BiCRS (a.k.a. BECCS): A 2-in-1 Climate Change Solution?

[@CarFreeSegnitz]

municipal waste streams already accumulate carbon wastes in one place. We do it anyway. Where I live, British Columbia, Canada, we carry out vast forestry harvesting. I live in a town whose major employer is a pulp mill that burns a portion of the wood that’s trucked in for fuel to generate electricity. It would be trivial for the mill to add a CCS solution. The same mill is right next door to my town’s sewage treatment facility. If the mill generated charcoal from its biofuel plant it would be trivial for them to activate it and use the activated charcoal to help clean up the sewage. From there the biochar is across the river, a short distance downstream to the town’s existing spray irrigation field. My town is already spraying effluent water on silage crop. Just a trivial matter to distribute the biochar on the same field. Or sell/give biochar to local farmers.

[@damiengerard1340]

maybe using vast quantities of agricultural waste, such as almond trees in california, or corn crops in the midwest, would provide access to biomass without impacting land use as it is already part of an existing system

[@Sykommer]

Love that idea!

[@CarFreeSegnitz]

The only issue with using agriculture wastes is that it isn’t really waste. Left in place it cycles nutrients back into the soil. Many farmers do this deliberately with cover crops. Cover crops hold soil in place, fix nitrogen and are tilled straight back into soil right before their main crop is planted. Some farmers, those on the Canadian prairies, do burn their straw on the field. It does leave nutrients on the land but contributes to air pollution. If there were some economical way to gather up that straw and put it through a biofuel system it would at least produce energy and pay back biochar that could be tilled back into the fields. It’s easy to see why farmers opt to leave the straw there to rot or burn it. Straw is so low density that the energy from a biofuel generator would be less than the energy invested in trucking.