Biocharcoal can Create new Diamond ( EARTH )

Biochar Could Put Huge Global Dent in Greenhouse Gases

Forget elaborate, potentially hazardous geoengineering schemes for countering global warming: injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or seeding the ocean with iron is just too risky.
Instead, a new study suggests we should borrow an idea from ancient Amazonian farmers: biochar. Far from a hippie-environmentalist-crackpot "save the world" scheme, researchers have found biochar could be the real deal, able to sequester over a billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
Biochar (shown in the image above) is charcoal made from biomass that is slowly cooked at high temperatures though a process called pyrolysis. Unlike regular biomass, which releases carbon dioxide a decade or two after it breaks down, biochar is much more stable and can retain it for hundreds of years.
While some CO2 is released into the atmosphere during the cooking process, at least half gets locked up during pyrolysis, and is then buried.
The study, appearing today in the journal Nature Communications, shows that if biochar production was applied on a global scale, it could save up to 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 annually -- that equals 12 percent of the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity in a year.
Besides gobbling up greenhouse gases, biochar works wonders on soil fertility. "Biochar can improve agricultural productivity, particularly on low-fertility and degraded soils where it can be of especial utility to the world's poorest farmers," the researchers, led by Dominic Woolf of Swansea University in the United Kingdom, wrote.
The organic material works its magic on the dirt in a myriad of ways, from reducing the losses of nutrients and agricultural chemicals in run-offs, to improving the water-holding capacity of soils. And, as an extra bonus, biochar can even be produced from biomass waste, such as rice husks, sugar cane, or manure.

A project in central Africa called the Biochar Fund is pioneering the use of biochar for increasing crop yields to bolster food security in the region, while simultaneously combating deforestation and global warming.
This is the kind of initiative that Jim Amonette, co-author of the study and a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, hopes to see on a global scale.
Before this can happen, however, critics of biochar need to be convinced that it can be produced sustainably -- and this is what Amonette sees as the role of his paper.
Some organizations, such as Biofuels Watch, are negative about biochar, because they worry that using it on a large scale requires developing major biomass plantations at the expense of natural environments.
"Our analysis was meant to show what biochar could do, when implemented in a sustainable manner that did not threaten biodiversity nor require plantations," Amonette told Discovery News.