It is well known that carbon levels in the atmosphere are increasing. What is less known is that carbon levels in our soils are rapidly declining. Both are urgent sustainability issues. Carbon is an essential element of soil fertility, facilitating the storage of plant nutrients in topsoil. Without carbon, agricultural plants starve.
Chemical fertilizers cannot compensate for a lack of carbon. They are simply washed away at the first rainfall without it.
Our solution, the horizontal bed pyrolysis kiln, in effect recycles carbon from the atmosphere, where we have too much, into agricultural soils, where we have too little. It produces biochar - which is an efficient means of replenishing soil carbon in a relatively stable form that retains plant nutrients in top soil - from biomass which would otherwise decompose to CO2 in a relatively short time span.
Annually, plants absorb and retain about 60 gigatonnes of carbon. Decomposing biomass releases about the same amount of carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere. Humans control a significant portion of this biomass via forestry waste, agricultural waste, manure, and municipal waste streams.
We have an opportunity, and the need, to intervene in the carbon cycle at this point, preventing the carbon passing through our hands from decomposing to CO2. The challenge is to develop systems that do so in a financially attractive way.
The horizontal bed kiln is the foundation of our answer to that challenge, designed specifically to extract as much value as possible from biomass waste streams in a simple, reliable way, to enable carbon recycling. Our device generates value by a) producing biochar or torrefied biomass from nearly any feedstock b) condensing wood vinegar from the gas stream, c) cracking and filtering the raw syngas remaining after condensation to produce a clean syngas, d) optionally burning the syngas in a genset to produce electricity, and e) pre-processing biomass to be converted to humic and fulvic acid in a secondary process.
Aria Media Sagl
via Carà 6
6999 Astano
Switzerland
Tel: +41 76 303 4477
info@aria-media.com
Skype: ariamedia