Biochar is a carbon negative, charcoal based, soil amendment that can be designed to help reclaim and improve marginal soils by increasing soil water holding capacity and enhancing fertility, while also generating high-value renewable energy co-products during its production.

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Deployed at a global scale, biochar could potentially play a major role in restoring the carbon balance in the atmosphere.

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If deployed correctly, the biochar process is carbon negative: it removes net carbon from the atmosphere. When a green plant grows, it takes CO2 out of the air to build biomass.  All of the carbon in the plant came from CO2 taken out of the air, and returns to the air when the plant dies and decomposes.  When the biomass is instead pyrolyzed—heated in the absence of oxygen—it produces charcoal, which is called biochar when it is buried in the ground.  Over 40% of the total carbon from the waste biomass is retained in biochar and sequestered in the soil for thousands of years, effectively removing that carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon in 1 ton of biochar is equivalent to about 3 tons of CO2. 

Biochar is not only a carbon sink, it can increase soil fertility. 

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Forests in Decline
The health of forests in the mountain west is in decline.  The U.S. Forest Service estimates that 100,000 trees fall every day due to the mountain pine beetle epidemic in Colorado and Southern Wyoming, creating a CO2 liability of nearly 175,000 Tons, daily.

In Western Canada the problem is much worse with nearly 54 million acres of forests in decline.  When these trees succumb to decomposition or fire, nearly 4.5 Billion tons of CO2 will be released into the atmosphere

With declining forest health and shifting ecological dynamics, landscape scale solutions to address overall forest health are greatly needed. Biochar is thought to be one such solution, and it's production can work in parallel with salvage operations and wood-product processing.

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