Post-petroleum solutions

What does biochar have to do with petroleum?

We are unlikely to find another resource as versatile and energy-dense as petroleum. As it becomes uneconomical to extract, charcoal is one of many resources displaced by petroleum that will resurface. As oil becomes more expensive and difficult to extract, alternatives derived from charcoal are likely to become more economical to produce. Too many wars have been fought over oil while research awaits subsidy by forward-thinking administrations.

This potential will gradually outpace its importance as a soil amendment, but soil amendment will continue to be charcoal’s most widely applicable application. Anyone with biomass and a match can make biochar, and soil absorbs more of it than we can make.

Healing land from logging

Try to imagine the effects of harvesting logs with bulldozers from steep forests that get about 80 inches of rain every winter. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, this was normal throughout coastal Northern California. Erosion and landslides were common, along with flooding. Sediment choked the rivers and wiped out salmon in vast numbers.

With the same passion that inspired their escape from civilization, young settlers to this region began to invent Restoration Forestry. They planted and protected trees, armored streams and gullies, and even bred salmon.

But few people understood that forests need fire. Fire exclusion continued, and as a result our forests are out of balance. Biochar makes the problem of overstocked forests into a soil healing remedy.