permaculture

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

Hi all,

I seem to have caused a flood of mails about charcoal.

Let me first explain why I don't like the name "bio-char". Charcoal has been 
made by mankind for thousands of years for very specific reasons one  
important one being that it does not decay and will stay in it's original 
form for an extreme long time. That can only be because it is dead and most 
definitely not alive as the name "bio"= old Greek for life suggests.
The bio part is only there to make it a good sales argument imo.

The most economically important reason for making charcoal was/is that as a 
fuel it is very superior to the wood it was made from. Before coal mining 
came to be it was essential to have charcoal for smelting metals and to work 
blacksmith forges. It burns much hotter than wood.
Another reason for making charcoal was that it makes it much easier to bring 
fuel from the woods down to human population centers. A freshly felled tree 
might take extreme hard work for several horses to move while a child could 
lift and carry the charcoal that was made from that tree.
Another reason was that charcoal does not soak up rain water as wood does. 
You can leave it out in the open under the worst of weather and it will 
remain the same.

The internet is full of recipes to make charcoal at home and all of these use 
a large amount of energy to convert wood to charcoal. Which is OK if you use 
the waste heat for cooking and heating but not if you think to do well for 
the planet and to sequester carbon because for every kilo of charcoal you 
make you are going to immediately release, there and then, 20-50 kilos of 
carbon dioxide into the air. Much more if the timber you are starting from 
has a high moisture content and admittedly less if you use an electric system 
that is fed by nuclear or alternative energy.
If you use the energy of burning timber to make charcoal you should weigh all 
the timber used in the process beforehand and then weigh what is left over as 
charcoal to give you an idea of the truth of this. The missing kilos have 
gone up as carbon dioxide mostly.

OK you have made charcoal which means that for the most part only the 
original cell walls of the timber are now left over and they consist of 
crystalline carbon. 
If you look closer you will even find Bucky ball and grapheme structures in 
there. Is that all? 
No there are also still aromatic hydrophobic substances there and for those 
without much chemistry, aromatic means benzene like hexagonal ring structures 
and many of these are known carcinogens to man and beast. 

It can take a year to multiple years for these aromatics to leach out under 
average weather or soil conditions. And even if the remains of those plant 
cells look like nice apartments for microbes and fungi to some, just like 
flats in a high rise they are a toxic habitat without food for micro 
organisms. If anybody can see with the naked eye colonies of bacteria and 
fungi in there they have better eyes than almost anybody alive. It is thought 
today that almost ten % of our body weight consists of such organisms and 
they are completely unnoticed by most until they cause a problem.

Is there any way to get rid of these aromatic compounds fast? Thankfully yes. 
The process is called activating charcoal and it is simply done by setting 
the charcoal back on fire under high oxygen conditions (bellows from below is 
a good way) and then quenching with clean water.

This activated charcoal is what is used in gas masks and water filters and it 
has extremely beneficial medicinal uses. This sort of charcoal will bind 
extremely willingly with all kinds of man made toxins everywhere. As David 
Muhl says, it will be chockfull of glyphosate in most American soils before 
long. I am thinking that this is the main reason that some people see good 
effects from adding charcoal to soil.

Christopher Nesbitt mixes his charcoal into the compost and sees extreme 
beneficial effects from this mix. I wonder what compost on it's own would do? 
Just maybe, charcoal in the mix could slow down decomposition of his compost 
under tropical conditions and have a beneficial effect that way. As a side 
note, according to the late Dr. Bargeela Ratever, a fore runner of scientific 
organic farming, rice hulls were the best thing to break impossibly  heavy 
clay soils into more workable and plant friendly soil. She advocated 
harrowing in the raw hulls into the top 2 inches of clay. I do think that the 
charcoaled hulls would still have a residual beneficial effect because they 
would still contain silicon for instance.
Heisenhauer seems to drench his charcoal with urine and sees good effects 
from that. Unfortunately urea is not readily adsorbed by charcoal. So I don't 
know why he should see immediate colonization of the charcoal.

One other important point is to quantify the sequestration of carbon. Even if 
we burned the complete biomass on the planet to make charcoal it would still 
be a ridiculously minor bucketful compared to the sea of CO2 pollution caused 
by the oil and coal industries and our burning of their products and there is 
no doubt in my mind that it would  make us all extinct if we attempted it.

All the best to all,
John