How to Make Biochar (Charcoal)

Most of you unintentionally make a bit of charcoal in your home fireplaces.  When biomass burns completely, carbon pairs with oxygen to form carbon dioxide in an exothermic (heat-releasing) reaction known as combustion.  The gray, powdery ash left behind consists of incombustible minerals, i.e. sodium, potassium, calcium, etc.  In order to make charcoal, which is essentially the dry carbon skeleton of biological material, you need a different type of thermochemical reaction: pyrolysis.  Pyrolysis is the decomposition of organic material in the presence of heat and the absence of oxygen.  In contrast with combustion, pyrolysis is an endothermic reaction, meaning that it requires energy input.  In any given fire, you may have zones of combustion and pyrolysis occurring simultaneously.  The key to producing charcoal with limited technology is maximizing pyrolysis and minimizing combustion, although some combustion is necessary to supply the energy for pyrolysis.  If you've already sat through a science lecture today, my apologies for boring you further :)

 

Shown above are a few of Eco-Fuel Africa's charcoal kilns.  The farm-scale model on the left is made from a recycled 55-gallon oil drum for about $30 USD.  That's about 70,000 Uganda shillings- the US dollar has some serious clout here, especially with Uganda's massive inflation problems.  For instance, Sanga tells me that the price of traditional charcoal rose 40% last year alone.  Without a commensurate wage increase for the average worker, such price hikes place mounting financial pressure on the vast majority of Ugandans who have zero alternatives to wood charcoal.

Handling the charcoal kilns is hot and somewhat treacherous work.  After the cane waste is packed in and set alight, the cover must be placed on top.  As you can see from the picture on the right, the chimney on one of the kilns is leaning precariously to one side.  Once the waste starts to burn down, the cover often requires readjustment using the attached handles.  I quickly discover that these uninsulated metal fixtures get very hot (duh!), and manage to sear my fingers quite badly upon attempting to fix the top in place.  After I recoil in pain, the shirtless man in the above photo, Hamsa, apologizes for the kiln's temperature, then proceeds to unflinchingly grab the cover with his bare hands and fix it in place.  I guess my soft mizungu skin isn't conditioned for such blistering work.  Feeling useless, I retreat to the shade of the building to take some notes and plan my energy experiment with the kilns.

My experiment is pretty simple- measure the mass of cane waste that goes into the kiln, and measure how much charcoal comes out. Since mass is equivalent to energy (as we all know from Einstien's famous equation), this tells us the efficiency of the charcoal making process, which is the focus of my Environmental Science thesis on the EFA business.  If 15 kg of cane waste produces 5 kg of charcoal, then the process is 33% efficient, and 66% of the embodied biomass energy is lost as waste heat (which are approximately the numbers I calculated in my field experiment).  When I get home, I hope to research ways to improve our kiln technology so we can recover some of that energy for a useful purpose, such as generating electricity, drying briquettes or biomass, etc.  The trick is doing so without adding undue expense or complexity.

New Beginnings at EFA Lugazi

Sorry for the long delay between posts!  Instead of overloading you with accounts of my last 6 days, I'll just transcribe the next entry in my journal.  This time I think I'll hold off a bit on the prose and let the pictures do some talking :)

I don't think I realized the perfect timing of my trip until I physically arrived in Lugazi.  The night we get in, Sanga takes myself and his 6 new employees out to a local bar for a gathering of the parties.  It seems that it is his first time meeting a few of them.  They are confused by my presence until Sanga explains my role in raising money for the new facility and studying the business from a scientific perspective, upon which they thank me profusely.  I try to explain that it wasn't my money and that I did little more than send a few letters and emails, but to no avail.  Three days in, and already I believe Ugandans are some of the most gracious people on the planet. 

Sanga then asks them to air their preliminary concerns after two days of collecting biomass and making charcoal at the new facility.  One man, named Hamsa, displays a nasty looking burn he received on his forearm while operating one of the kilns.  We assure him that we'll buy some safety equipment in the coming days.  Everything else seems to be running smoothly
Since there is not yet access to electricity at the new facility, Sanga has rented a temporary space close to his home in Lugazi village for briquette making.  This is my first true view of the functioning business. 

 


















We have 2 briquetting machines, and each can be operated by one person.  It's a pretty dirty job- workers feed charcoal powder into the machine by hand from a big pile behind them, and a rotating screw compresses the powder and squeezes it out the side of the machine, sort of like charcoal toothpaste.  It comes out looking like a wet, black sausage.  The powder is bound together by adding water.  They are then laid out to dry in the sun, and are ready for packaging and sale within hours.  I tried my hand at briquetting, and I don't think the charcoal dust will come out from under my fingernails for some time.

The above left photo shows the finished product in action.  As you can see, EFA's charcoal burns dry and clean.  A stove using traditional charcoal is depicted on the right.  When most household cooking occurs indoors, the health benefit of using EFA charcoal is patently obvious.  

The Slums of Kampala

Walking around the Kampala slums is an overwhelming sensory experience.  The roads and soil are a vibrant shade of rusty red.  Everyone seems to wear brightly colored clothing that contrasts starkly with their ebony skin.  The wailing of infants rings in my ears at every turn.  Passing cars and trucks kick up clouds of dry red dust, and many trail sooty exhaust smoke that chokes my nostrils and leaves me with a buzzing headache if I forget to hold my breath.  Sanga explains that there are zero emissions regulations, and it doesn’t help that most of the vehicles are at least 10 years old.  Numerous piles of burning trash (often containing plastic, batteries, and other nasty stuff) further add to the ground-level air pollution.  I get the nagging feeling that every inhalation knocks days off my life expectancy. 

Young, dusty children are everywhere.  Often they unabashedly follow me, waving and calling out “muzungu!” which is the universally accepted term for white tourist. Translated literally, muzungu means “person who wanders around aimlessly.”  Most teenagers are hard at work, either pushing wheelbarrows or carrying oversized loads on the back of corroded old bicycles.  Women calmly balance ponderous rucksacks on the crowns of their heads as cars and motorcycles squeeze past on congested roads.  There is no pavement or sidewalk, so the street is the marketplace (see below photo, taken from Sanga's car).  Women actually seem to do the most difficult work- running storefronts, cooking, cleaning, child rearing, or some combination of the above.  Their multitasking skills are a marvel. 

Wood charcoal is heaped in front of virtually every store in the slum.  According to Sanga, charcoal is brought from the forests to Kampala by the truckload and quickly consumed, even though prices rose by 40% last year.  The individual charcoal pieces are often large and irregularly shaped- not very favorable for cooking.  Of nearly 870 million sub-Saharan Africans (surpassing 2 billion by 2040), over 90% use wood or charcoal for cooking.  Though the numbers are staggering, seeing the ubiquity of charcoal firsthand gives me better grasp of this market’s vast potential.

Sanga points out a store near the EFA facility that sell his briquettes, which come neatly packaged in monogrammed 1-kilo plastic bags.  The woman running the store accosts Sanga; supplies of EFA charcoal have stalled, and she wants more.  That’s because the area has been without electricity for the past 8 days, apparently due to a blown transformer and negligent utilities.  Without power, Sanga can’t run the machines that compact and bind the charcoal powder into briquettes.  He’s experimented with solar energy, but panels are expensive and production is too slow.  How is any business supposed to function sustainably with such unreliable infrastructure?

More to come as I head to Lugazi, especially pictures (I forgot my camera cable, so these will all be iPhone shots).  Thanks for stopping by!

Arrival, and being Sanga Moses

This is only my second time meeting Sanga in person, and upon my arrival in Entebbe airport he already embraces me like a brother.  He looks as exhausted and red-eyed as I feel after my 25 hour journey.  I can barely imagine how hectic this man's life has been in the past months; he's newly married as of a month ago, his grandmother died last week, and he recently picked up and moved from his home village to the site of EFA's new facility in Lugazi.  Not to mention the massive organizational flux brought on by founding a new business in the developing world.  People told him he was insane to leave his steady, well-paying job as a corporate accountant, but he refused to conform.  On top of all this, he tells me that he was diagnosed with malaria yesterday (no big deal right? here its as common as flu).  Doctors said he should be in a hospital bed, but amidst all of this craziness, Sanga made it to the airport in time to wait 3 hours for my delayed flight to arrive.  And he has the humility to thank me for coming!  What a guy.

On our way from the airport to the EFA facility in the Kampala slums, we stop for a bite to eat.  Though it is past 1 am on a Monday, the Kampala nightlife seems to be in full swing.  Harsh, throbbing music blares from surrounding bars and night clubs.  Disembodied headlights seem to drive straight towards us and veer to the side at the last possible second.  Scantily clad girls giggle and give me eyes; I'm flattered until he tells me that they are definitely prostitutes.  In fact, just about everyone we pass stares me down, but I'm too tired and hazy to be overwhelmed by anything.  We finally settle on a restaurant where it turns out everything on the menu is fried and breaded (not my cup of tea haha).  Thankfully they had eggs, so I order an omelet, douse it in hot sauce, and we continue on our way.

We drive towards the outskirts of Kampala in Sanga's first car, a refurbished Toyota that was given to him as a wedding gift.  The roads become increasingly riddled with bone-jarring potholes until the tarmac finally disappears in favor of a rutted, cratered moonscape.  I would have been skeptical of approaching these roads in anything less than a Humvee, but Sanga carefully navigates the hatchback around the worst of it.  There are no streetlights and all the buildings are dark, so I can't yet make much of the surrounding slums.  We finally arrive at the EFA "Kampala office," which consists of a small, concrete-floored building with nothing but a desk, a chair, and a couple of bedrooms.

Upon entering one of the bedrooms, I'm surprised to find an EFA employee already occupying one of the two mattresses.  He awakens to help Sanga and I make up the other mattress by the light of a lone, flickering candle.  As I lay down to sleep (at long last), I inquire as to where Sanga was going to spend the night.  "With Moses," he replies.  "Isn't that your name?" I ask, perplexed.  Turns out that Moses was the first name of the guy on the other mattress.  You heard right- the founder and CEO of Eco-Fuel Africa, Limited has no qualms about sharing a bed with his employees.  A wave of rich, American guilt washes over me before I finally succumb to the jet lag.  Culture shock can wait till tomorrow.

 Eco Fuel Africa's Kampala Facility

Welcome!

Hello everyone! I've created this as a forum for friends, family, and supporters to glimpse my work with a company called Eco-Fuel Africa Limited (for brevity's sake, I will hereafter refer to Eco-Fuel Africa as EFA).  My visit with EFA's founder and CEO, Sanga Moses, is taking place from January 31st- February 13th, but I am sure our work will carry us much farther into the future.

For those who don't already know, EFA is a Ugandan business that intends to replace traditional wood-based cooking fuels with alternative energy sources.  Most Ugandans, and indeed much of the developing world, cook over open fires or primitive stoves that use either wood or wood charcoal.  This wood is traditionally taken from virgin tropical forests, contributing to rampant destruction of forest resources.  At current rates, the entire African continent will be devoid of forest by the year 2050.

EFA aims to address this problem by making charcoal from widely available agricultural waste.  Their model is predicated on loaning farmers the technology to make charcoal powder from crop residues.  Farmers repay the loan with a portion of charcoal production, which EFA consolidates, packages, and distributes for local sale.  This creates sustainable jobs and income streams in poor communities while producing a cheaper, cleaner-burning product that does not deplete valuable forest resources.

I hope my visit will help me (and through this blog, my fantastic and generous supporters) understand the true value of EFA's innovation.  Today's developing world faces explosive population growth, corrupt and unresponsive governments, crumbling economic infrastructure, massive natural resource depletion, and irreversible global warming.  In my estimation, these elements are conspiring and conflating to send the developing world (especially sub-Saharan Africa) into a downward spiral.  EFA is an example of a paradigm shift in social enterprise that considers economic progress in the context of greater socio-ecologic systems.  In the philosophy of natural capitalism, this has been termed the next industrial revolution- the realization that all of our livelihoods (and those of our children) depend on the same finite, shrinking pool of natural resources.

Thank you for joining myself, Sanga Moses, and Eco-Fuel Africa in the quest to change the trajectory of human development at an unprecedented scale.  It sure will be an interesting journey :)