This piece from TWW’s Greg Brophy first ran in The Fence Post on November 17, 2023 and can be accessed here.
Colorado firm brings age-old technology into the 21st Century to help forests, farms and emissions
By Greg Brophy
If there was a single technology that could reduce wildfire risk, improve the health and productivity of farmland, and keep carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, would you want to see that technology succeed?
If the answer is yes, then you may also be interested to know that a leading developer of this technology is based right here in Colorado, yet another example of our state’s leadership on energy and environmental issues.
The technology in question is biochar, which is created when wood and other organic materials are superheated in an oxygen-limited environment. Instead of burning and releasing carbon dioxide, which happens at lower temperatures, a chemical reaction called pyrolysis converts the carbon in the wood directly into biochar, a charcoal-like substance with very high carbon content.
Once converted into biochar, the carbon from dead trees, construction waste and other sources of timber is locked in place — it won’t be released into the atmosphere through burning or through decomposition.
Instead, that carbon can be mixed into farmland soils to help with water retention, the exchange of nutrients between crops and the soil, and improving the overall soil structure. “Biochar has many properties that have potential to enhance soil fertility,” according to the Colorado State University Extension Service.
The highly concentrated carbon in biochar can also be used by industry in a range of products, including plastics and road asphalt. And every ton of carbon that’s stored in biochar prevents more than three tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
To be sure — the process of making biochar isn’t new. Thousands of years ago, it was used in South America’s Amazonian Basin to make agricultural soils more fertile and more productive. More recently, the U.S. Forest Service has used biochar as a way to promote regrowth in places where forests have been damaged or destroyed.
But the idea of using biochar on a much larger scale is new — and that’s where the Colorado firm Biochar Now enters the picture.
Based in Berthoud, Biochar Now builds and operates specially designed kilns that produce the high temperatures needed for pyrolysis to take place. The kilns are portable, meaning they can be moved to areas with large areas of dead and diseased trees or large stockpiles of industrial wood waste.
The technology has caught the attention of state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
For example: In 2017, the state legislature examined the technology’s potential and concluded it could create a cost-effective way to reduce the number of trees killed by insects and disease on forest lands. Removing this “excess biomass” could “minimize the number and severity of wildfires” in Colorado, the lawmakers concluded.
“We have around a hundred million truckloads of rotting dead trees across the West that need to be cleaned up and hauled out,” Biochar Now’s CEO, James Gaspard, said in a recent interview. “If we don’t use them for biochar, that wood would just be sitting there waiting for the next fire to come through.”
Meeting the energy and environmental needs of our country in the decades ahead will require some major technological breakthroughs. But it would be a mistake to overlook the innovations that are built around existing technologies and practices, some of them age-old.
Biochar is one of those technologies, and it holds the promise of limiting the catastrophic wildfires that have plagued our state, while at the same time helping our farmers.
It’s no surprise that a Colorado firm is leading the charge to scale up this technology. The kind of pragmatic thinking you see in Colorado and across the rest of the Western U.S. is something that the debate over energy and environmental policy in Washington, D.C., badly needs.
Brophy is a farmer and former state senator from Wray, Colo. He is the Colorado director for The Western Way