Continuing on with my obsession with biomass, here's a bit about wood...leading to how bio fuel, and burying massive amounts of charcoal is an excellent method of carbon sequestration...no...not biochar. Just regular charcoal. Forget biochar for now, the verdict is still way out on that one. Think regular charcoal. And think wood as one of many alternative fuel sources, that happens to also create charcoal.
You know what?
The ancients were TERRIBLE with tree management.
Absolutely terrible. There are some pockets here and there of evidence of old civilizations managing woodlots to some extent. But nearly any centrally organized nation with access to iron or steel pretty much just cut the hell out of their forests. And when they had nearly exhausted their trees, they invaded other places with trees. Civilizations without access to iron didn't have as easy a time cutting, hewing, splitting, etc.
There didn't seem to be the notion of a limited world. The nations that slashed everything pretty much seemed to believe that when they ran out, they'd conquer the nation next door and use THEIR wood. And so on. Like a turtle holding up the world. What holds the turtle up? From there it's just turtles all the way down.
Basically like us with oil.
Once upon a time, almost everything was built with wood. And if you were a nation worth anything, you had a navy -- wood again. And you needed to have the BIGGEST navy -- more wood. Catapults, wood. Bows and arrows, wood. Bridges, wood. Carriages and carts and wheelbarrows and wagons and wheels, wood. Agriculture, clearcut land for agriculture.
Wood wood wood wood wood.
Wood was pretty much the only show in town for centuries.
Centuries, hell. For millenia.
From reading ancient history, it sounds like we've got more trees today than many ancients could ever imagine.
In Pliny’s time [that's 23 CE, or AD] Italy was almost completely stripped of its forest cover. For this reason the Romans had to import most of the timber form all parts of the Empire and metallurgic industries, which depended heavily on charcoal, moved out of Italy.
--Source
Here's a nice BBC article with some dramatic flair suggesting that mass deforestation contributed to the downfall of Rome
The question of the fall of the Roman Empire has been debated for 1500 years, but new evidence suggests that the wealth and prosperity of Rome may have been the cause of its own downfall. According to a new theory, environmental damage, and particularly deforestation, to meet the needs of the luxurious elite caused a whole host of problems eventually weakening the Empire to the point that it could no longer stand.
Rome, a powerful nation that used wood for absolutely everything from iron making and metallurgy to creating framing for their massive marble projects, eventually could not conquer enough additional lands to satisfy their thirst for wood. They never did get the Germanic lands, which were lousy with wood. As the theory seems to go, once the Romans were unable to get the resources they needed to keep themselves up, the nations that did have the resources just kinda moved in. Various ancient Chinese dynasties were crippled from the same deficit.
Wood.
Michigan suffered a similar fate. Muskegon, specifically. Muskegon, Michigan was one of the richest cities in the world for a brief time 120 years ago, and that was due to wood. Lumber barons with pretty much unregulated access to the young state's wood supply clear cut everything, and floated it down the Muskegon River which goes clear across the state up north.
When Chicago burned to the ground, Muskegon supplied the lumber to rebuild Chicago.
Then one day the trees were gone, and the Lumber Barons packed up their shit and moved elsewhere.
What I'm trying to say here is, as I stand here with a straight face saying we need to use more biofuels, I want to make is absolutely clear that what I don't want to see happen is the world's forests once again be clear cut like they had been for centuries.
I believe it can be done responsibly.
Some English cities made use of well managed woodlots for centuries, producing a reliable and renewable source of fuel and building material on the same land leading up to World War II.
In 2007 Minnesota created some excellent legal guidelines for harvesting biomass
"Biomass Harvesting Guidelines for Forestlands, Brushlands and Open Lands"
It's a surprisingly easy read. Maybe it's the goofy font they use for the headings.
It's got a lengthy description of why a certain percentage of biomass retention is important in forests and then issues rules for select areas like so
If harvesting brush and small trees for biomass associated with
a timber harvest, leave 20% of this material on the site. This
material may be run over or cut, but it should remain on the site.
Retain and scatter tops and limbs from 20% of trees harvested
in the general harvest area (one "average-sized" tree out of every
five trees harvested).
[and]
The overall goal of FWD [fine woody debris] retention is to retain about one-third
of the FWD on a site.
As a general rule, when I talk about using wood biomass as fuel, I'm talking about using deadfall.
When folks hear "lets use wood as fuel" there's an alarming vision of people clear cutting living trees and stuffing them into a gigantic furnace.
But that's not it at all. I'm talking about using deadfall.
Forests produce an incredible amount of deadfall every year. We can use a percentage of that deadfall for fuel.
If you haven't been in a heavy forest recently, I encourage you to do so. Go someplace relatively unmanaged and lightly traveled. What you'll find is a massive amount of tree debris all over the place. Fallen trees, fallen branches, all strewn about the forest like somebody took a pile of sticks, balanced them on end and let them go.
Trees are constantly shedding woody material. Every year. It's pretty astonishing how much wood trees lose each year. Though they seem to be growing slowly, each tree is producing an even larger amount of wood each and every year. Turning sunlight into lignin.
Add to that the trees are also constantly competing for sunlight. Some are crowded out and die off.
Or strong wind storms hit every year, and lightning strikes and limbs and branches are blown off and trees of all sizes topple to the ground.
This happens year after year after year. Even if you were to clear a forest floor one year, the next year it would be strewn with woody biomass again. Though you should leave 1/3 of the woody debris.
In the State of Michigan you can buy a fuel wood harvesting license for $20. The state gives you a map and tells you where you can harvest wood, how much you can harvest (five cords) and what type of deadfall to harvest (never live trees).
Wood is an incredibly easy to attain fuel source. I can go out into the woods and, by hand, gather enough wood in the course of an hour, to heat my house for a few days. You can't do that with coal or oil. Wood is by far easier to harvest and less destructive to the environment than any fossil fuels if done in moderation.
As for the energy in wood, it's about 1/3 as energy dense as oil or coal. Not bad considering it's completely renewable and crazy easy to get. Harvesting, as I've already mentioned, could be done using gassification equipment that runs on wood rather than fossil fuels making wood harvesting carbon neutral.
Definitely...there's NOT ENOUGH WOOD to fuel all of our fuel needs.
Wood fuel is just ONE piece of the puzzle.
Already, 1.5 billion humans use wood charcoal for 90% of their energy needs, and another billion use it for 50% of their energy needs -- Source
Wood is still a dominant energy source. And can be a renewable and sustainable piece of the puzzle here at home.
There's been a lot of talk about biochar as a carbon sequestration method that improves soil quality...ignore that stuff. It's a red herring. It increases the rate of organic decomposition in soil, actually increasing methane production. Bad news...
BUT...you can simply take the normal charred remains of burned wood and bury it. It's not biochar, but it is carbon sequestration.
A scientist named James Lovelock suggests the best and last hope for humanity is to create and bury massive amounts of regular old charcoal to sequester carbon
Bury Massive Amounts of Charcoal to Sequester Carbon
There is one way we could save ourselves and tat is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste—which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering—into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.
[This will make enough of a difference.] The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.