VIDEO. Biochar, towards a solution to reduce our CO2 emissions

According to Jean Jouzel, climatologist and former vice-president of the IPCC, we emit 60 billion tons of CO2 in the world per year. By 2030, we should cut our emissions by half but also extract CO2 from the atmosphere. While the absorption of vegetation and the oceans does not exceed 20 to 25 billion tons, biochar could be an exploitable resource for storing carbon dioxide, up to 2 billion tons of CO2. Biochar is charcoal of plant origin.

An interesting solution for the environment

In Lajinha, Brazil, the French NetZero factory, founded in 2021, is trying to deploy biochar on a large scale. This material, which looks like a kind of coal, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Jean Jouzel, climatologist and former vice-president of the IPCC, was quickly “convinced of the use of biochar”, which was also quoted in the fifth and sixth report of the IPCC.

In the factory, the coffee parchment, waste from coffee husking is stored. These plant residues capture carbon from the atmosphere. The principle of the plant is therefore to extract the carbon captured by these residues. In tropical regions, plant residues are not used. They eventually decompose and re-emit greenhouse gases. “It is extremely beneficial to use this organic matter for something else and to extract the carbon from it to store it in the soil.”, according to Jean Jouzel.

The biochar will then be stored in the soil and improve their fertility. “It’s quite porous and it allows you to hang what we call nutrients and therefore reduce emissions related to the use of fertilizers in these regions.”. The main advantage of biochar is therefore its stability, once in the ground, because “it does not decompose after a few centuries”, adds the climatologist.