From the IBI movie "The Promise of Biochar"

On his farm in the hills of west virginia, Josh Frye isn't raising chickens just for meat. He is also raising them for their manure. Through a process that some scientists tout as a solution to climate change, food shortages and the energy crisis, Frye is transforming the waste into a charcoal-like substance called biochar that in the long run could be far better for the world than chicken nuggets. "It might look like this is just a poultry farm," says Frye. "But it's a char farm too."

Burn almost any kind of organic material — corn husks, hazelnut shells, bamboo and, yes, even chicken manure — in an oxygen-depleted process called pyrolysis, and you generate gases and heat that can be used as energy. What remains is a solid — biochar — that sequesters carbon, keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere. In principle, at least, you create energy in a way that is not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative.

Time

Biomass stoves save schools money and carbon: This video gives an introduction to a project promoting the use of biomass burning stoves in India. Traditionally, crop wastes in the Punjab are burnt following a harvest. Now, farmers are encouraged to gather the waste and sell it to biomass briquette producing factories. These briquettes are then used in stoves for large-scale catering as a carbon neutral fuel alternative to the expensive liquid petroleum gas, leading to more money for the farmers and biomass factories, savings for the stove owners, and less carbon in the atmosphere! Each stove saves an estimated 39 tonnes of carbon. This project won an Ashden award for sustainable energy in 2005 and is supported by ClimateCare, a world-leading carbon offsetting company (Video credit: Ashden Awards).

Locking carbon up in soil makes more sense than storing it in plants and trees that eventually decompose, argues Johannes Lehmann. Can this idea work on a large scale?

To meet the challenges of global climate change, greenhouse-gas emissions must be reduced. Emissions from fossil fuels are the largest contributor to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, so a reduction in fossil-energy use is a clear priority.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7141/full/447143a.html

One way to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it back in the ground. In the first of two News Features on carbon sequestration, Quirin Schiermeier asked when the world's coal-fired power plants will start storing away their carbon. In the second, Emma Marris joins the enthusiasts who think that enriching Earth's soils with charcoal can help avert global warming, reduce the need for fertilizers, and greatly increase the size of turnips.

In 1879, the explorer Herbert Smith regaled the readers of Scribner's Monthly with tales of the Amazon, covering everything from the tastiness of tapirs to the extraordinary fecundity of the sugar plantations. "The cane-field itself," he wrote of one rum-making operation, "is a splendid sight; the stalks ten feet high in many places, and as big as one's wrist." The secret, he went on, was "the rich terra preta, 'black land', the best on the Amazons. It is a fine, dark loam, a foot, and often two feet thick."

Last month, the heirs to Smith's enthusiasm met in a hotel room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the World Congress of Soil Science. Their agenda was to take terra preta from the annals of history and the backwaters of the Amazon into the twenty-first century world of carbon sequestration and biofuels.

They want to follow what the green revolution did for the developing world's plants with a black revolution for the world's soils. They are aware that this is a tough sell, not least because hardly anyone outside the room has heard of their product. But that does not dissuade them: more than one eye in the room had a distinctly evangelical gleam.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442624a.html

Die weltweite Energieerzeugung durch die Verbrennung von Kohle, Öl und Gas setzt riesige Mengen an Kohlendioxid frei, Hauptursache für den Klimawandel. Die Verbrennung von Biomasse wäre in ihrer Kohlendioxid-Bilanz dagegen neutral, da die verbrannten Pflanzen das Treibhausgas zuvor der Atmosphäre entzogen haben. Allerdings gelingt bei den gängigen Verfahren zur energetischen Nutzung von Biomasse die Umsetzung nur unvollständig.

Wissenschaftler des Max-Planck-Instituts für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung haben nun ein Verfahren entwickelt, mit dem sie Biomasse - Pflanzenabfälle aus dem Garten oder Holzabfälle aus dem Wald - direkt in Kohle umwandeln können. Der Prozess funktioniert erstaunlich einfach und kann auf verschiedenen Stufen angehalten werden: Entsprechend erhält man ein Produkt, das als Gartenerde verwendet werden kann, Braunkohle oder Steinkohle. Als Nebenprodukt entsteht lediglich Wasser, kein Kohlendioxid, wie bei anderen Biomasseverfahren.

Allein in Deutschland fallen jährlich etwa 70 Millionen Tonnen Biomasseabfälle an, die in der Regel einfach verrotten. Nach dem neuen Verfahren könnten diese Abfälle einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Deckung des Energiebedarfs leisten.

http://www.mpg.de/bilderBerichteDokumente/multimedial/filmeWissenschaft/2006/07/KochKohle/index.html