Deployed at a global scale, biochar could potentially play a major role in restoring the carbon balance in the atmosphere. BEC's ultimate vision is to provide the fuel and fertilizer necessary to make closed-loop agriculture possible. This will promote food security—improving soil structure, water-holding capacity and drought resistance, along with soil fertility—while also removing net carbon from the atmosphere.
BEC currently offers clean, low-cost technology to make biochar from waste biomass without energy co-products. These units are suitable for converting forest waste into biochar for university and government research; mine tailings reclamation; pine beetle kill remediation; forest fire fuel management; agricultural soil fertility; and within a few years, carbon credits.
Initial tests also show that the biochar produced by BEC's technology is highly effective at absorbing oil. While the units required to produce it are currently relatively small, they could be reproduced rapidly, and deployed almost anywhere in the country, operated by relatively low skilled workers, making biochar for cleanup out of pine beetle kill, trees blown down by hurricanes, peanut shells, or potentially even kudzu.
The US alone generates 368M tons a year of forest product waste, with another 60M tons/year of wood from the Rocky Mountain pine beetle epidemic thus far; along with almost 1B tons of agricultural waste. BEC's ultimate goal is to provide cost effective solutions to transform waste biomass into biochar for soil fertility and atmospheric carbon remediation. BEC is working closely with the International Biochar Initiative to ensure biochar's recognition in new carbon trading mechanisms. Until that process has been completed, biochar is eligible for voluntary carbon-credits. The carbon in one metric tonne of biochar is equal to about 3 metric tonnes of CO2.