Biochar – a win win for jobs, agriculture and the environment
by John Pratt [0]

Is Malcolm Turnbull on to something? Recently he has become a champion of biochar.

The following is an extract from Greg Hunt’s (member for Flinders) website [1]:

The technology we’ve just been looking at is innovative, it’s exciting, it’s Australian, it’s great for the environment, it will create thousands of jobs, but it has been completely neglected by the Rudd Government’s CPRS, by its emissions trading scheme. We have an enormous opportunity here in Australia to absorb millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, store it safely as carbon, and put in back into the soil and increase the productivity and the health of our own landscape. A win-win. A win for jobs, a win for the environment, a win for agriculture. So it’s an enormous opportunity that has been overlooked by the Rudd Government, and that’s why we are calling for a Green Carbon Initiative, a biocarbon strategy that will focus on investing in our landscape, in Australian jobs, in Australian agriculture, doing the right thing by the environment and the planet, and the right things for Australians.

With the main focus for carbon sequestration being on the capital intensive and scientifically unproven ground storage of C02, I think Malcolm is on to something – biochar may be the answer we are so desperately looking for:

Pyrolysis with biochar carbon sequestration provides a tool to combine sustainable soil management (carbon sequestration), and renewable energy production [2]. While producing renewable energy from biomass, carbon sequestration, agricultural productivity, and environmental quality can be sustained and improved if the biomass is transferred to an inactive carbon pool and redistributed to agricultural fields. The uses of crop residues as potential energy source or to sequester carbon and improve soil quality can be complementary, not competing uses.

The Federal Opposition has made biochar a centre piece of its climate change strategy. While Malcolm Turnbull hasn't yet signalled whether he will support the Government's emissions trading scheme, he has promised to slash missions by backing new technology. It is good policy to spread the reduction of greenhouse emissions across as many technologies as possible.

By contrast the Climate Change Minister, Senator Penny Wong said that for now the science of biochar is unproven. (DEA comment [3]—so is the sequestration of carbon from coal) In a statement, the Minister said: "Soil carbon (including biochar) does not fit within the scope of the current Kyoto Protocol accounts, so is not included at this time in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme." (DEA comment [4]—so what, if it reduces carbon in the atmosphere, let’s get ahead and do it for there surely will be recompense if it works.)

Maybe the problem with Labor policy is that it is too close to the coal industry or the coal unions.