In the parable of The Five Blind Men and the Elephant, each man correctly describes the part he is touching, but is mistaken in applying his experience to the whole animal.

The circumstances within which biochar is made result in different choices for equipment, co-products, and overall scale. A centralized facility only pencils out where biomass can be economically delivered to a large stationary plant, and applications for the co-products of heat and electricity may be needed to make it do so. At the opposite end of the scale, in remote locations with no practical opportunities for making use of heat and electricity, making biochar is simply a superior alternative to chipping or burning and is done with mobile devices, compact kilns or no equipment at all.

A recent burn with the Vuthisa kiln. Heat is used here to perpetuate and improve pyrolysis, so it’s not really going to waste!

The product, biochar, is the same in all cases, with variations in quality. Those variations often matter in the market, but I would argue that they do not matter significantly in the soil. I disagree that making biochar should be combined with cooking, heating, or power generation as a rule. We are all making the same substance, but our needs are different.

I sympathize with anyone explaining biochar to novices, of which there are many, because I face the same problem with great regularity. Given the cheap availability and convenience of fossil energy and petroleum-based products over many decades, biochar and pyrolysis are simply not familiar to most people in our culture. How biochar production is done, and what you do with the biochar and its co-products, will vary according to which part of the proverbial elephant you are touching.