The upcoming G8 & G20 summit in Huntsville, Canada, makes this the perfect time to write about a topic somewhat neglected by our blog recently: biochar.
Bring it on Climate Change!
So what is this thing they call biochar, you ask? It’s been described as the Swiss Army knife, or the “killer app” of climate solutions.
Stephen J Dodds, Professor of Control Engineering at the University of East London, gives us a clue.
Biochar is a 2,000 year-old practice that converts agricultural waste into a soil enhancer that can hold carbon, boost food security and discourage deforestation. The process creates a fine-grained, highly porous charcoal that helps soils retain nutrients and water.
Biochar can be an important tool to increase food security and cropland diversity in areas with severely depleted soils, scarce organic resources, and inadequate water and chemical fertilizer supplies.
Biochar also improves water quality and quantity by increasing soil retention of nutrients and agrochemicals for plant and crop utilization. More nutrients stay in the soil instead of leaching into groundwater and causing pollution.
The carbon in biochar resists degradation and can hold carbon in soils for hundreds to thousands of years. Biochar is produced through pyrolysis or gasification — processes that heat biomass in the absence (or under reduction) of oxygen.
My note: biochar is an important byproduct of the good combustion in certain improved cookstoves, like WorldStove’s Lucia stove, among others.
The Lucia stove is so cute we want to pinch its handles!
In addition to creating a soil enhancer, sustainable biochar practices can produce oil and gas byproducts that can be used as fuel, providing clean, renewable energy. When the biochar is buried in the ground as a soil enhancer, the system combats climate change by becoming “carbon negative.”
We can use this simple, yet powerful, technology to store 2.2 gigatons of carbon annually by 2050. It’s one of the few technologies that is relatively inexpensive, widely applicable, and quickly scalable. We really can’t afford not to pursue it. To put 2.2 gigatons in context, that’s the amount of CO2 produced by China in 1990. Today it emits 6.1 gigatons.
Thank you, Professor!
Ok, you say, but what does this have to do with a bunch of suits meeting in a remote town in Canada’s interior?
We all know that these periodic meetings of the club of wealthiest nations produce a lot of hot air… Oops… I meant, C02 emissions.
Now, a group calling itself the Huntsville Project is trying to get every summit delegation to offset its C02 emissions by investing in biochar projects around the world. (Plus, who really wants to invest in a methane digester? And offsetting with reforestation is sooooooo last summit.)
The simplicity of the idea is one reason why this just might happen.
Here’s how it works:
1. A country chooses from a global list of ongoing and planned biochar projects for their offsets.
2. The money is collected in a global Biochar Climate Mitigation Fund. Biochar entrepreneurs will then use microcredit for affordable finance to start New Carbon Economy biochar projects.
3. The Biochar Climate Mitigation Fund will be operated by a foundation with the highest levels of accountability, oversight and transparency
The challenge now — and the real reason why we’re writing about this — is that the Huntsville Project must get Canada and every delegation attending the June 25 – 27 summit on board. We think this is a good idea because it will bring some much needed attention to biochar as an potentially critical solution to real carbon sequestration, food security, clean water, and many other challenges.
Do your part by signing the petition asking Canada and visiting delegations to offset their carbon footprint with biochar!
Visit http://www.newcarboneconomy.info/
Malawi
So you think you can’t reduce energy poverty, cut greenhouse emissions, create jobs, and turn a profit at the same time in one of the world’s poorest countries?
Conor Fox thinks otherwise.
It takes a great vision — and probably nerves of steel — for foreign investors to find a business opportunity in a country like Malawi, where about 85% of the population lives in rural areas, more than 50% of the people live below the poverty line, and per capita GDP hovers around $900.
What’s more, Malawi has suffered 57% deforestation from 1972 to 1992 and is carrying an ongoing annual deforestation rate of 2.8%.
Conor Fox is the country representative for Hestian Innovation, an eco-securities firm who sees a business opportunity in the country’s heavy dependence on biomass for home and commercial use.
Stoves are sold at a modest price. Photo: Jeff Barbee
The business premise makes sense on paper: introduce energy efficient technology – mainly in the form of stoves and kilns that reduce woodfuel consumption by up to 80% and 70% respectively — and then sell the Voluntary Carbon Standards-certified carbon credits on the world’s carbon market. Sounds simple, no?
Maybe. But how does that square with the reality on the ground?
We caught up with Conor Fox in Malawi to find out how the business is doing.
The Charcoal Project: How did Hestian Innovation settle on Malawi as a test market?
Conor Fox: We wanted to develop a project in an African country that had not yet accessed funding through the carbon market and for various reasons Malawi was the best fit. We’ve been involved in this project for over two years now.
TCP: What is your background and what’s your relationship to Malawi?
CF: I worked as a consultant on climate change in South Africa and Malawi on a short-term basis. Apart from that, we had been advised by friends and colleagues that Malawi would be a good place to have a base. Professionally I am an environmental economist and have worked with civil society and government in Latin America and the Caribbean and more recently in Africa.
The Project:
TCP: What has surprised you most between what you planned on paper and the reality on the ground?
CF: What we are doing on the ground is surprisingly close to what is reflected in the PDD (Project Design Document, which is the business plan, essentially), albeit in a more technical matter-of-fact way. One nice piece of feedback we got from a validator was that our project on the ground is better than how it is reflected in the PDD, something that is very often the opposite way around, in his experience.
TCP: Where are you in terms of your projected roll-out? Are you on target?
CF: In general we are on target, although with more investment we could surpass our target and bring more sustainable development benefits to more people.
Hestian's projections for Malawi
TCP: How difficult or easy has it been to get people to adapt and adopt the new technology? With regard to the cookstoves or the tobacco curing barns/kilns?
CF: Early adopters tend to be our best source of marketing via word and mouth and now our challenge is to up-scale operations to meet very high demand. The technologies we are promoting have evolved over time and are now at a stage where we believe they have reached a happy medium between price and performance.
A tobacco curing barn financed by Hestian. Photo: Jeff Barbee
The Technology
TCP: Let’s talk about the stoves. Who designed or advised you on the types of stoves and kilns to be used?
CF: The stoves and barns have evolved over years and many people have been involved at various stages, not least the end-users who give us important feedback. Perhaps it is best not to list those involved for fear of omitting important actors along the way. Suffice to say that the design of both the stoves and barns take into consideration the availability of materials, tools and skills at a village-level and the preferences of the people that use the technologies on a day-to-day basis.
Hestian's range of products
TCP: How are the stoves performing?
CF: The stoves are performing well. The proof is in the pudding – the feedback we are getting throughout the country is really positive.
Only after proving that the technologies are accepted and demanded on the ground have we disseminated them. Their design takes into consideration realities on the ground.
All of our tests are field-based, as this is where we believe it counts. Where lab tests can help at the initial stages in the research and development, it is only in people’s homes and farms can the meaningful results come in.
Moulding the clay stoves the old fashioned way. Photo: Jeff Barbee
Our tests are based on kitchen and barn performance tests in people’s homes and farms before and after the adoption of the improved technologies over extended periods of time. In the case of stoves the tests are based on two 72-hour periods before and after adoption, while the barns are tested over a three-month curing season.
The results of our tests are likely to be conservative as tests are often conducted soon after adoption. With time it is likely that the users will master how their new technologies perform best, resulting in improved efficiencies and lower fuelwood consumption.
TCP: You settled on a five-year working life for the Esperanza stoves, two years for the portable ceramic, and ten years for the rocket barns. Why?
CF: Again these estimations are based on feedback from users. An independent assessment of portable stove users estimated that they can last between two and three years, so we have estimated two year although we have developed a replacement system for stove that may not last that long.
The Esperanza stove has a longer life as it is fixed and built into the kitchen and it can be maintained indefinitely. A spare parts and maintenance component has been set up to enhance the durability of the Esperanza.
The Rocket Barn is built with locally available materials without any exotic or hard to find parts. We believe that it can last as long as a house, as it is built with brick and has a corrugated iron roof. The estimated ten-year life span is likely to be conservative and maintenance and repairs offered by the project can extend the life span of the barn.
Carbon Finance
TCP: How important is the carbon finance component to the project?
CF: The products on offer would in most cases be beyond the reach of our customers in the absence of the project, which is only viable with carbon finance. In other words without carbon finance, we would not be able to bring improved technologies to thousands of households.
TCP: How hard or easy is it to sell these eco-securities on the voluntary emissions reduction market?
CF: The major challenge of monetizing emission reductions is the speed of the certification process. Prior to validation and registration, interested investors are wary of the risks. But once a project is registered it becomes increasingly attractive for investors.
TCP: Have the sales of the offsets generated the kind of revenue you anticipated? How is this working on your bottom line? How is it affecting the scope and timetable of the rollout of the project?
CF: The challenge of many carbon projects is that many of the costs are felt up-front while the revenues start at zero and activities are financed from initial investment. As our project progresses more and more people will be benefiting from the technologies and revenues are likely to be significant but during the start-up period the cash-flow management is challenging. All going well for our next project we will be in a better position to invest in a system that has been tried and tested and we can hit the ground running.
TCP: How are you doing in terms of hitting your targets w regards to stoves and barns sold?
CF: We have set ourselves very ambitious targets. For the barns we are playing catch-up at the moment but are comfortably doubling our annual productivity and targets are very much reachable. For the stoves, we had a late start but are firmly on target. In our first 7 years we are targeting up to 150,000 customers, but we know there are at least 2 million potential customers in Malawi alone.
TCP: Is the cost of the stove subsidized to the consumers? What is the cost? How was this cost basis arrived at?
CF: All our technologies are subsidized, with levels varying from technology to technology. Where micro-financed, payback periods are usually under one year as interest rates are high.
Sustainability Analysis Assessment
TCP: How many people are directly and indirectly employed by the project on the ground?
CF: The project has a network of implementers that generate income for well over 400 people including staff, stove production groups, stove promoters, builders, carpenters and metalworkers.Over half are women.
Carbon Emissions Reductions
TCP: You have projected a reduction of almost 200,000 tons of CO2 for the seven years ending November 2015. Are you still sticking to that figure?
CF: Our projections are estimates, but we can surpass targets.
Kicking the tires of the Carbon Market.
The Kyoto Protocol-sponsored CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) and the VCS (Voluntary Carbon Standard) represent the two most widely accepted certification programs for carbon offset projects that generate credits for sale on the carbon market. Each scheme has its supporters and detractors.
(For a primer about the Carbon Market Overview, check out this presentation prepared by the World Bank and presented at the March 2009 PCIA meeting in Uganda.)
Either way, foreign investors continue to invest in carbon credits generated from energy efficient stove and kiln programs located in Africa in places like Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda, among others.
But although the prices of various types of carbon credits have seen a decline on the international carbon market as a result of the logjam in Copenhagen in December, investors are still betting on the emergence of legally biding international treaty that will lay the financial foundations for a robust carbon market.
Finding a sustainable and reliable funding stream for energy efficient programs in Africa and elsewhere around the world will be critical to the accelerated adoption of energy efficient technologies by the world’s energy poor.
We wish the folks at Hestian the best of luck!
What will it take?
What will it take to tip the scale in favor of a global crash program to swap out three-stones-and-a-pot for energy-efficient stoves, kilns, and sustainable alternative biofuels?
Port-au-Prince
Will Haiti be to bioenergy what Katrina was to climate change?
New Orleans
How long before Al Gore, Angelina, or Bono take on bionergy as the next big inconvenient truth? The Charcoal Project’s intelligence services tell us there is already a film in the works. Will Bono embrace the rocket stove onstage to his fan’s delight?
Perhaps it will be the lure of a multi-billion dollar global market in carbon offsets from stoves, kilns, and briquettes programs that will do the trick. Or maybe it will be the on-the-ground realities of implementing REDD that will undo the Gordian knot.
And the point is…?
Actually, there are four points and they boil down to this:
1. Is there a need for a global stove, kilns, biomass program?
2. Is the bionergy/biomass community ready to step up to the global challenge or will it cling to its small-scale, silo-ed, buckshot approach?
3. Is the world, especially the development community, ready to recognize and embrace the issue with the same furious passion it has correctly championed clean water, HIV/AIDS, climate change, malaria, and the eradication of polio, to name a few?
Getting the message across in Lagos
4. What will it take to move the world’s needle in the direction of a global effort to swap out three stones and a pot for better stoves, kilns, and fuels?
So?
Here’s what I think.
I response to the first question, my gut tells me there is a need but I’m not a scientist or development expert. I realize that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach in the way condoms, sex ed, and retrovirals come to mind when combating HIV/AIDS. Or the the mosquito net for malaria. This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer.
However, if the answer to the above is in the affirmative, then I am confident that practitioners and champions of bioenergy/biomass technology can rally around a unified goal. Whether you care about indoor air pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, or poverty alleviation, low-cost technological fixes and clean, sustainable biomass fuels exists to solve these overlapping global challenges. We might differ on how to get there exactly but I’m certain the likes of Hedon, PCIA, Aprovecho, Canada, Uganda, Brazil, Haiti, USAID, EPA, DOE, World Bank, UNEP, WHO, WFP, Berkeley U, MIT, and so many other organizations in so many countries can find enough common ground to rally around a shared vision. We have a choir, now all we need a hymn sheet, to answer question 2.
My answer to number 3 is an unequivocal yes. We know what the problems are and we have the technology to fix them. All this at a very low cost compared to, say, the financing of clean coal development or even a single nuclear power plant. When I explain the magnitude of the problem, its impact on half the world’s population, and the existence of readily available solutions, people I speak with invariably get excited about solving this problem. I’m certain you all get the same response wherever you are. In the words of Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a leading climate change scientist at the University of California San Diego, solving the charcoal/woodfuel problem is the “low hanging fruit” for climate change…. and, I would add, environmental degradation… and indoor air pollution… and energy poverty.
So what will it take? Three things: marketing/communications, lobbying, and resources. Launching global marketing and advocacy campaigns is not rocket stove science:
Nike ad in spanish
Marocco
"Yes. One dozen rocket stoves, please."
Nike, Coca Cola, IBM have managed global campaigns. As Tuyeni Mwampamba mentioned in our interview last month, there’s a real disconnect when the poorest of the poor can afford to have a cell phone (Nokia? Sony?) yet still use inefficient stoves and biomass. Maybe a free cell phone with every stove?
Perhaps Haiti will help us get the ball rolling. Either way, let this be a call to all in the bioenergy field to start thinking global, not just local.
I know not everyone will agree with our views on this but let the discussion begin and let’s hammer out a consensus because the stakes are high and the time to act is now.
Kim & Nina
The Charcoal Project
