The Pitch:

We face significant sustainability issues in 3 fundamental, interwoven areas: agriculture, energy and climate. For instance, we need sustainable energy and a sustainable climate to produce food for ourselves. The CarbonZero Project is a pool of resources and knowledge to help humanity transition toward a sustainable future. We are promoting the use of biochar, which can be defined as charred biomass from waste streams that is used for agricultural purposes, to increase agricultural yields, sequester carbon and produce renewable bioenergy, as an all in one package.

Biochar is added to soils to increase their carbon content, significantly enhancing plant nutrient uptake efficiency. Agricultural soils the world over have lost some 70 - 80% of their natural carbon content (humus) in the last 50 years. It’s a significant and alarming sustainability problem that has so far gone largely unnoticed. Carbon is the most important aspect of soil fertility. Biochar is more effective at restoring nutrient uptake efficiency than organic matter.

The pyrolysis process used to create biochar also co-produces bioenergy that can be utilized in a variety of forms, as a burnable gas, refined into liquid hydrocarbon fuels, or converted to electricity.

In effect, biochar removes excess carbon from the atmosphere, because plants absorb carbon dioxide and convert it to carbohydrates, cellulose and then lignin. When that biomass is converted to biochar and placed in soil, about 50% of the carbon absorbed is converted to a highly stable form of carbon and sequestered in agricultural soils in a safe, relatively permanent, beneficial manner. There is no other known process that can do this.

Overall, each individual aspect of the process supports and enhances the sustainability of the whole approach. For instance, increased soil fertility potentially sequesters more carbon, because more waste biomass becomes available to convert to biochar. Scientific research has estimated we possess a potential to sequester some 9.5 gigatons of carbon per year with this method, which is more than we currently emit.

Biochar can be implemented at any scale, from an industrial plant producing a renewable form of fertilizer to an African village cooking stove made from clay by a local potter. It’s an essential sustainable technology that we believe should be promoted widely.

Modern society has framed success in terms of monetary gain. But this narrow approach has precipitated a variety of very unsuccessful outcomes with it, including global warming, accelerating natural resource depletion, and a dangerous societal dependency on an unsustainable way of life. To be truly successful, sustainably successful, it seems we need a different vision of wealth and profit. We need a more all encompassing, interdependent vision of success; one that includes consideration of things like, “What is successful for the thin layer of soil that we are completely dependent on?”

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