The Phoenix Energy technology used in Merced essentially cooks the biomass in an oxygen-deprived environment to release the elemental gasses from the wood. In the process biomass is converted into a carbon rich biochar. With the carbon fixed in solid form this process not only provides a valuable soil amendment but also serves as a source of carbon sequestration.

The Merced plant is expected to produce enough electricity to power about 400 homes. The plant connected to the electricity grid under California's feed-in-tariff with a 15-year power purchase agreement. Ken Bosket, CEO of Cleantech Transit, stated "We are delighted with the success that Phoenix Energy has had with the Merced project and look forward to working with Phoenix Energy to build a strong partnership." iStock Analyst

A Camarillo biofuels firm has secured $17.7 million in funding in Google Ventures’ first biofuels play and the second investment that the Silicon Valley giant has made in tri-county energy technology in recent weeks.

CoolPlanetBioFuels claims it can make carbon-negative gasoline with a process that turns plant tissue into fuel and a charcoal-like soil additive called biochar that would sequester carbon. The firm is developing a machine that uses heat, pressure and mechanical force instead of the fermentation process that produces most of today’s biofuels.
CoolPlanet’s machine works more like cracking, where complicated hydrocarbons like crude oil are broken into simpler ones like gasoline and kerosene. CoolPlanet’s machines will fit into standard shipping containers and can be linked together at a feedstock site.

“It’s a micro-refinery,” Mike Cheiky, co-founder and CEO of CoolPlanet, told the Business Times.
Google Ventures did not disclose the amount of the investment, but regulatory filings indicate that it was up to $17.7 million. GE Corp., NRG Energy, ConocoPhillips and Northbridge Venture Partners are also investors in CoolPlanet.

STREUBEL: My research focused on helping out our local farmers, especially our local dairymen on what we could do to help them take care of some of their nutrient loading that they have with their dairy manure and maybe create a product for them to sell off-site. And so we looked at using the fiber from the dairy manure turning it into a biochar and then putting it into dairy lagoons to kind of absorb/recover phosphorus from those lagoons, lowering the phosphorus levels so that it could go back out onto the field in a normal process but with a lower phosphorus load

Results have been promising in lowering the phosphorus levels in the lagoons.

And we are also then taking that material and seeing if it’s useful to the plant and that the phosphorus that’s being trapped truly is in plant available form. And our results seem to indicate that when you add our biochar into the dairy lagoons we can lower phosphorus and it looks like it can be an adequate fertilizer source. They would be able to reduce their phosphorus loads on their land, in their lagoons and possibly have a co-product to sell off-site to people who do need phosphorus in a form that is carbon rich and plant available. AG Info

Early preparation for climate change impacts would bring economic benefits to the UK, say engineers in a report commissioned by the government.

Engineering the Future - an alliance of professional engineering bodies - says companies will be more likely to invest in nations with secure infrastructure. It urges regulators to improve links between sectors for better planning. A climate-constrained future will bring more disruption to energy, transport, water and IT, it warns.

This increases the risk of "cascade failures", where a breakdown in one system has knock-on effects on others - such as a flood that takes out the local electricity supply, which in turn affects the mobile phone network.

Potential impacts of climate change covered by the report - Infrastructure, Engineering and Climate Change Adaptation - include:

• damage to roads and railway tracks from prolonged high temperatures
• flooding of drainage networks
• increased damage to buildings from storms

The report concludes that complete protection against climate impacts will not be affordable, and society is going to have to decide what levels of prevention should be funded for various types of threat.

"At the moment, there's no mechanism for having that debate with the public, or even for having it within the regulatory and policy space," said David Nickols, managing director of future energy with engineering consultants WSP Group and a main author on the report.

"We're building infrastructure that's going to last 30 to 40 years, and yet we're not having a debate about whether our children will be happy with what we did."

Read more http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12384389

In one sense, proving Carbonscape’s novel one-step process can cheaply produce highly porous charcoal was the easy part.