In the past century and a half we've burned so many fossil fuels that there is nearly 50% more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than before the Industrial Revolution started (at the time of writing). Global temperatures are rising, natural habitats are rapidly decreasing and our planet is slowly becoming uninhabitable for plants, animals, and people. Now is the time to turn our industries around and sequester as much carbon dioxide as we can before the scales tip.
To do so, we work together with a cutting edge, solar-powered carbon capturing ally, nature! Because plants can capture carbon dioxide via photosynthesis and transform this greenhouse gas into leaves, roots, and branches, they perform a task even the most advanced technology cannot - they turn the carbon dioxide into a solid for free! One key setback with this is that if plants die and are exposed to the open air, dioxide gets released into the atmosphere once again.
That is where biochar comes in
Before plants decay, we collect the biomass and convert the biologically active biomass into a biologically inactive, new form of fossil fuel; Biochar. We work on different applications in which it can be stored in a solid form for up to a thousand years!
When Biochar is stored in the ground, it will act as a permanent soil enhancer. Because of its structure, the water uptake capacity, nutrient exchange capacity and the microbial activity in the soil increases. So besides being a carbon sink, we applicate the Biochar for different soil applications. This means it can be used to make an ecosystem healthier, or by farmers to boost crop yield without turning to soil-damaging alternatives.
This means that Biochar is great for both international and local communities, functioning as a large scale carbon sink while also encouraging a circular economy and negating the need for damaging fertilisers or other forms of charcoal which are more harmful to people’s health when burned for fuel.
Biochar is around 70-80% carbon, which means that (after converting carbon dioxide into a solid) a kilo of Biochar will sequester around 3.5kg of carbon dioxide! This leaves the environment with not only less carbon dioxide, but also more oxygen as a result – helping return the earth to the state it was in before we ever started digging for coal or oil. It also means that just by creating and selling Biochar to the people who need it we can sequester a tremendous amount of carbon for our global community, improving both local economies and the global environment.
As governments look to create incentives for companies to create as little carbon as possible, Biochar has risen as a multi-purpose tool for both the businesses that wish to sell it as a product and the businesses that wish to utilise its carbon sequestering abilities – future proofing it for when carbon credit certification becomes more strict and regulations rule out methods that are less holistic for the environment.
At Dutch Carboneers we are passionate about the present and future possibilities for this ancient technology being used to solve modern problems – and we hope that you are too!
