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🔎 Just a month ago, I shared a study proving that we had gotten biochar durability studies all wrong in the past. Now, a Stanford University study by Alexandra Ringsby and Kate Maher published in Environmental Research Letters makes many of the same points.
They analysed 83 biochars from 17 publications and found:
🧪 Over-Reliance on the H/C Ratio: this single parameter test for biochar durability - very common in both standards and academia - does not capture the complexity of production and application of biochar. It can therefore lead to false conclusions.
🔬 Lab-Based Models Don’t Match Real-World Performance: experiments often last only 1-2 years to then extrapolate durability curves for hundreds or thousands of years. This leads to significant mistakes and underestimations of biochar’s durability.
🧐 My take - as a very interested non-scientist: the evidence seems to be mounting from across the Atlantic that two-pool incubation experiments are simply not a good way to assess biochar durability, hugely undervaluing permanence. Yet there are still several standards in the voluntary carbon market (and the IPCC…) using these as their foundation.
🛡️ Thankfully, standards such as Isometric, Riverse, and even the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation are moving in the right direction, and at least offering a different, separate crediting pathway based on reflectance rate and inertinite testing, which is clearly the future for biochar durability.
❓ What is your take? What do we need to finally move the sector as a whole in the right direction?
Paper here:
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