Sustainable Design Update

Biochar

This may sound like another of my “Free Energy” posts, but it isn’t.

Liquid fuel, similar to Diesel fuel, and other hydrocarbons can be made by heating up biomass without oxygen. The process, known as pyrolysis, is similar to how charcoal is made. Take a sealed container, fill it with wood (or other biomass), heat it up to 300 – 500 C and condense the gasses that are emitted by the heating biomass. The result is a “BioCrude” oil distilate and charcoal.

Biocrude can be processed just like crude oil is processed to make some lighter distillates and diesel fuel. The remaining charcoal can be burned – in which case this process is not carbon negative but slightly carbon emitting. Or better yet, the charcoal can be buried or used as a soil amendment, in which case the process is carbon negative.

This process is currently being commercialized by a number of companies, Dynamotive looks to be at the head of the pack with a plant in Guelph, Ontario now online processing 200 tonnes of biomass per day.

Link to Scientific American on Biochar (they call it agrichar)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Energy, Sustainability, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.