Turning slash (and chicken poop) into cash

Eric Twombly, president of Biochar Products, talks with Steve Edwards, president of the Baker County Private Woodlands Association, during a demonstration tour Thursday of his biochar research plant in Halfway. (Baker City Herald/Ed Merriman)

“One of these plants in my estimation might pencil out to 10 or 15 jobs, and we could easily have three or four in this area around Halfway, Baker City, Trout Creek and other places in Baker and Union counties,” Eric Twombly, president of Biochar Products, told members of the Baker County Private Woodlands Association (BCPWA) and others attending a tour of his plant.

For private forest owners and federal forest managers, Twombly said biochar and bio-oil products could provide a new market for wood wastes from fuels reduction and forest health thinning projects.

Biochar technology also holds the promise of reducing pollution from forest fires and slash burning, improving forest health by providing a revenue stream to pay for beneficial logging, reducing the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels and producing a natural soil amendment that helps grow crops with less water and less fertilizer, Twombly said.

Steve Edwards, a forest owner and president of the BCPWA, said he’s excited about the potential of biochar soil amendments to reduce water usage for crops by as much as 15 percent.

“It creates the potential to turn a lot of marginal farmland into productive farmland,” Edwards said.

He said the ability to grow more food with less water is expected to become increasingly important with the global population exploding.

“I realize we don’t have the ability to use our forests like we used to. About the only thing we can take out of the forests any more is forest wastes,” Twombly said.

As a result of legal challenges and government restrictions on logging, Twombly said, “Our forests are overloaded with fuels. That’s why they’re burning up.”

Twombly said many timber industry and environmental leaders, forest managers, state lawmakers, members of Congress and officials with the Obama Administration recognize the nation is facing the worst forest health crisis in history and are supporting some logging.

Traditionally, the woody biomass left from logging was stacked in piles and burned, sending smoke loaded with carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“Currently, the biomass products gleaned from cleaning up the forests aren’t being used,” Twombly said.

Frustrated by the waste and pollution, Twombly started investigating alternatives to slash burning. He found a prototype machine that can turn anything from wood wastes to chicken manure into biochar fertilizer and bio-oil.

Biochar also can be used to purify water, Twombly said.

He got so excited by the potential benefits of converting forest waste into useful products that he retired from the Forest Service to avoid any conflict of interest and obtained a grant from the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station.

“This is a Forest Service research project,” Twombly said. “We are the ones with the DEQ permits.”

With so much interest worldwide in reducing greenhouse gases, Twombly said the Forest Service recognizes the need to do more thinning to improve forest health and reduce the frequency and intensity of fires.

Twombly said the Forest Service also is looking to get away from the traditional practice of burning slash piles.

“We’ve got lots of fuels reduction work that needs to happen, but we can’t burn all the time,” Twombly said.

Instead of burning slash and other organic matter such as grass straw or even weeds, sagebrush and juniper, the prototype machine Twombly demonstrated during last week’s tour converts the biomass materials into marketable biochar soil amendments and bio-oil.

“This machine produces 100 gallons of oil per ton of biomass and 400 pounds of char,” Twombly said. “The char in bulk retails for around $250 per ton.”

He said the bio-oil generates about 62 percent of the British thermal unit (Btu) production of crude oil.

“We are getting to do this learning with the Forest Service watching us. They are taking the char and oil products to the lab and testing them. It is a grand opportunity for all of us,” Twombly told the tour audience.

He said samples of biochar and bio-oil derived from different species of trees and plants are sent to the Rocky Mountain Research Station, where tests compare chemical content, Btu generating capacity and other factors.

So far, he said test results have been remarkably consistent, with little variation between the biochar and bio-oil made from cottonwood, cedar, juniper, agricultural wastes or chicken manure.

In response to questions from the audience, Twombly said the biomass processing plant could be used to dispose of weeds, sagebrush, juniper trees and other vegetation that farmers and ranchers would like to get rid of without burning.

Using biochar as a soil amendment is especially good for the environment because the carbon stored in the biochar remains in the soil for hundreds or thousands of years, said Chuck Rouse, a former timber buyer who’s working with Twombly on the project.

Rouse said the Aztecs and others amended soil with charcoal made from wood in the Amazon region of South America 7,000 years ago, and much of the char remains trapped in the soil today.

“It’s a big carbon sink,” Rouse said.

Although the prototype plant is proving successful, as with any prototype there are bugs to be worked out, Twombly said.

The machine requires constant complicated adjustments, rendering it virtually unusable for the type of mobile biomass processing best suited for fuels reduction and forest health thinning projects.

Twombly and his cohorts record adjustments they’re making and will be suggesting improvements to the manufacturer for building a truly portable and easily operated biomass processing plant that could be trucked to wherever the biomass is.

Rouse said he also likes that the machine can run on syngas, a byproduct of of the process of convering biomass into biochar and bio-oil.

Propane is used to fire up the plant, but once it is running the process generates enough syngas to keep the machine operating, Rouse said.

While the prototype is still a bit bulky to haul around, Twombly said one of the goals of the research is to come up with design changes to shrink it down to two connectible units that will each fit on a 40-foot lowboy trailer.

Despite the plant’s operational issues, Twombly said he’s excited because the plant actually works.

“It does what it is supposed to do,” Twombly said. “We’ll keep working with (the manufacturer) to get this machine refined to the point people can take it out in the woods and run it by just changing a few dial settings.”

Tony Sowers, a 30-year resident of Halfway who participated in the tour, said he’s been helping Twombly with the biochar project for about three years because of the potential it has for creating jobs in Pine Valley.

“If we could do that in every valley in the intermountain region, that would be fantastic,” Sowers said.

He said about 30 people from Idaho toured the Halfway plant before the Baker County group arrived.

Benjamin Bechtold, a tour participant from Richland, said he likes the potential for reducing fuel loading and improving forest health with less slash burning and pollution, but like Sowers, he’s most interested in the potential the technology has for creating jobs in small rural towns hit hardest by the timber industry’s decline.

“Jobs are few and far between,” Bechtold said. “Logging is kind of going out or on a hiatus, so I am interested in anything that can create some jobs.”