Can charring chicken poop save the planet?

August 11, 2009 · Posted by in Environment 
Cooking chicken poop sans oxygen could help fight global warming.

Cooking chicken poop sans oxygen could help fight global warming.

Charring chicken poop probably won’t save the planet on its own, but some people think charring fowl manure along with beetle-killed pine trees, corn husks and other organic matter might be an important weapon in the war on greenhouse gases. And a lot of the people who think that are hanging around Boulder this week.

Wednesday wraps up the first-ever North American Biochar Conference, which was hosted by the University of Colorado’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security.

Biochar — a fancy name for charcoal, more or less — is what’s left when organic matter is burned in a low-oxygen environment. And when you don’t have oxygen, you can’t make carbon dioxide. So after the burn, you’re left with biochar, which stays stable for a thousand years, locking up that pesky globe-warming carbon in a big black chunk. And as a bonus, the biochar makes an excellent fertilizer when added to agricultural fields.

“Humble biochar has uncharted potential for capturing and storing carbon dioxide, while simultaneously improving soil fertility and agricultural productivity,” Lakshman Guruswamy, head of CU’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security, said in a news release.

Check out Laura Snider’s story on the nation’s first biochar conference, check out the Web site for the International Biochar Initiative here, or read about the nice things Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had to say about the biochar conference.

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8 Responses to “Can charring chicken poop save the planet?”

  1. Symphony_Sid on August 13th, 2009 2:37 am

    A conference on Chicken Poop in Boulder?

    The jokes just write themselves, don't they?

  2. rjw908 on August 13th, 2009 5:25 pm

    So where does the energy used to char the poop come from? Getting it from burning coal would be a pretty poor bargain.

  3. Laura on August 13th, 2009 1:00 pm

    Essentially, the chicken poop — or downed wood, or dried grass, or whatever biomass you’re using — is the fuel. So you light the dried poop and that burns.

    The thing that creates biochar, and not just a flaming pile of poop, is that you restrict the oxygen that the biomass is burned in. Without much oxygen, the majority of carbon in the biomass products cannot become carbon dioxide. Instead, the carbon transforms into the biochar product.

    Hope that helped,
    Laura

  4. Elsewhere in the Ecosphere | Green Blog Media on August 13th, 2009 1:14 pm

    [...] Can charring chicken poop save the planet? [...]

  5. Joel Gagnon on August 14th, 2009 7:53 am

    Calling biochar a fertilizer is incorrect. It is a valuable soil amendment, but it has no fertilizing value. We need to keep in mind that its production is at the expense of any fertilizing value the raw material might have had. In the case of chicken manure, that is considerable. Is the nitrogen going into the air as NO2? If so, that would be turning a potential fertilizer into a an air pollutant.

  6. raffa's status on Sunday, 16-Aug-09 08:56:18 UTC - Identi.ca on August 16th, 2009 2:56 am

    [...] http://biggreenboulder.com/environment/can-charring-chicken-poop-save-the-planet/ [...]

  7. Can charring chicken poop save the planet? | Ethiopian News on August 16th, 2009 9:30 am

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  8. Dan13LA76 on June 19th, 2011 9:59 pm

    Yeah, why not.