Charcoal & Biochar

Carbonscape produces charcoal as a finished product with multiple uses. Loose or briquette charcoal is a popular and leisurely means of cooking food on the barbeque especially during the summer season. This market is worth in excess of US$100m in Europe and the USA. Charcoal is also increasingly used to replace coal in the production of pig iron and ‘green’ steel as a means of reducing carbon emissions. Charcoal is also used to smelt metals such as copper and iron.

Biochar

When biomass such as plant material decomposes in air, CO₂ is released. Carbonscape’s patented process effectively fixes this CO₂ as charcoal, thereby preventing the formation and release of CO₂ into the atmosphere from biomass decomposition.

As the CO₂ generated by Carbonscape’s technology is less than the amount of CO₂ that would have otherwise been released, the process can be considered carbon negative. Carbonscape produces a type of charcoal that provides benefits when mixed with ground soil. The entire process of diverting wood waste to produce and bury charcoal in soil effectively sequesters that carbon, storing it for thousands of years and most importantly removing it from the earth’s atmosphere where proposed carbon taxes apply. This is called biochar (charcoal made from biological material).

Biochar has been produced for around 2,000 years from agricultural wastes and acts as a soil enhancer by aiding the retention of nutrients and water. Water quality is potentially improved as a result of biochar enhancing soil absorption of agrochemicals which prevent leaching and hence pollution of waterways.

Biochar can thus provide enhanced food security and crop diversity in areas that have severely undernourished soils, inadequate water and chemical fertilizer supplies. It has also been demonstrated that biochar can reduce emissions of other greenhouse gases such as N₂O (Nitrous oxide) and CH₄ from soils.

Carbonscape’s biochar thus promises soil restoration and greenhouse mitigation that is more efficient and less costly as compared to other techniques. Although yet to be quantified, the global impact of such a product is envisaged to be vast.

Sequestered charcoal as a means of carbon capture is worth in excess of US$400m in the United States and Europe alone. The growth rate for Carbonscape’s sequestered charcoal is expected to lie within 5-9% over the next five years. Carbonscape’s sequestered charcoal negates the drawbacks posed by traditional approaches of carbon capture and storage (CCS) techniques which include utilizing saline aquifers, existing oil and gas fields and unused coal seams. These drawbacks are:

• Risks associated with the captured gases accidentally escaping back into the atmosphere
• Traditional techniques are only limited to large singular sources of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitters (power stations).
• These techniques only deal with carbon dioxide that is being produced in situ. In other words, these traditional techniques do not deal with CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere.
• CCS is prohibitively expensive and will not be available commercially for another decade.