Biochar: The Oldest New Thing You've Never Heard Of | Wae Nelson | TEDxOrlando

I have in my hand here a package of biochar now I know when you look at this you see a big black blob but when people ask me about this I just simply say this will change the world I've got a new granddaughter now she's just just had her first birthday about a month ago and one of the things I find amazing is how early they learned to ham it up for the cameras but for those of you who have children or grandchildren you know just how much this brings the future into focus for you and for me it did the same thing and my concerns as I look forward were over some of the problems the world is facing one of these being climate change another one being how we're going to feed our ever-increasing population and as these problems were rolling around in my mind one Sunday afternoon I just happened to come across a documentary on television entitled the secret of El Dorado and this told the story of a fantastic civilization that lived in the Amazon jungle before the Europeans got there but that had always been a problem for people because the soil in the Amazon is so bad that there was no way it could have grown enough food to feed this this population that had lived there and then they began to find areas of rich soil some places they were just small an acre two acres same places they're well over a hundred acres or more and they shared two characteristics one of those characteristics is they were very dark dark in color and the second was they were obviously man-made well this brought a new question delight and that was how had the these people been able to take this soil and turn it into that and when that saw was examined the magic element was found to be charcoal just plain ol everyday common charcoal a charcoal was made by a process called pyrolysis pyrolysis simply means you heat up organic material in the absence of air and when you do that all the volatile czar driven off all the gassy parts are driven off and what's left behind is a solid material that is essentially pure carbon and that's called charcoal now when you look at wood under a microscope what you see is that it's just like our bodies it is chock full of passageways and channels to move fluids around and if you really look carefully you'll see there's actually more open area than there is solid area there it's all the material there so when you do make charcoal from wood or other organic materials like wood all of these passageways remain as part of the structure of the charcoal as pores and when you have lots of pores you also have lots of surface area as an example is estimated that one gram of charcoal that's a piece that's about the size of a pencil eraser one gram of charcoal has about 9,000 square feet of surface area in it this little piece about the size of a pencil eraser what's more that that surface area in the charcoal tends to have a very slight electrical charge on it which helps draw things into the charcoal and to settle on that surface when we put charcoal into the ground it is called biochar now plants in order to grow well require three things besides sunlight to do well one of them is they need nutrients they need water and any microorganisms when we amend soil with biochar a very fantastic thing happens and that's that the biochar with the mechanism I talked about earlier tends to suck the nutrients out of the soil and into the biochar where it is stored for the plants for whenever they need it besides that because we've taken the nutrients out of the soil stored him in the bio chart when the rains come and filter through this soil no longer do we have polluted water coming off that goes out and pollutes our streams and rivers and besides that because the nutrients are still being stored we don't have to keep adding fertilizer again and again to make up for the amount of nutrients that are washed away while all that's happening the pores in the biochar are filling up with water so you have a significant reserve of water staying in your soil waiting just for the dry times to come but it's in the mini world of microorganisms where biochar really shines modern research has shown that microorganisms are very very important to how well plants grow it's as if where they find a luxury condominium when the microbes come across biochar this is a quote from Alan Alan Bates this gives you an example of just how much difference you can get above no charcoal below charcoal whenever we add biochar to the soil we find that there is a significant increase in both the quantity and the different varieties of microorganisms in the soil which results in a very significant increase in the yield and well-being of the plants there's a gentleman who's in a field of corn without biochar and the field with corn with biochar this next one will really show it to you this is beans planted at the same time on the left no biochar on the right biochar and that's in five weeks that slide is a gentle is it two farmers who are from Cameroon and if you notice in the right hands they're carrying a corn plant that's got big roots and in the left hand a smaller plant the one on the right was growing in biochar amended soil and the one in the left hand was without biochar if you take a look at the farmer on the right he seems pretty happy with his yield that's the kind of benefits we get from biochar so over here we've got all these benefits at the Buy gives us for our crops and other plants that we grow but over here there's a totally different benefit that we're gaining the plants take in co2 from the air and use the process of photosynthesis then to make the food and structural components that they need and when we make charcoal out of that material the charcoal that is there which it like I said is basically pure carbon its carbon that was in the atmosphere originally biochar is the only effective economical way we know of to actually remove co2 from the air there are technologies that tout their benefits as oh we are able to reduce the carbon footprint or we're carbon neutral biochar is carbon negative this is an amazing material and so here we are back at where we started back to can our concerns about the problems facing the world in the future but now we know we have a new technology a technology that will help us manage these problems it's an old technology it's a mature technology we don't have to vest a tremendous amount of money and time into developing something new and then take the risk that it's going to fail we've been making charcoal for over 5,000 years and it's scalable the developed world can build large plants and produce biochar on a massive scale an industrial scale but it's just as effectively made on a small scale subsistence farmers can make biochar out of kilns that they've made themselves from scrap materials out of their own communities such as barrels tin cans and brick this is three young ladies demonstrating the biochar kiln that they built out of a paint can Pizza can pizza sauce can and a baked bean can runs about 20 minutes makes a great great biochar yield so yeah I'm still concerned about the future but with that concern that goes a new emotion and that emotion is hope biochar is a new technology or an old technology made new again and it turns out that the that one of the tools that we need to solve our problems in the future is laying literally right beneath our feet biochar has the potential of really improving our lifetimes in the future and that's very good news for us our children and especially our grandchildren oh and did I mention biochars a marvelous material [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 151,016

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Agriculture, Climate Change, Conservation, Environment, Farming, Food, Gardening, Global issues, Green, Science, Sustainability

Id: p0YNFn9Dloc

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019