🔍🌱 New report: how permanent is biochar? 10, 100, 1,000 years, or even longer? 🌱🔍

📜 Today, the European Biochar Industry Consortium (EBI) consortium published a report diving into the latest science to answer this question. It is the result of a multi-stakeholder process spanning soil scientists, agronomists, and geochemists.

💡The TL;DR? Industrially produced, high-quality biochar (“inertinite biochar”) is permanent on geological timescales and we now have the tools to calculate the exact % of any given biochar that is permanent.

Keen for more details? Here are the highlights:

🔍 Incubation experiments which resulted in the common misconception of biochar not being permanent were based on low-quality carbonised material, not high-quality industrially produced biochar. This is not just semantics, but a fundamental difference.

😯  Biochar is not a homogenous product. It consists of different fractions with different chemical properties which show completely different resistance to microbial resistance.

🌡 Biochar fractions that have been exposed to high temperatures (>550C) for sufficient time are chemically/structurally equivalent to inertinite. There is no scientific evidence for the microbial degradation of inertinite.

🔬 The proportion of Inertinite Biochar has to be verified by suitable characterization methods (e.g. random reflectance) and ensured by certification.

➡ My take: this has massive implications. It proves (yet again) why biochar carbon removal (#BCR) is permanent and comparable to carbon dioxide removal (#CDR) with geological storage such as #DACCS and #BECCS. Add on top: the co-benefits, relative affordability, and high technological maturity of BCR, and you quickly realise why policymakers and corporate buyers alike are becoming so interested in it.

👏 Huge shout out to Harald Bier and Hansjörg Lerchenmüller for driving this cross-disciplinary stakeholder discussion and putting together such a detailed, compelling report. And to Hamed Sanei and Elias Azzi and their teams for their groundbreaking research published earlier this year.

Highly recommend diving into the details yourself:

🔗 EBI Report: https://lnkd.in/d6rbrYrb

🔗 Sanei et al.: https://lnkd.in/dSBxrNVs

🔗 Azzi et al.: https://lnkd.in/dTqYknfj

❓ What is your take? Any outstanding concerns on the permanence of biochar? Or should we move on and consider this debate settled? 💬

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