but this could have been done much better. Around 10cm thickness was added to the bed. Also added was 5 cm of compost and 1 kg of NPK fertiliser (13:13:15 + 2Mg). The bed was then forked a number of times to a 20cm depth. For comparison purposes an adjacent bed was prepared in the same manner including the compost and the NPK, but no added char.

Corn, broad beans and basil were planted in both. Definitely germination was better in the char bed and definitely initial growth was also more vigorous. Unfortunately the wallabies broke the fence ending that trial, but the fence has been reinforced and the beds planted again. This time I’ve added a third bed the same as the first with the char, compost and NPK, but added 5 cm of worm castings from my composting worm experimental pile. (I believe composting worms have equivalent miracle capacity as does char).

The test site is just above the creek flats on land that was a dairy farm for maybe 100 years before being abandoned some 20 years ago and allowed to return to natural forest, mainly eucalypts. Around 5 acres have been cleared. Soil texture is loamy, with recent tests indicating deficiencies across the full range of nutrients. Annual rainfall is in the 1500mm range. Being a fairly civilised part of the world we don’t have any of that snow stuff but winter daytime temps can plunge horrifically to 10 deg C (50F), with occasional night time frosts. Terrifying. Right now we’re at the beginning of Autumn.

I’ll update in a couple of weeks.

Max H
mfh01@bigpond.net.au