What is it about?

Adding biochar to soil is a low-tech way to achieve negative carbon emissions. Plants take up CO2 from the atmosphere, the carbon in the plant biomass is turned into stable form via pyrolysis, and the resulting carbon-rich solid is put in soil for sequestration. There are also potential agricultural benefits from doing this. The main drawback is that impurities in biochar limit the amount that can be added to soil. Since the actual impurity levels vary depending on the biochar source and the soil characteristics, I've developed a mathematical model to help planners determine allocation of biochar, so as to maximize carbon sequestration without introducing excessive levels of impurities into the receiving soil.

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Why is it important?

Biochar systems are a scaleable option for achieving negative carbon emissions. Many of the technological building blocks of such systems are fairly mature. However, prior to my work, there have been few attempts to develop decision support tools to plan large scale biochar systems.

Perspectives

I'm always interested in finding new applications for Process Integration (PI) methods. This paper, whose earliest version was written in the days leading up to Easter of 2016, demonstrates how versatile PI can be when a little imagination is applied.

Prof. Raymond R. Tan

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: A multi-period source–sink mixed integer linear programming model for biochar-based carbon sequestration systems, Sustainable Production and Consumption, October 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.spc.2016.08.001.
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Contributors

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