Biochar: Low Carbon Economy As A Soution To Climate Change and the Environment

The high consumption of fossil fuels as the pedestal current economic activity has caused adverse effects on the environment such as the climate change and environmental issues. Accumulation of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that has exceeded the threshold needs to be reduced to the safe limit. Some things you can do include: improving energy efficiency of various equipment and machines today are still using fossil fuel, using fuel or renewable energy sources and absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When we review the balance of carbon emitted by the use of renewable fuels or substitution of fossil fuels with renewable energy is carbon neutral, while the absorption of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere is carbon negative.

Low-carbon economy as a solution to climate change and the environment is how economic sectors are encouraged to carbon neutral conditions even carbon negative. Biomass energy is one solution to achieve the low-carbon economy. Availability of biomass feedstock in Indonesia in particular, is very abundant and has a small part that is less than 5% is used as an energy source. The Optimum scenario of utilization the biomass into environmentally friendly forms of energy is the next questions when we has dropped the option to use as an energy source.

Continuous pyrolysis technology as a second generation biofuel technology is the best solution in order to establish the era of low-carbon economy. Products such as charcoal / biochar,  biooil, and syngas will be generated by this technology. Especially biomass waste or organic waste can be directly processed at the site to produce the products as above. Agro-industry companies such as palm oil mill generate huge biomass waste every day. Indonesia and Malaysia as the largest palm oil producer in the world or around 87% of world production (2007) that had a lot of palm oil mills is estimated at more than 1,000 units, so that the biomass waste available is overwhelming.

Especially in palm oil industries, product biochar (charcoal) will have a major role to improve soil fertility, including reducing the need for chemical fertilizers (urea) in oil palm plantations, so it will be very profitable. A number of efforts have been carried out by the palm oil companies to increase their effectiveness in fertilization and soil enrichment, and with biochar is like like 1 shoot killed 2 birds, palm solid waste problem can be overcome, gain energy sources and improvement of soil fertility. Biochar (charcoal) in addition to be able to fertilize the soil is capable of capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to a carbon negative mechanism, while biooil and syngas can be applied as a carbon neutral fuel because it comes from biomass.