Biochar -potential to remove 2.6 billion tonnes co2

The IPCC further consolidates: Biochar is an important carbon removal technology with several co-benefits to fight climate change. The report notes that the long-term persistence of biochar carbon in soils has been widely studied.

4th April the IPCC released the report “Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change”. This is the third part of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Cycle (AR6), contributed by the IPCC Working Group III.

The report clearly shows that Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is a cornerstone of any strategy to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. So, what does the latest IPCC report say about biochar?

The IPCC assesses that biochar has a global potential to eventually remove 2.6 billion tonnes CO2 per year. According to the report biochar has the potential to bring several co-benefits, for example, increased yields/food production capacity, particularly in sandy and acidic soils, increased soil water-holding capacity and nitrogen use efficiency, biological nitrogen fixation, and enhanced resilience to climate change. The report also points out biochar’s ability to adsorb (and thereby immobilise) organic pollutants and heavy metals.

On barriers to upscaling, the IPCC emphasises insufficient investment, limited large-scale production facilities, and high production costs at small scale.

We at Reverse Carbon believe that these findings strongly support our strategy. In fact, our solution addresses some of the very implementation barriers that the IPCC highlights, thus our efforts promise to take biochar closer to delivering substantially towards mitigating climate change, while also utilising many positive side benefits that come with biochar systems.

If we focus on what the IPCC says more specifically about biochar and CDR, the report notes that the long-term persistence of biochar carbon in soils has been widely studied. We observe especially that the IPCC does not place biochar in the category categorised by high risk of non-permanence category in which Afforestation/Reforestation (planting of trees) and Soil Carbon Sequestration (altered methods in agriculture) are placed.

The IPCC reports that the greatest uncertainty surrounding biochar as a CDR method is the availability of sustainably-sourced biomass for biochar production. Since we have been aware of this aspect for long, our strategy relies exclusively on utilisation of sustainable biomass residues.

In conclusion, we find the IPCC report encouraging in the sense that it confirms that the strategy we have chosen has solid scientific backing.

More generally on CDR, the IPCC mitigation scenarios show that on a global level, it will be necessary to remove several hundred to over a thousand billion tonnes of CO2 between now and 2100. As we all know deep, rapid, and sustained emission reductions must be an absolute priority, but it will not be enough. The IPCC emphasises three complementary roles that CDR can, and needs to, fulfil to make the Paris Agreement goals attainable:

1. lowering net GHG emissions in the near-term;

2. counterbalancing ‘hard-to-abate’ residual emissions (e.g., emissions from agriculture, aviation, shipping, industrial processes) in order to help reach net zero emissions in the mid-term;

3. achieving net negative CO2 or GHG emissions in the long-term if deployed at levels exceeding annual residual emissions.

Using simpler language, CDR is necessary for the world to get to net-zero emissions, and it will help us to get there quicker. CDR will also be needed to pay back a carbon debt – because when we eventually get to net-zero emissions, we will have emitted too much, and we need to pay back our debt to the atmosphere by bringing down the concentration of CO2 to a sustainable level.

A final note on terminology: The new report maintains the definition of CDR from the previous report. However, there has been some modification of the glossary since the last report. The IPCC now consistently uses the term “CDR methods” do denote approaches that can draw down CO2 from the atmosphere. The term “Negative Emission Technology” has been scrapped. And “Negative emissions” is used exclusively to describe a state of higher removals than emissions on a system level.

At Reverse Carbon we feel that this report gives strong support that CDR needs to be scaled up at an almost breath-taking pace, that biochar has an important role to play, and that our continued efforts, here at Reverse Carbon, can make important contributions to the fight against climate change.