The city of Stockholm pioneers in the biochar use and production

Last August I had chance to visit the city of Stockholm and hear about their biochar efforts. It is really impressive what they have succeeded within past five years or so, much thanks to the enthusiasm of Mr. Björn Embrén from City of Stockholm’s Landscaping Department.

It all started more than 15 years ago, when Björn noticed that trees perform poorly in compacted urban soils. It was costly to plant trees, fertilize and take care of them- and if they were not doing well, they had no landscaping value and they had to be replaced. On the other hand, there were trees growing on sides of rock walls or on top of old chimneys, where rarely any soil existed- so it was not soil that the roots needed but effective aeration (CO2 away and oxygen to the roots), moisture and nutrients.

They then started experimenting with structural soils, a planting holes with a layer of big, 3-7 cm diameter rocks in the bottom and soil washed between the rocks.

This was a success, and as the next step, in 2009, they switched to using biochar instead of soil for all of their urban tree planting projects. They have found that the main advantage of biochar for urban tree projects over other soil amendments is that it resists compression and compaction.  The crushed stones and biochar mix results in an improved porosity in the soil (roughly 40%).  Increased porosity facilitates better gas exchange, permeability leading to improved root penetration.

Schematics from Björn Embrén.

A further improvement on their methods has been to have the biochar and stones delivered pre-mixed.  They have found that this saves up to 25% in time and labour costs.  The preferred biochar particle size of the biochar is between 1 – 10 mm and currently they recommend approximately 2.25 cubic meters of biochar   for each urban tree (likely mixed with rocks already, but still quite a lot!).  This explains why loads of biochar from Europe have been shipped to Stockholm, mostly from Germany but also from  RPK Hiili OY (Mikkeli, Finland).

In order to be truly sustainable, however, a goal of using locally produced biochar from underutilized biomass was set. To attain this goal the City of Stockholm initiated the Stockholm Biochar Project with the objective of producing both biochar and renewable energy using urban green waste collected from municipal parks as well as city residents.  This particular biomass is often difficult to dispose of and very much underutilized.
The Stockholm Biochar Project team succeeded in winning one of the five coveted prizes of the 2014 Mayors Challenge funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the EUROCITIES organization which netted them 1 million euros to be used to set up their initial pilot plant.

We visited the plant last summer and according to latest news in the Biochar journal, it will produce its first tons of biochar within a few months from now, in summer 2016! The pilot plant will start from producing 300 tonnes of biochar per year and at full scale, will reach 1,500 tonnes per year. The heat generated during production will be added to a local or district heating network. Biochar will be used both by city residents and by city landscapers in public parks and urban tree beds. Probably we will soon see many other cities following the example and getting their green waste recycled, carbon fixed and trees happy!

Read more and see images at: https://www.biochar-journal.org/en/ct/77-Planting-Urban-Trees-with-Biochar

Sonnenerde running for European Business Award, online voting now!

An Austrian biochar producer Sonnenerde has been selected of all the companies in Austria as the Austrian Champion for the European Business Award. This is great success for the biochar friends worldwide!

Now it is possible for everyone to vote for them and if lucky, biochar would get an international platform and excellent promotion! It is a big chance for the whole biochar community. So if you do not have any other favorite candidate, please consider voting for Sonnenerde!

Voting is easy (took me less than 3 minutes), but check out their video first:
http://www.businessawardseurope.com/vote/detail-new/the-award-for-environmental-corporate-sustainability-1/15785

Thanks for sharing this information to your friends and interested people!

Previous and upcoming international biochar events

The field of biochar is changing rapidly and the newest developments and ideas are exchanged in conferences. I have listed a selection of both previous and upcoming conferences to this site and will try to keep this list up to date. If you know a conference that is not yet listed here, but should be, please contact me!

I would also like to invite you all to the  Joint International Biochar Symposium 2015 in September 2015, as this is the final conference of the Biochar COST Action and unites the two often separated, co-existing “worlds” of practitioners, stakeholders and applicants with biochar scientists for inspiring exchange.

The quality of biochar and how to engineer the biochar needed for a specific purpose?

The biochar research has grown almost exponentially within the past ten years:

Similarly, the industry is growing globally (large-scale European examples being the Sonnenerde in Austria and RPK Hiili OY in Mikkeli, Finland). While Sonnenerde is already a well-known  producer of growth media, composts and EBC-certified biochar (see their PR video in English here),  the largest charcoal producer in Finland, RPK Hiili OY has also sold several tens of truckloads of their biochar for soil amendment purposes. For example, the City of Stockholm has been using their biochar as a soil amendment  for tree-planting for years with great results (see the recent article in Nature about it under Biochar publications as well as the story in the magazine Ekoelo (1/2015)).

With both the research and industry of biochar use as a soil amendment growing, more and more effort is put also to the classification and certification of the product. Both the IBI's biochar certificate and the European Biochar Certificate (EBC) have been under development already for a couple of years. While the IBI Biochar Certification Program is a voluntary, self-certifying, biochar certification program administered by the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), the EBC is coordinated throughout Europe by the independent quality assurance agency q.inspecta, with inspections of production plants in individual countries carried out by independent national inspection agencies. Inspections take place once a year. Producers confirm that they will keep up-to-date production records. The EBC aims to enable and guarantee sustainable biochar production and to give customers a reliable quality basis. Furthermore, it also aims at providing a firm state-of-the-art knowledge transfer as a sound basis for future EU legislation.

The certified biochars will be more uniform in their nature, for instance, the EBC has a positive list for feedstock, meaning that the carbonaceous material produced from old car tires does not qualify as biochar. Same story with charcoal burnt for energy production (e.g. Torrec and BalBic) as it is then not used in a way that "that does not involve its rapid mineralisation to CO2" and does not allow the material to "eventually become a soil amendment".

But even when certified with the EBC/IBI certificate, the variety between biochars produced from different biomasses under different pyrolysis conditions remains notable. The established hypothesis in the literature is that the selection of peak pyrolysis temperature and feedstock material – as two key production variables – fundamentally affects resulting biochar properties. Even though numerous studies during the past decade have been trying to identify the relationships between production variables and biochar properties (e.g., Zhu et al., 2005, Gaskin et al., 2008, Nguyen and Lehmann, 2009, Cao and Harris, 2010, Joseph et al., 2010, Keiluweit et al., 2010, Cao et al., 2011, Cross and Sohi, 2011, Hossain et al., 2011, Mukherjee et al., 2011, Enders et al., 2012, Rajkovich et al., 2012 and Zhao et al., 2013), the small number of samples analyzed has hindered the quantitative understanding of the relationships between production variables and biochar properties. 

The recent study by Verónica L. Morales et al. (2015) makes a giant leap towards closing this gap. As the title Reverse engineering of biochar suggests, this paper underpins quantitative relationships that account for the combined effects that starting biomass and peak pyrolysis temperature have on physico-chemical properties of biochar. For this purpose they used meta-data from published data of diverse biochar samples (n = 102). In addition to the networks of intercorrelated properties and models predicting biochar properties, they have developed also a free web-tool Biochar Engineering implementing the derived models to maximize their utility and distribution. Using this web-tool, it is possible to "design" the biochar that would best suit certain purposes, be it liming acidic soils or fertilization soils with nutrients, high specific surface area or maximum C-sequestration potential (the fixed-C content).

Naturally, this is just the first step along the lines of being able to predict the properties of the biochar, the range of temperatures as well as feedstocks that the model is based on, are limited, but it definitely is the way forward for the biochar research and industry. And the tools seems reasonably accurate in terms of the biochars I have been using in my experiments, especially regarding to the C content and SSA.

The Biochar Journal (tBJ) is online now!

The authors of the popular Ithaka-journal have widened their focus and in co-operation with the American biochar enthusiasts, the first international journal dedicated to biochar is online now!

The Biochar Journal will provide relevant, cutting edge research and practical guidance showing how the use of biochar and other climate friendly techniques can not only boost economic and environmental resilience but also regenerate local, regional and global ecosystems. Biochar in agriculture, livestock farming, building industry, brownfield and habitat remediation, desert reforestation, disaster management, water treatment, reusable packaging, electronics and much more will be unfolded in the Biochar Journal.

Biochar papers from Finland

Biochar has been intensively studied in Finland during past couple of years, resulting in constantly increasing number of  peer-reviewed papers published. In order to make it easier to find the papers, we have listed the Finnish biochar articles on this page, sorted by date of publishing. We have chosen the papers that fulfill the following criteria:

a) the papers target biochar use as a soil amendment material
b) the papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals
c) the research is conducted in Finland.
 
Should you know biochar papers from Finland that have not yet been added to the list, please contact us!

2nd Nordic Biochar Seminar

95 participants from 14 countries, 30 oral presentations and 35 poster presentations-this was the 2nd Nordic Biochar Seminar, held in Helsinki at 14-15 February 2013!

The University of Helsinki Biochar team is proud to have hosted this milestone event in biochar research in Northern Europe! Additionally, we are very happy that the conference brought together people from all over the world, from India to Canada, in addition to European countries!

Many of the presentations and posters can be accessed here.

Furthermore, in December 2013 the international peer-reviewed open access journal Agricultural and Food Science has  published the Biochar Special  Section (Vol 22, No 4 2013) based on the papers submitted by the seminar participants. More information can be found on their website.

1. Nordic Biochar Seminar, Oslo, Norway

Two conference days, four sessions, 16 oral presentations and two poster sessions together with panel discussion- that was the First Nordic Biochar Conference, a milestone event of biochar research in Nordic countries! The conference brought together researchers from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and UK to share their experiences and first stunning results on possibilities and constraints in temperate climate. 

The University of Helsinki Biochar research team thanks Bioforsk and especially Mr. Adam O'Toole for his dedication for organizing the conference and making it possible for us to share our first results!

The conference presentations are available in their website. 

3rd UK Biochar Conference 2011

More than 150 researchers, practitoners, government officials, companies, social enterprises and NGOs met in Edinburgh on the 24 - 26th May for the the 3^rd UK Biochar Conference.  One third of the delegates attended from outside of the UK  (those who were able to find their way around the ash clouds from Icelandic volcano).

 

The conference was preceded by an official unveiling of new pilot-scale 'specified biochar' production
pyrolysis facility at the UKBRC on the 24th of May.  On 25th and 26th of May, about 20 oral presentations as well as more than 50 posters of latest biochar research were presented.  

 

The meeting was an important milestone for both the UK and global biochar communities and a report on the event is in preparation which will be able available on this website in due course. The conference was covered live and webstreamed, courtesy of Environment and Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network (ESKTN). The link can be accessed from here.

Many of the presentations given in the conference will be published in special issue of a scientific journal, "Earth & Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh", expected to be out in mid-2012.

2nd Finnish Biochar seminar

University of Helsinki Biochar Research group is pleased to have held the 2nd Finnish Biochar Seminar, in Viikki Science Library, Helsinki,  February 14, 2011.  The seminar  included 14 oral presentations and invaluable discussion opportunities to all Finnish as well as Estonian Biochar researchers.

Thank you to all those who attended and presented your work. We have posted all the presentations to special page in this blog (see "2nd Finnish Biochar Seminar"). Although most of the presentations were held in Finnish, hopefully guests interested in them will be able to understand their content.