Effect of Biochar on Soil Fertility and Carbon Sequestration

Every year worldwide anthropogenic CO₂ emissions from energy generation is increasing. By 2020, 33.8 billionmetric tons per year could be emitted, up from 29.7 billion metric tons per year in 2007.Added to anthropogenic CO₂ emissions,the natural carbon cycle and deforestation. Research to mitigate CO₂ emissions, reduce the CO₂ atmospheric concentration, and enhance soil fertility, crop production and bioderived energy production would be welcome. Efforts to reduce CO₂ emissions through carbon sequestration include both reforestation and CO₂ injection into underground saline and other geological formations or into the deep ocean. Sequestering C in soils as biochar can improve soil fertility, supplementing adding biosolids, organic waste fertilizers and improving crop rotation. However, organic wastes and biosolids will decompose in the soil emitting CO₂.Conversely, the carbon in biochars, originally removed from the atmosphere as CO₂ during plant growth, persist in soils from decades to millennia. Thus, if biochar application proves widely applicable at low cost in improving soil fertility in agriculture, its widespread use could lead to enhanced carbon sequestration. Biochar can be made either as a byproduct of fast pyrolysis to generate biooil (a liquid fuel precursor) or slow pyrolysis. Biochar production technologies 26 and CO₂ capture, storage and utilization.