o the untrained eye, the black, charcoal-looking substance doesn’t look like much. But in the eyes of officials working to restore forests and reduce the impact of wildfires, the material represents an important piece of the puzzle: a product.
Finding a product that can be generated by forest restoration, and be sold to fund the efforts, has been the perpetual challenge for officials in northern Arizona.
Now, scientists and forest officials are looking at a new tool to help in that effort.
Dubbed the CharBoss, the machine can burn material generated during forest thinning operations and create that charcoal-like substance, a material called “biochar,” said Coconino County Forest Restoration Director Jay Smith.
In the future, the CharBoss could come to supplement slash pile burning and other restoration strategies, with the biochar produced sold for any number of uses, Smith said.
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“Everything else right now, we lose money, pretty much. That’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve,” Smith said.
Still, the machine is not a silver bullet, said Han-Sup Han, professor and director of forest operations and biomass utilization at Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute, which is studying potential use of the CharBoss and the biochar it creates.
“We need all the tools,” Han said. “We need to open burn, we need the prescribed burns, we need the CharBoss, we need to get anything that is possible and available to be able to manage our [forests].”
Last month, Coconino County worked with the Forest Service and the ERI to test the machine.
Smit said they were testing the CharBoss against the county’s current air curtain burner.
Both machines work in a similar fashion. Small logs, branches and pine needles, often referred to as biomass, is fed into the machines. That material is then burned in a way, and at a temperature, that limits the smoke put off by the fire, greatly reducing the impact of diminished air quality on local residents.
But the CharBoss dumps the material before it is entirely consumed, generating the biochar substance, said Smith.
The air curtain, on the other hand, generates only ash.
Biochar could be used in a myriad of ways, Han said, from supporting soils and agriculture, to being used in water filters.
“It can really nicely improve the soil productivity — which improves the production of the agricultural products,” Han said.
Han’s studies have shown that when biochar is used within soils, those soils retain water more than normal, meaning less water is needed to support the same number of plants.So far, it’s looking as if when biochar is used, it reduces water loss by 15%, and thus that much less water is needed to support the plants.
That could have applications in everything from agriculture, to more pedestrian uses such as on golf courses, Han said.
And putting biochar in the soil has another beneficial side effect: capturing and storing some of the carbon dioxide that would be released in the burning of the biomass.
“When you convert the biomass into biochar, and then use the biochar as a soil amendment product and put it into the soil, then that the carbon can be sequestered and stored in the soil for hundreds of years,” Han said. “That’s a really good thing.”
As the CharBoss has been tested, Han said, they have also found that the amount of biochar produced depends on what material is burned.
Han said preliminary findings show that when burning greener material, such as wood that has not been dried or seasoned, or smaller material such as twigs, pine needles and smal branches, they produce biochar equaling about 9% of the material that is fed into the Charboss.
In other words, if they load up 1,000 pounds of recently cut small twigs and branches into the burner, they will produce about 90 pounds of biochar.
But that amount increases to 17%, or in this case, 170 pounds, as they feed the machine larger and drier material.
Those logs don’t have to be massive to start seeing that difference. If the logs are just 2 to 4 inches in diameter, a size commonly cut during thinning operations, they start seeing that increase in the biochar produced.
“We found that the drier material, it burns faster in the CharBoss as you can imagine, and it produces more biochar. But if it’s wet material and smaller material, it produces less biochar,” Han said.
Both Smith and Han said they expect improvements to be made to the CharBoss in the coming years, potentially increasing its size so that it can burn more material at one time, and further automating it to reduc the manpower needed in its operation.
At the moment, the county’s current air curtain burner can consume about three times the material that the CharBoss can, and be operated by just one person.
“We’re saying it’s kind of like the Apple 1.0. This was a 1.0. There will be a 1.2, a 1.3,” Smith said.
But in the meantime, the smaller capacity of the CharBoss does come with other benefits such as ease of transport.
As opposed to having to bring biomass to the CharBoss, the machine is small enough to be towed to where that material already is, and simply burn it there.
“So one application I see for it in a community like ours would be when you have community cleanups,” Smith said. “It’s on a trailer with wheels, you can hook it to one truck and pull it to Munds Park or Bellemont … you could just sit there and burn this stuff up. And you could create all this biochar that then the people could come back and take as they wanted to, and put it in their gardens or wherever they want.”
