The Forest Walker Part 2
Join me today for Episode 850 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
- Biochar
- What it Is
- What it Does
- Ways to Make It
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin Ant, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 11 o'clock AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 1st day of the 2nd month of 2024.
And this is episode good lord. What episode is it? I think it's 850. Yep. It is 8 episode 850 of Bitcoin and we're gonna continue on with the Forest Walker talk. Today we're about just the biochar portion of the Forest Walker system. Right? Now, before I even get into into any of that I do want to go through and look at something. I got a, I got an email from Dan Bolser, who's somebody I've known for quite a while on various platforms like Twitter, which I will say something about here in a second. And he had the only, like I basically said, you know, hey, if you got problems with this system, you know, or or like if I'm missing something or if you've got another idea or you want to add to it, whatever, you can email me at david.bennett.cgmail.com.
Well, Dan was the only one that actually took me up on that. And so I woke up this morning to, to this email and it says, it won't work. Only kidding. I love it. My business slash engineering slash academic perspective would be too many moving parts. I love the idea, but can you bootstrap? What if you paid someone to do this, like, e. G. A, you know, for example, a pilot? It's not scalable, but you'd learn a shit ton. I'm serious when I say I want to build a river, perhaps we can work on that next. Okay. I understand exactly what Dan is saying and I wholeheartedly agree with him. There are a lot of moving parts to to what I'm suggesting, which is one of the reasons why when I started talking about this not yesterday, but the day before when I was outlining the whole system that I purposely said that this is starting to reach into science fiction Because there is a lot of moving parts.
And the fact and the fact remains, there may not be a return on investment. And if there's not a return on investment, nobody's gonna build this, including me. I mean, I I can, you know, want it to happen all day long and, you know, and and get other people excited about it. But it really boils down to numbers as to whether or not this remains science fiction or if it becomes actual reality. And I'm not I'm literally not doing this and I need to to make sure that that we all I want to make sure that the I make myself plain here.
I'm not doing this because this needs to happen. That's not the point. This is more of a mental exercise. How do we fit Bitcoin mining in with things that don't necessarily look like Bitcoin mining? Right? Like, heating hot tubs with Bitcoin miners. Heating your home with Bitcoin miners. There's an entire, there's an entire greenhouse that grows flowers in the Netherlands and as far as I know they've been doing it for years like at least 7 years that I know about they are heating the entire greenhouse with Bitcoin mining. And they are not the only ones.
And we keep we keep coming across this where how many different ways can we fit Bitcoin mining into something? That's what this exercise is all about. Is how to get our imaginations looking at how do we fit Bitcoin mining into something. And to be able to do that we got to, you know, got to understand a little bit something about mining like how much does it cost to buy miners? How are they built? What kind how much heat do they emit? How much electricity do they use? How much Bitcoin can they mine? If you're attaching the hash power to something like a pool, you know, unless you're gonna go out and spend 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars on a a whole bunch of mining equipment not just the miners but the power infrastructure the power contracts rack space and maintenance people to work on it. You're not going to solo mine Bitcoin. That's just not going to happen. Sure, it's it's happened before and and some lucky guy would like it even on Nerdminer that these little tiny miners.
There's there's always the potential that you can hit a block and get the reward. But for the most part, this system would be attached, the forest walker system would be attached to a mining pool. So that I'd at least be, you know, the system would be able to at least get some satoshis out of the deal. But a system like this is designed where it's not about Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is along for the ride to fill a gap in something else that could be done. And that's what this entire exercise is about. One of these days, maybe. You never know, could run across a billionaire who just wants to get their name attached to carbon sequestration so they can put it in their company's brochure that they're funding a system like this. That could happen.
There's no reason that can't happen because it's great PR. We'll get into a little bit of that. But I just wanted to make sure that I shouted out Dan Balser because he's making a very good point. There's a lot of moving parts. And that's why this is on the edge. It can be done. There's nothing about this system that's impossible. The only thing to that really tips it over the edge from fantasy to reality is return on investment and can that be done? Alright. Well, that's a numbers game and that may be another show, but for now I really want to start talking about the biochar portion.
Because this is this is really where the meat and potatoes of this system comes into play and bio or a Bitcoin mining is just basically along for the ride. Alright, so biochar, let's just let's just center ourselves into what it is. It is this entire system makes biochar by grazing on wood waste in a forest. I went over that in part 1 of the Forest Walker series. Alright. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, you gotta go listen to part 1. I did it's it's episode 849. It is Forest Walker part 1. That's the whole system outlined. And I talked got into a little bit about biochar, but this entire show is about the biochar portion of the Forest Walker system. So what is it?
How would you define biochar? So what I'm gonna do for the guys over in, in the livestream is I'm just gonna put up a I basically just put up a whole Google wall of pictures of what looks to be like charcoal. Except it's not charcoal. See, that's that's the issue is that there's a major difference between charcoal that you put on your grill and biochar. There's a wholesale difference between the 2. What is that difference? It's the amount of volatile hydrocarbons that are still in the charcoal versus the amount that's still in biochar. If you go get Kingsford or lump charcoal or cowboy charcoal or whatever that has a lot of volatile lot volatileizable hydrocarbon still left in it, which means that as that charcoal heats up and catches on fire, it's gonna start off gassing a whole bunch of hydrocarbons.
And that's why you light a charcoal fire that's why it'll last an hour. Because it's burning off all that hydrocarbons before it starts burning the carbon itself. The carbon will be the last to actually ignite even though it's all orange and stuff trust me it's actually the heat is actually coming from this burning gas. When all that gas when all those hydrocarbons are depleted out of that charcoal then it turns to ash and it does so almost immediately, right? So in biochar there there are no hydrocarbons left. It's just straight carbon to the tune of about, I don't know, 80% carbon.
So in the 4th Walker system, the carbon is coming from what is coming from wood waste that's being gathered by the system chipped up, and run through the gasification process to do all of the other wonderful stuff that we talked about in episode 849. But biochar by definition comes from all manner of organic waste. It doesn't have to be just wood. It can be straight up agricultural residue like corn stalks and rice husks and nut casings like if you, you know, eat pecans or walnuts the shell that is a high quality input for the gasification process and biochar manufacturing.
And obviously there's forestry waste like, you know, wood chips, sawdust, and you know straight up sticks being chipped up and whatnot run through the gasification process and that'll get you what it is that we want. But dude, there's also like flat out food waste, there's animal manure, I mean you could think of like there's people that have put grass clippings once they're dried into the gasification process and they are able to actually get some biochar out of it. There's all manner of feedstocks that's what we're talking about the feedstock that goes into the manufacture of biochar. But there's also dedicated energy crops, like there's something called miscanthus and switchgrass that are grown specifically for the high amount of carbon containing material that they basically mow it down, dry it out, and then that becomes a feedstock for the manufacturer of biochar.
Alright, so once you've got your feedstock and the feedstock is essentially anything that contains carbon and as you know moisture content kind of needs to be low like 10 to 15% moisture content before you take it through the gasification process. Otherwise, you get problems. But the gasification process another word that you can look at describing it is pyrolysis. Which is just a fancy word of or a fancy term that describes the heating up of a carbon containing compound to a point that the carbon molecule or the various carbon containing molecules like, oh, I don't know, like methane and stuff like that starts to volatilize out of the mass and then becomes it becomes the gas that becomes the synthesis gas that we want and as I said synthesis gas consists of carbon monoxide which is highly flammable, hydrogen which is highly flammable, and methane which is highly flammable. Those three things are the major components for syngas.
And that's what you know, the Forest Walker system uses to power the great guts and feathers of that entire system. But for those that that, you know, are wondering about like gasification and does it work? This thing has worked since 16/99. You know, the year before the year 1700 is when the very first person started working with this stuff. His name was Dean Clayton. And that's when he first started experimenting with gasification. It was 16 99. It took until 1901 for the very first vehicle, like a car. Well, not a car like we have today, but you know, something with 4 wheels and an internal combustion engine. It took until 1901 for them to figure out because, you know, honestly the the the car hadn't wasn't all that old by that time. And somebody's like, oh, remember that gasification thing? Yeah. Let's let's strap it into this car and see if we can burn a log of wood and and get it to actually do, you know, ignite and and run an internal combustion engine. And lo and behold, it did.
To the point that by the end of World War 2, 500,000 vehicles in Germany alone were being run on what was also at that time called wood gas. It's the same thing. Syngas, synthesis gas, wood gas it's all the same. It's carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and methane. And if you can get that gas out of the gasification system and plug it into an internal combustion engine, you're going to be able to run that engine. At the end of the process of pyrolysis slash gasification after all the volatile chemicals are exuded out of it because you've heated the materials up to, oh, I don't know, like, you know, 200 to 600 degrees Celsius you end up with a very very pure form of carbon.
Straight up carbon. No, not a whole lot of ash. Not a whole lot of there's certainly no volatile chemicals in it. It's just straight pure charcoal except you would never use this shit on your grill. So what's the structure of biochar as it comes out of the gasification process? Well it's really high in carbon as you might imagine. Like I said, about 80% of what's left over is pure carbon. It can remain stable in the soil for 100 to 1000 of years. And here's the kicker.
[00:16:05] Unknown:
It's highly porous. It's not like
[00:16:10] Unknown:
it when you look at charcoal, it's, you know, that when you lift it up it's like especially like like something like biochar, it's very light. It has like almost no density because almost all of it is airspace. It looks solid. You know, you're holding in your hand and you're like, you can't see through it, yet there is an entire network of little tiny holes and pores. In fact, for the guys over in the live stream, I'm gonna throw this one up. There's another base, you know, basically it's another, Google spread of Google images that shows the what would be called micrographs of biochar.
And you see all that there's a whole like there in all these pictures there's a bunch of holes. Where are these holes coming from? Well, the holes in fact are essentially the like you're looking at the end of a bro you know in these pictures you're looking at essentially the ends of broken off pieces of biochar. But essentially they're not just holes, they're very long tubes. Very very very long tubes. Now, here's the thing. Think of a tree, or any like just a woody bush. It doesn't have to be a tree. It can just be like a shrub as long as it's woody. And this also, by the way, this also goes for bamboo and a lot of other grasses, but let's just stick with wood.
[00:17:48] Unknown:
If I go and I look at a pine tree, how in the hell does the water from the ground go up the tree all the way to the top when that tree can be a couple of 100 feet tall? I dare you to go find a water pump that can move water straight up a column above, you know, a 100 feet
[00:18:14] Unknown:
without having massive amounts of energy put into it. The kind of energy that you don't want to see. I mean moving water up 200 feet straight up in the air. The amount of energy you need the size of pump water pump you need to do that is not the kind of pump you're ever gonna see at a Home Depot. It doesn't exist. You need something else something industrial. So how do trees do it all the time? There's something called capillary actions.
[00:18:45] Unknown:
And capillary action without getting into the sides of it is just little a little tiny tube
[00:18:52] Unknown:
if, you know, if it's little enough if it has a, you know, if its diameter is small enough then water will just creep up a bit creep up it all the way to the end of the tube all by itself. No energy. It's bizarre. Yes, but it happens. So a tree is essentially a collection of very very tiny straws. When you burn all the hydrocarbons out of this the volatilizable hydrocarbons out of the wood what you're left with is a whole bunch of little tiny tubes, right? And that is what gives one of the main defining characteristics of biochar its structure, is these little tiny tubes. And that does a whole bunch of other stuff which we'll we'll get into. But again, these gasification or pyrolysis, this takes place at at temperatures of like anywhere between 200 and 700 degrees Celsius. That's hot. That's real hot.
The better biochar is produced between 50700 degrees C and there's variabilities in this depending on what feedstock you start with depending on what temperature you're going with. You know, it can produce different styles of biochar which we won't get into now. For our purposes, all biochar is good biochar, and it will work just fine. And in fact, in fact, you can do this at home. You can make this at home for all the reasons we're gonna go into here in a couple of minutes. You can make this stuff at home by yourself. And one of the ways that you can do this, and this is the way that I did it, okay?
Was just use a charcoal grill. So how does that work? Okay, so I go cook steaks. So I put I put the whole like I charge my charcoal grill my Weber with a slug of charcoal that I do use for cooking food, which is the kind that still got all the hydrocarbons in it, and I light it on fire and I do, you know, let it get all orange and glowy and stuff like that and get hot and then I cook my food and after I'm done cooking my food I put the lid on and shut off all the air. So I shut off the bottom vent of my Weber. I shut off the top vent of my Weber and the fire just goes out. The next time I grill, I put more charcoal on top of the charcoal that is already there because it doesn't turn to ash. Because you've killed all the air going into it, the heat just dies, the fire goes out, and you're left with charcoal that has less hydrocarbons than it did before.
So I put more charcoal on top of that and then I rinse and repeat. I cook another meal on it. Well, now after about 2 or 3 days of constantly doing that because the charcoal gets smaller and smaller, it starts to fall through the grate. By the time it falls through the grate, you have to pull the grate out and and get all the chunks of charcoal that are down below the grate, and that you can use as biochar because most of the hydrocarbons have been exhumed out of it. And that's exactly what I used to use. And after a season of grilling, I was able to fill up 215.5 kegs, you know, beer kegs. I had a couple of old beer kegs with the tops cut off. I could fill those both up with chunk charcoal that had been almost completely depleted of its hydrocarbons. I didn't need anything special.
I didn't need something like a like a tea lud kiln or an open pit kiln or a cone kiln or a can inside of a can. I was just able to use a simple Weber charcoal grill. So for the guys over in the, live stream, I've put up yet another set of Google pictures that shows these various different kinds of biochar production kilns. And one of them is called a T LUD. I'm not gonna point at which one it is. It's top lit updraft. That's what T LUD stands for. That is a type of kiln that you can use and and you can build these things in your backyard, honestly. I mean it's like you don't, you know, you don't need a complete manufacturing facility to do this.
TLUD is, you know, one of the ones that is used by a lot of people that make biochar to do that. And it's T L U D Top Lit Updraft. And if you want to go see that you can go see that. But honestly, you can get away with just digging an open pit and throwing wood in it and burning it. We'll get to that here in a second. There's also this thing called a cone kiln, which is essentially an open pit, except it's above ground so that you don't have to dig anything out of your yard, right? And then there's the can inside the can. And that is one of the most effective ways to do this. And what you do is you get a 35 gallon drum, and you stuff it full of wood.
And then you put the lid on it, and you put it tight. And there's like a sink there's like a couple of holes at the bottom of it, And we'll get to that in a second. That you poke into the very bottom of it. You take that can filled with wood and you put it inside of a 55 gallon, a larger oil drum. And you stood in the gap between you stuff a whole bunch of other wood. And then you light that wood on fire. So as the wood around as the wood inside the second can burns it gets the inside can really hot. And what happens? The gases inside the wood or the the cellulose and lignin and all that stuff starts to break down and cleave molecularly and turn into hydrocarbon fuel, you know, hydrocarbon rich gas.
And that burns, and it comes out of the holes that you poked in because otherwise, you've got a pressure container filled with hot wood and you don't want that because it will explode and make a very big mess. So that gas starts to escape at the holes in the bottom and continuously heats itself up. So as the wood on the outside burns away, it's the can on the inside has now gotten up to a temperature where it can self heat because now it's just pouring out gas which is continuously igniting and it's heating itself up and it will do that until it just runs out of gas.
At that point, you just let it cool down. And it did you put a lid on the on the 55 gallon drum at that point, so that you cap off all the rest of the air that could possibly get in there. And you just leave it alone. And you go out the next day, and you open them both up, and then you get a hose, and you basically flush all of the charcoal that's in that second kiln with water to make sure that it doesn't reignite. And you completely soak it down. Boom. You've got yourself backyard biochar. And there's other ways to do it. Like I mentioned the, you know, the, cone kiln or an open pit and tea lud. They all work essentially the same way. But it's not impossible. You can go do this. And there's good reasons why you want to go do this.
Now, one of the one of the reasons why we end up doing this, and like I said, you know, from last show, one of the reasons we're doing this for the forest walker system is to get the dead wood out of the forest so that it doesn't burn the forest down because we don't allow forest fires to actually ever occur in the forest anymore. So therefore, this is a waste management system. At its core, it's a waste management system. So you can do forest waste, you can learn, you can do all these other other things like agricultural waste and stuff like that. But for the forest, we're talking about cleaning up all the dead wood by using the Forest Walker system.
Now, I want to talk about something called terra preta. Because this is now we need to get now that we define what what we're doing and what biochar is and kind of one of the, you know, some of the different ways that it's made. Why? Why why why do we want biochar? Well, there's this stuff called terra preta. And it was first found and really examined hard in the Amazon River Basin mostly through Brazil. Alright. So back in the day when the conquistadors were still exploring the New World, you know, Spain pretty much had a lock on a lot of the exploration especially in Mexico and Central America and South America.
They were exploring pretty heavy. And there's a there's a book in fact named Terra Preta. And if you want a fascinating story about a trip down a river in the days of the conquistador, buy this book. The author's name is Ute Schub. That's u t e s c h e u b. He's written a book called terra preta and almost the first quarter of the book is a diary of a fruit like I think it was a Franciscan monk that went along with these guys and they were the first to go down the Amazon River. And they started not from the mouth of the river up, they started on the west coast in the mountains and they came down the river.
And there's a lot of different stories about some of the stuff that they saw which I won't get into but one of the things they basically saw was this a massive civilization. Several massive civilizations. This guy was describing millions of people millions of people in the Amazon River Basin. Huge cities, you know, not like, you know, New York style cities, but like massive settlements that were permanent. These guys didn't they weren't, you know, and they were farming and they were doing all kinds of neat stuff. They were staying put. They weren't migratory. And the only reason that they weren't migratory is because they had all the food that they needed right there.
But one of the things that we know about soil in jungles is that it's really shitty soil. It's almost completely devoid of nutrition like no nitrogen, no phosphorus. It's just it Even though that it's got this huge load of, you know, rainforest growing on it trying to grow food doesn't work so well. Well, and if you actually if you look at the soil, if you go down and dig in just regular non terra preta soils It looks like sand, it looks like this red and yellow nasty looking gunk. But these guys found several civilizations and they couldn't figure out how these guys were feeding themselves until they found this stuff called terra preta. They had these civilizations that have been there for centuries have been essentially digging pits in the ground, throwing clay pot shards, you know, they're from their broken toilet pots that they kept in their huts or whatever it was.
And they would burn, like, basically slash slash and burn. But they would throw all this slash into these pits along with these shards and all their food waste and all these bones, and they would light it on fire. And then after it got pretty good and burning, they bury it and lit the fire just smolder underground. And it would carbonize everything. It was like every like all the hydrocarbons would come out it would like go off into gas and the only thing left was a whole bunch of really pure carbon and a lot of clay pot shards. And they're talking human waste, you know, like excrement, food waste, dead animals, all that stuff. They all went to the pits and it all got burned except instead of allowing it to burn to ash, they would throw dirt on top of it when it got pretty good and going and then all of a sudden you get a whole a pit filled with a bunch of carbon.
And then they figured out centuries before that they could grow food on it. And that's when they started basically farming. Right? Because they had the soil to be able to farm on and it supported millions of people according to this Franciscan monk. Well, they almost all died by the time they got to the end of the river. Alright? So this guy was one of the survivors and he they they got rescued or basically found their way to a Spanish something and they got basically sent all the way back to Spain. And they were being debriefed by whoever it was that was debriefing people from the new world on what what it was they saw. And this guy recounts, we saw millions of people, we saw several 100 cities, we saw soils that grew the the amount of food that you just can't imagine.
It was beautiful and blah blah blah. And they the Spanish basically didn't send an expedition back to the Amazon River for about 40 to 50 years. And when they did, what did they find? Nothing. They found nothing. There were hardly any people. There certainly, what, millions and millions of people. Yet, this Franciscan monk said that there was. So they basically said that guy whatever he wrote down he was crazy. There's no way that this could have ever happened. So fast forward years years years years until, like, we get to modern times and we're going back down there and now archaeologists are looking at these soils saying no, this would be possible.
So what happened in the cities? Have you ever seen a jungle overtake pyramids in Central America? There's whole cities that are buried in the jungle because it doesn't take long for the jungle to just overgrow everything. It's like a huge vines and trees and all kinds of stuff and all of a sudden the only way that you can actually peer through the forest canopy is with, like, infrared and radar and stuff like that. And we're finding now that there might have very well been millions of people in the Amazon Basin around the time that this Franciscan monk wrote it all down. And the only way that that could have happened because the physics of the soil do not change, that soil would not have supported that many people.
The only way that it could have happened is with this terra preta, this high carbon containing soil. Now, it gets a little better. Check this shit out. This is one of this is one of the funnest theories. When the reason there was no people left in the Amazon Basin when the when the Spanish went back to finally do a second expeditionary force is because smallpox, measles, and cowpox, and all of the diseases that the Spaniards at the time, you know, Europeans, they came over with all these diseases and these Indians had never seen seen it. Their immune system had no idea this shit existed. So they talking 90%, 80 some people are saying anywhere between 50 95% of the people that were in the Amazon bases could have perished within a couple of decades because of these diseases. That's why they didn't see anybody else.
But as here's what here's here's the funny thing. They were there for centuries and they were burying all this stuff in the ground. They were like all these terra preta soils. And then they all died, so they can't continue doing what they're doing. So now the the rainforest sees all of this good nutrition and it goes nuts. The river basin jungle goes absolutely bonkers with growth to the point that it starts sucking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. And around this time, you've got a little ice age. This is the little tiny ice age. There's been several of them, but this is one of the little ice ages that have been recorded in recent memory that caused starvation across Europe because the temperature started falling. Why?
The theory goes that the forest ate up so much co2 because now it had a nutritional bank to be able to draw from that it sucked in so much carbon dioxide that it actually chilled the atmosphere. The death of the people in the Amazon Basin that was caused by Europe came back to haunt them by causing famine, crop failures, and all manner of shit. The Thames River froze solid at the time. And this is like way back. This is a long time ago. This is before probably, you know, Jonestown or not Jonestown. We're not thinking of yeah. The early early American settlements, right, in the United what would become the United States.
They didn't know why they're like, oh my god. It's climate change is gonna kill us all.
[00:37:35] Unknown:
Well, if it really was the fact that they had buried so much carbon in the in the soil
[00:37:42] Unknown:
and that carbon did all the things that we're gonna talk about and the forest saw that and there was nothing holding it back, there was no millions of people slashing and burning it, and it just took over and it was able to explode in growth then it's not outside the realm of possibility that it consumed so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that it caused a little ice age. And I find that fascinating. I find that fascinating. What we also find is that it wasn't just the Amazon where you found terra preta soils terra preta soils or also known as black soils because it's a high carbon has been found on every continent on the planet except Antarctica because humans have never lived there.
Australia, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Central America, you name it. You name it. If it was a civilization that was not on Antarctica, they had figured out how important carbon is for the soil. So you felt we find terra preta everywhere. Now, everywhere we look, we're finding it, finding in the Highlands of Scotland, finding it in England, finding it in India, finding it in the middle east. It's everywhere Because back then humans somehow or another we figured it out that you put carbon in the soil and it does good things for you. And it good does good things for your civilization and you want as much carbon in the soil as you can possibly get.
[00:39:18] Unknown:
Right? So
[00:39:22] Unknown:
all that said, let me make sure I'm not missing something before I move on. All that said, we find ourselves now in modern times with this entire bogus crap of ESG. Right? The ESG stuff, the carbon sequestration and the carbon trading and credits, and you are the carbon that they want to reduce. And now I actually saw a Scientific American talking about how bad it was that humans exhale carbon dioxide because it's poison. It's a greenhouse gas and we're all gonna die because of it. Okay. This, in fact, we are right at the nexus point when I started thinking why I started thinking about something like the Forest Walker system.
If these guys are so blown up and so bent out of shape about carbon in the atmosphere, And there's this stuff called biochar, and we know how to make it with gasification. And we can use that process at to produce fuel that actually burns in an internal combustion engine. And we can produce electricity that will run Bitcoin miners to soak up any extra electricity that we're actually producing that is not being used by the system, and we're able to lay down carbon in forest soils and reduce its fire hazard potential, then we should probably think about doing that.
Because of all the great things that just by itself carbon in the soil does. Like for instance, let's talk about this the carbon sequestration thing. 1, this system the the Forest Walker system it kind of is a it could be, not it not that it does, but it could actually be a forcing function that forces the climate hystericists to put their money where their mouth is to fund a system like this. Because not only is it going to protect our forests from forest fires, but it's also going to sequester carbon long term in the soil. Remember that terra preta stuff? That shit been carbon dated being in the soil for over 1000 of years.
At least a couple of 1000 of years. Nobody's really sure how long solid carbon lasts solid. No. Like charcoal carbon. That's solid carbon. There's other forms of carbon in the soil. This is what's called recalcitrant. Like, it's just not gonna go anywhere. You put it in the soil and it stays there for 100 to 1000 of years. We're not sure, but I do know that the guys that are carbon dating some of the terra preta pits out in the Brazilian rainforest are saying dish it's at least 2000 years old from radiocarbon data or dating.
Right? So now we've got the hystericists on the rope saying, okay. Well, you know what? I I know how to put a shit ton of carbon into the soil. Let's get this shit done. Let's mine some Bitcoin while we're at it. And all of a sudden, Bitcoin is now connected to the way that we actually get these people to stop wetting their diapers. Because that seems to be all they do is just cry and cry and cry about co2. I we can take care of that shit. I mean, forget solar panels. The tree is your solar panel and it doesn't mean cut down forest in order to make biochar. You can get enough carbon from just the fallen litter waste around the world to power this civilization probably 4 times over every year.
Just by going out and burning this stuff, getting this in gas, putting it into a combustion engine and generating electricity with it everywhere across the world completely decentralized. So, that's what trees do. They basically take co2 and they add sunlight to it, and they produce sugars, and then those sugars are put into long chains of sugars and the longer the chain the sugar gets and the way that it's actually bound together, you end up with stuff like lignin and cellulose. If you can if you do something different with that sugar you get sugars that humans can actually eat. But all of it really boils down to just carbon carbon bonds which contain energy.
That's what we're after. Trees figure out how they can store that energy using carbon. We figured out how to take dead wood and pull the energy out of it. So the trees as they drop their dead limbs are actually providing us solid sources of energy. And if you take the entire landmass of the world and look at all the forest and how just start calculating how much biomass is dropped every year, it doesn't take too long for you to go, well, shit. We could power quite a bit of this stuff with just this stuff that's being left on the forest floor, but we just need to go be able to go get it and have a reason to go get it that returns money on an investment. And again, that's a numbers game, which I'm not gonna get into here.
But here's the the other thing about the climate hystericists. Check this one out. Biochar can reduce the need for chemical fertilizers. And the production of those fertilizers is what? It's energy intensive to produce. Thereby, it indirectly reduces greenhouse gas emissions associated with fertilizer production. Again, we're we're forcing the hysteris hysteresists to love Bitcoin because Bitcoin gives us the ability to go out and say, you know, this might not work on its own. But if we add Bitcoin to it, it it may just push us over the cliff and we start making money.
And that's all anybody that's all anybody actually wants to hear is a positive return on investment. Some people wanna hear 10 x, 20 x, a 100 x return on investment. Other people just wanna go, I just don't wanna be in the poor house because of it. Right? Bitcoin mining pushes this and a whole bunch of other things to where it's like, oh, if we just add Bitcoin mining it'll work. And that's what I think that the Forest Walker system does. Because, you know, now you got a you got a stable carbon structure, right? You throw it into the ground, it is resistant to decomposition, it remains stable in the soil for 100 and 1000 of years, It effectively sequesters the carbon over very long periods of time. So, therefore, all those people that are screaming about how we're all going to kill ourselves, they should actually be putting money into this. They should be the ones who are saying, yes, we will do this. I'm giving them a way to do this.
Right? It's the reason that it reduces fertilizer is because of something we'll talk about here in a little bit. Biochar not only does what it does that I've already told you about, it does other things too. Like, holds like it it will actually suck in and grab on to nutrients. Instead of letting them flow through the water table out out of the soil and into rivers, it actually will suck on to phosphorus and potassium and nitrogen and stuff like that, and it will hold it in place. We'll get to that. But because it can do that, because it can hold on to nutrients, you don't need as many nutrients as you did before you put carbon into your soil.
Before you put carbon into your soil you needed to always constantly put nitrogen fertilizer on your soil if you're growing a corn crop or something like that. But if you add a shit ton of carbon to it, all of a sudden what would have run off is now sequestered on-site. And the plant roots for next crop would be able to access that nitrogen. So therefore, you don't need as much, so therefore, not as much as produce. So therefore, the energy intensiveness that it takes to be able to produce this stuff isn't necessary. Again, the people that say we're all gonna die because we're burning too much fossil fuels, they should be happy about this. They should be very very happy about this. And in fact, I think that they would be.
And they've set themselves up to where they kinda have to be. And how is how am I getting there? The carbon trading and carbon credits action. I mean, check this shit out. I've mentioned it in the first part of the the first part of the series. But carbon credits, basically, right now for the last well, for the last 5 years, they've been talking about carbon credits. And so what is a carbon credit? Okay. Let's say that I've got this system built. I've got the Forest Walker system. I've got a thousand of these metal, you know, or carbon fiber critters walking around forest and they are producing 1 ton of carbon every hour, and I can prove it.
I I I can I can take somebody, you know, an auditor out there and they can go look at it go, yep, that's that's a ton of carbon and it's happening every hour? Okay. So then, they pay me money. Right now, we we're looking at carbon credits for for a metric ton, which is about £2,200.
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That's a metric
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ton. They'll pay me 40 to $100. Now, who's they? The broker dealers that have anything to do with this ESG nonsense, Right? So now, they've paid me money. And they get what do they get? They they get proof that sub that they paid somebody a $100 per ton to put carbon in the ground. They can go trade that as a derivative on on basically, like, trade it like stock. And then they can sell that shit to another company who has no ability to put carb like the like so like a company that has nothing to do with carbon whatsoever. They're making,
[00:50:04] Unknown:
I don't know, shoes. And they're using a lot of energy to do it.
[00:50:09] Unknown:
And then all of a sudden they're like, you know what? We're if we're gonna be ESG compliant, we've got to buy these carbon credits. Well, I provably put a metric ton of carbon in the ground, I got paid for it. And now they've got basically a share of stock, it's not an equity, but just let's just go go with it. And then they can say, okay. Well, you if you pay us a $120 per metric ton, you can have the share and that way you can at least say that you helped put carbon into the ground forever or at least, you know, a couple 1000 years. That's what a carbon credit is. That's what this carbon trading bullshit is all about.
I'm actually thinking that this is a way to tap into that even though we and we all understand that this is kind of lunatic they're kind of lunatics. But like I said in the last show, if they want to pay me money to go do this, I'm going to allow them to pay me money to put carbon into the soil en masse. At the same time, making sure that our forests are more protected from catastrophic fires. What's not to love about the system? And, you know, like Dan Balser was saying, too many moving parts. And I'm saying, where's the return on investment? I'm wondering if there doesn't even need to be return on investment other than being able to attach your name as a company and say, we funded this system.
See how good we are? See our little halos that they're shine, you know, it's all golden up above our head and and there's the sound in the background and all that shit because that's marketing. That's telling a story. That's that's making the people that could crush them happy. And say, look, well, we're we're doing our part. We're refunded the Forest Walker system. Look how much carbon we're putting into the ground, and we're making sure the forest don't burn. Who doesn't wanna be a part of that story? That's the marketing angle of this. That's a lot of times is just enough to where it doesn't matter if you're making money on a system like this or not. But all the while, we have to be able to soak up the extra energy that's being produced by each one of these critters that's on the ground. So therefore, Bitcoin mining comes along for the ride. So guess who gets to also say they're helping put carbon in the ground?
Bitcoin miners All of a sudden the the skull of Satoshi that's belching out all the nuclear waste out of the smokestacks on top of its head doesn't actually make any sense anymore Greenpeace USA don't have a leg to stand on anymore. That's where I'm going with all this. It's I think it could actually make money. But I know for a fact that it will definitely be the marketing story that everybody wants to plug into because it makes them look carbon trading and credit people are happy because why? Well, they're they've actually got somebody out there that's shoving physical carbon into the ground and can prove how much mass they're sequestering underground.
And as that carbon's in the ground, what is it doing? It's restoring soil health. In fact, biochar has become popular enough that without the Forest Walker system, metric tons of this are being sold to farmers and ranchers and other people for, you know, urban landscaping projects and all kinds of stuff. Because it's kind of you kinda can't argue against what happens to soil when you put this raw carbon into the ground. Not coal, not charcoal, but biochar into the ground. And after it charges up with a whole bunch of living critters and nutrient load, it ends up doing wonders for the soil to the point that people have paid anywhere and this is as of April 2023, from what I can gather the prices of biochar per ton £2,000 not metric ton, but regular ton American ton of £2,000 has been anywhere between $100 per ton which is very close to the 40 to a $100 per ton of carbon credit cost, all the way to $25100 a ton, sometimes over depending on the quality.
$25100 a ton is a lot of money for carbon. That's if you're selling it on the open market. Well, I've just told you that carbon credits would only get you between 40 and a $100. You know what I smell? Arbitrage opportunity. I smell a lot of arbitrage opportunity. And I don't know exactly how that works. All I know is that every single time I see a price for something that is one thing and a price of that exact same thing that is much much higher or much much lower than the other thing then there's an arbitrage opportunity on open markets. But be that as it may, $25100 per ton of biochar is nothing to sneeze at. And in a forest walker system, sure, it's designed to actually put the carbon right there back into the forest soils, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that it couldn't be collected.
I wouldn't wanna do that because you're robbing the forest of its potential carbon, but it could be done. You know, and it's like especially if we go, okay, we'll take half and we'll leave half. So we produce 2 tons, we put a ton into the soil in the forest, we take the other ton and we sell it for 2 grand. Well, that could actually especially if you're producing a ton. Let's say you're producing a ton, 4 tons a day with a thousand of these critters. Well, 4 tons at 2,000 is 8 grand a day. Well, actually, 4 tons will take 2, so 4 grand a day. 365 because these things operate all by themselves. Sure. They have to be repaired, but I'm just saying for the great gusts and feathers of what we're talking about, they're just out there doing their thing and they're mining Bitcoin on the side.
Well, wow. So why are people paying between a $125100 a ton to put on their soil? It's because of what it does to the soil. Soil health. Remember those little straws and tubes and the the amount of the sheer amount of surface area that like, this biochar has? It does all kinds of stuff. For 1, let's just look at 1 gram of biochar. Let me go back. Actually not, I think it well, did I kill him? Hold on.
[00:57:04] Unknown:
Let me see if I've got this back.
[00:57:09] Unknown:
Biochar. I'm just gonna say micrograph. I'm putting these pictures back up for the guys up in the live stream. Okay. So here you go. Here's a bunch of micrographs that you see all the surface area that you can get. So how much surface area is there in a gram of biochar? If you were to take take a gram of biochar and flatten it out to where it's literally just just nothing but surface area is 2,000 square feet. There's another one that says that it's basically an NBA an official NBA basketball court. So if you know what the size of an NBA basketball court is, that's 1 gram of biochar when it's laid out flat.
That's a lot of surface area. Why is surface area important? Because bacteria and all manner of soil fungus and other bacteria, they have a tendency to need a place to stick on to. They need a place to adhere to. And with all this porosity and all this biochar, not only can they stick on to it, it protects them from predators so that they can have little little baby micro, you know, microflora and microfauna. So it provides a home for a bunch of the stuff in the soil that is absolutely required for soil health. If you have soil that has no life in it, no bacteria, no fungus, no nematodes, no plasmodium, no algae, no nothing.
You have dead soil. Congratulations. You're not growing anything on that soil without a Monsanto or a Bayer Crop Science labeled chemistry set. You're not growing
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shit. Now if you've got a lot of carbon,
[00:59:05] Unknown:
all this biology does all manner of things like mycorrhizae fungi. You have to have it for most plants to be able to for the plants to function properly. We won't get into why. That's an entire show all by itself. Bacteria, there's a lot of people say, oh, you know legumes are plants that associate with a certain type of bacteria, and that bacteria fixes nitrogen into the roots of the legume plant. Legume think of bean, it's a bean plant, that kind of thing.
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And then when that plant dies,
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all the the the bacteria in its roots die, the roots die, and then all of a sudden all this free nitrogen spills out, and it got that nitrogen from the air. So for a long time people thought only legumes could do this. That that's not correct now. We now know that there are free living bacteria in the soil that fix nitrogen directly into the soil from atmospheric nitrogen. But if there's not any of that shit in your soil, they're not going to be fixing nitrogen in your soil. So happens they like to have a place to live, they like to have structure, they like that kind of stuff, and biochar provides that in mass, Right?
So, these things also produce certain items like like, you know, mycorrhizal fungi and a fair amount of different types of bacteria, they produce this stuff called glomalin. Glomalin is a biological glue. Let's just call it that. And it glues soil particles together. And as long as you've got little clumps of soil particles instead of just sand, you know, or or like really hard packed clay, what you get is water infiltration. Because it's aggregating the soil particles up into like little balls, and if their soil particles are in little balls then there are spaces in between these little balls and that's where water and air can get back into the soil. And because air can get into the soil, a bunch of these critters that live in the soil also need air. You need good aeration.
You need good water infiltration. The aggregation of the soil particles by being glued together by glomalin, which just so happens to be produced by the very same critters that need water infiltration and air living in the soil, all of it goes together to de compact soil. Because compacted soil, when water hits it, it runs over the top. If you've got good aeration, good aggregation because of all these critters making glomalin in the soil, then you get natural decompaction and water instead of flowing over the top causing all manner of problems, actually infiltrates into the soil.
And then there's where biochar plays yet another role because of all the surface area, water likes to cling on to carbon. It has a natural affinity, especially to things like biochar. And with 1 gram being equal to the surface area of a court, you know, NBA official basketball court, 1 gram can hold a lot of water. In fact,
[01:02:30] Unknown:
some biochars have been tested
[01:02:33] Unknown:
and they have held anywhere between 5 10 times their weight in water. Split the difference, let's call it 7 x. So I got 1 gram of biochar, 100 percent dry. Let's just call it 100% dry, absolutely bone dry biochar. And I put 7 grams of water together with the biochar in like a beaker. And eventually, all that water is going to adsorb to the biochar. It doesn't this is hard to do this is hard to do, in a podcast. Two different words. Absorb and adsorb. 1 is spelled abzorb a b as in boy. The other is a d, d as in David, zorb. When you have a sponge on your sink and it gets wet, it absorbs water. If you squeeze it, the water easily comes out.
That's absorption. A towel is good and absorptive. However, I can wring the water out of it, and it doesn't really take that much energy. Adsorb adsorption is different. It chemically holds the water, which means you ain't just gonna squeeze a bunch of biochar and get all the water out of it. It's still going to hold 7 times its weight in water. That water is just going to stick to all this surface area that the biochar provides. Not only is it providing homes for like little critters and little, you know mycorrhizal fungi, no it's also providing a home for water. And it wants that water, it holds on to that water.
So by putting more of this type of carbon into your soil, whether you're a farmer, you're worried about pasture management, your ranch, you're going to be able to be resilient through droughts more and more depending on how much more of this carbon you put into your soil. If you get good water, you're gonna get good water infiltration. That water is gonna infiltrate the soil, it's gonna come into contact with the biochar, it's going to it'll suck it up like a sponge, but it will hold on to it like an iron grip. And the only way you're gonna cleave that water off of that carbon is through the physio chemical action of a root actually touching the biochar and stripping the water off.
That's the only way that water leaves. Now eventually, if you leave wet biochar out in the sun, sure it'll dry. But if it's underneath the ground, you've got living systems in the ground that water is gonna stay there. Which means your drought more drought resilient, the more carbon you put into your soil. Right? So the water holding capacity alone is one of the reasons why you want this stuff in all soils, whether it's a forest soil, whether it's pasture soil, whether it's agricultural soil, whatever. Your backyard soil, your lawn soil, all of it gets better.
And it's not just water that has this adsorption this AD as in David absorption
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capacity nutrients. Alright nutrients.
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One of the major things that biochar does, not only does it hold on to water, not only does it give these little critters a place to stay like apartment buildings, it also grabs on to nutrients like nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, a lot of positively charged ions love to stick to biochar. Which means, like water, the only way these plants are getting this stuff out of the biochar is literally by stripping them off through physio chemical action. It's not just free flowing through the soil anymore. It's not like a dead farmer soil that's been dead for 20 years and the only way they're getting a crop out of it is to put more nitrogen on it. Because at the end of that season, the nitrogen that they put on that was not used by the plant is going to flow through the soil and it's going to go into a river and it's going to leave the farm.
But if you've got a bunch of carbon in your soil, it will not leave your farm, which means you don't have to use as much. And eventually, as this carbon builds up and this type of recalcitrant carbon builds up into your soil, and you've got enough microfauna and microflora in there, and many of those actually take nitrogen out of the air and put it into a form that plants can use, and that sticks to the biochar that's in the soil, all of a sudden, there are people that are finding they don't really need to put any nitrogen on their soils. Now that is an extreme case, I will grant you. And if you are a farmer right now that's farming corn and say, you know what? I'm just gonna throw a ton per acre of this diabetic biochar on my soil soil and everything's gonna be great. You're gonna be out of business in a year.
Your crops will die. Your crops will die. Your crops will die. Because it takes a long well, it takes a while to charge this stuff up in the soil. You can speed that up in various, you know, mechanisms, but when you're talking about tons, like for instance, when I was doing my backyard biochar, the way that I was charging it up was literally I had put it into these beer kegs and, I urinate on it and fill I filled them both up with water so like, you know, so all this charcoal is basically chilling out in water for days days days, and then I was just pissing on it. I'd go out in the backyard just piss in the barrel because that attracts a bunch of bacteria specifically the kind of bacteria that like to be able to work with nitrogen and they start growing into the biochar.
And I did that for, like, you know, a couple of months before I even put it in the soil. At that point, it's fine. But that's 35 gallons of biochar. That's not 35 tons. There's so it's it's gonna be different. Right? If you go out and try to do this on your agricultural fields on a broad acre scale, what I'm discussing or describing will actually hurt you upfront. But after a season, a couple of seasons, if you continue to if you put down biochar and you continuously still put down your nitrogen fertilizer, eventually you'll start using less fertilizer.
But if you were to neglect any kind of fertilization process or fertility regime that you've been doing just because you put biochar on the soil, you're going to go out of business as a farmer.
[01:09:34] Unknown:
So you have to earn the right
[01:09:37] Unknown:
to be able to do this, which means you have to really understand how this system in the soil actually works. You know, one of the ways that it works is like, you know, nitrogen comes through and its plant available form has a couple of, you know, it's like n,
[01:09:55] Unknown:
was it like n2+. So it's got like 2 positive charges on it. Hydrogen has got one positive charge.
[01:10:05] Unknown:
So all of a sudden, nitrogen has a stronger bonding affinity to the side of the biochar than hydrogen does. So it strips off the hydrogen basically gets displaced. Yeah, well one of the ways that a plant can get that nitrogen back is to put basically flood a whole bunch of hydrogen ions until it finally is able to kick off a couple of these nitrogen ions and then scoop those up and then the hydrogen that's produced by the plant sticks on to the empty spaces on the biochar. So this is what's called nutrient buffering, right? And this is one of the reasons why the nitrogen will not just leave your soil if you've got a bunch of recalcitrant carbon inside of it, right? But the same is true if for those that know anything about chemistry the same is true for pH buffering.
Because pH stands for potential hydrogen. The lower the pH, the more actual hydrogen ions you've got in your solution and that you can look at the soil as a solution. The higher your pH, the less hydrogen ions you have in solution, but you've got more potential hydrogen. So if you've got like a really really high pH soil, biochar not only will lower the pH, but it will keep it there over long periods of time it buffers it. And it's through this action of adsorption that it is able to cling on to water that it's able to cling on to nutrients and it's able to have some kind of trading ability between those positively charged nutrient ions and hydrogen ions. And it's the hydrogen ion amount.
If it's not if it's just chilling out in your soil and it's not really attached to anything, you're gonna have lower and lower and lower pH. And if you've got really high pH soils, you want to make sure that you don't lose your hydrogen ions. So all this action that biochar does from water to pH is doing nothing but helping your soil do its job.
[01:12:22] Unknown:
So, essentially, we're gonna come to the end of the story for biochar as of today anyway.
[01:12:30] Unknown:
But I want to leave you with this. First of all, we're talking about recalcitrant carbon, solid carbon, and you have to put it in the soil. And we could do this with the forest walker system, right? 2nd, this is this is a worthwhile endeavor for very many reasons, but from a market standpoint, like a free market standpoint, I've already told you. People have paid up to $25100 a ton for biochar. If you think that that means that you're gonna go broke doing this, I don't think so. Doesn't mean you're gonna get, like, you know, stinking rich either, but I mean shit. I I would rather do this than a lot of things for money.
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When this stuff is in the soil,
[01:13:17] Unknown:
it makes soil better. It holds on to water longer. It holds on to nutrients longer. It makes the soil a hospitable place for all the plants and all the critters that the plants need to be in the soil and it puts everything back the way God intended. As a forest fire happened that wasn't catastrophic, it would drop a load of charcoal on the ground. And then the little critters of the soil would take it into the ground. It wouldn't be as recalcitrant as digging, you know, digging it deeper into the soil, but that's for a later show. But it would incorporate that carbon into the soil.
We already know that it made the forest more water resilient. Why? Because it had carbon holds on to water. We know that any of the nutrient cycling was basically buffered because of the adherence factor of the carbon in the soil. Why? Because of chemistry. It's just the way it is. So any nutrition that was falling out of the pine needles and leaves in a forest that were being turned over by the soil critters, anything anything that was, like, able to get away through the water stream wasn't. It was adhered to by on onto this carbon that was put down during these forest fires. But we don't get forest fires anymore because the minute that they flare up, we put them out. And we've been we've gotten so good at it that the fuel load in the forest is why the whole this whole story began in the first place.
Being able to convert all this wood waste into usable energy and have byproducts on the other side. Now, through the pyrolysis and gasification process, there's at least 3 other
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products. There's heat clearly because we're talking about burning shit, right? But there's one other thing that people miss Carbon dioxide production.
[01:15:25] Unknown:
I think that that it may be that that's gonna be in a different show.
[01:15:30] Unknown:
But there's a third one.
[01:15:33] Unknown:
Wood vinegar. What the hell is it? That's not for today's show. We are already well over an hour. I've said my bit about why you need to start thinking about biochar and how it fits with the Forest Walker system. But wood vinegar is gonna be an entire show all by itself.
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If you want to know what wood vinegar is now,
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you can go to your nearest grocery store
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and go to the condiments aisle and go buy a bottle of liquid smoke. That's wood vinegar. That's right, you eat it. It's completely okay for you. Doesn't seem like it would be, but it is. In fact, it's got a lot of benefits.
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And we're gonna talk about that in another show. But for now, I gotta go. I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin Ant, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 11 o'clock AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 1st day of the 2nd month of 2024.
And this is episode good lord. What episode is it? I think it's 850. Yep. It is 8 episode 850 of Bitcoin and we're gonna continue on with the Forest Walker talk. Today we're about just the biochar portion of the Forest Walker system. Right? Now, before I even get into into any of that I do want to go through and look at something. I got a, I got an email from Dan Bolser, who's somebody I've known for quite a while on various platforms like Twitter, which I will say something about here in a second. And he had the only, like I basically said, you know, hey, if you got problems with this system, you know, or or like if I'm missing something or if you've got another idea or you want to add to it, whatever, you can email me at david.bennett.cgmail.com.
Well, Dan was the only one that actually took me up on that. And so I woke up this morning to, to this email and it says, it won't work. Only kidding. I love it. My business slash engineering slash academic perspective would be too many moving parts. I love the idea, but can you bootstrap? What if you paid someone to do this, like, e. G. A, you know, for example, a pilot? It's not scalable, but you'd learn a shit ton. I'm serious when I say I want to build a river, perhaps we can work on that next. Okay. I understand exactly what Dan is saying and I wholeheartedly agree with him. There are a lot of moving parts to to what I'm suggesting, which is one of the reasons why when I started talking about this not yesterday, but the day before when I was outlining the whole system that I purposely said that this is starting to reach into science fiction Because there is a lot of moving parts.
And the fact and the fact remains, there may not be a return on investment. And if there's not a return on investment, nobody's gonna build this, including me. I mean, I I can, you know, want it to happen all day long and, you know, and and get other people excited about it. But it really boils down to numbers as to whether or not this remains science fiction or if it becomes actual reality. And I'm not I'm literally not doing this and I need to to make sure that that we all I want to make sure that the I make myself plain here.
I'm not doing this because this needs to happen. That's not the point. This is more of a mental exercise. How do we fit Bitcoin mining in with things that don't necessarily look like Bitcoin mining? Right? Like, heating hot tubs with Bitcoin miners. Heating your home with Bitcoin miners. There's an entire, there's an entire greenhouse that grows flowers in the Netherlands and as far as I know they've been doing it for years like at least 7 years that I know about they are heating the entire greenhouse with Bitcoin mining. And they are not the only ones.
And we keep we keep coming across this where how many different ways can we fit Bitcoin mining into something? That's what this exercise is all about. Is how to get our imaginations looking at how do we fit Bitcoin mining into something. And to be able to do that we got to, you know, got to understand a little bit something about mining like how much does it cost to buy miners? How are they built? What kind how much heat do they emit? How much electricity do they use? How much Bitcoin can they mine? If you're attaching the hash power to something like a pool, you know, unless you're gonna go out and spend 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars on a a whole bunch of mining equipment not just the miners but the power infrastructure the power contracts rack space and maintenance people to work on it. You're not going to solo mine Bitcoin. That's just not going to happen. Sure, it's it's happened before and and some lucky guy would like it even on Nerdminer that these little tiny miners.
There's there's always the potential that you can hit a block and get the reward. But for the most part, this system would be attached, the forest walker system would be attached to a mining pool. So that I'd at least be, you know, the system would be able to at least get some satoshis out of the deal. But a system like this is designed where it's not about Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is along for the ride to fill a gap in something else that could be done. And that's what this entire exercise is about. One of these days, maybe. You never know, could run across a billionaire who just wants to get their name attached to carbon sequestration so they can put it in their company's brochure that they're funding a system like this. That could happen.
There's no reason that can't happen because it's great PR. We'll get into a little bit of that. But I just wanted to make sure that I shouted out Dan Balser because he's making a very good point. There's a lot of moving parts. And that's why this is on the edge. It can be done. There's nothing about this system that's impossible. The only thing to that really tips it over the edge from fantasy to reality is return on investment and can that be done? Alright. Well, that's a numbers game and that may be another show, but for now I really want to start talking about the biochar portion.
Because this is this is really where the meat and potatoes of this system comes into play and bio or a Bitcoin mining is just basically along for the ride. Alright, so biochar, let's just let's just center ourselves into what it is. It is this entire system makes biochar by grazing on wood waste in a forest. I went over that in part 1 of the Forest Walker series. Alright. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, you gotta go listen to part 1. I did it's it's episode 849. It is Forest Walker part 1. That's the whole system outlined. And I talked got into a little bit about biochar, but this entire show is about the biochar portion of the Forest Walker system. So what is it?
How would you define biochar? So what I'm gonna do for the guys over in, in the livestream is I'm just gonna put up a I basically just put up a whole Google wall of pictures of what looks to be like charcoal. Except it's not charcoal. See, that's that's the issue is that there's a major difference between charcoal that you put on your grill and biochar. There's a wholesale difference between the 2. What is that difference? It's the amount of volatile hydrocarbons that are still in the charcoal versus the amount that's still in biochar. If you go get Kingsford or lump charcoal or cowboy charcoal or whatever that has a lot of volatile lot volatileizable hydrocarbon still left in it, which means that as that charcoal heats up and catches on fire, it's gonna start off gassing a whole bunch of hydrocarbons.
And that's why you light a charcoal fire that's why it'll last an hour. Because it's burning off all that hydrocarbons before it starts burning the carbon itself. The carbon will be the last to actually ignite even though it's all orange and stuff trust me it's actually the heat is actually coming from this burning gas. When all that gas when all those hydrocarbons are depleted out of that charcoal then it turns to ash and it does so almost immediately, right? So in biochar there there are no hydrocarbons left. It's just straight carbon to the tune of about, I don't know, 80% carbon.
So in the 4th Walker system, the carbon is coming from what is coming from wood waste that's being gathered by the system chipped up, and run through the gasification process to do all of the other wonderful stuff that we talked about in episode 849. But biochar by definition comes from all manner of organic waste. It doesn't have to be just wood. It can be straight up agricultural residue like corn stalks and rice husks and nut casings like if you, you know, eat pecans or walnuts the shell that is a high quality input for the gasification process and biochar manufacturing.
And obviously there's forestry waste like, you know, wood chips, sawdust, and you know straight up sticks being chipped up and whatnot run through the gasification process and that'll get you what it is that we want. But dude, there's also like flat out food waste, there's animal manure, I mean you could think of like there's people that have put grass clippings once they're dried into the gasification process and they are able to actually get some biochar out of it. There's all manner of feedstocks that's what we're talking about the feedstock that goes into the manufacture of biochar. But there's also dedicated energy crops, like there's something called miscanthus and switchgrass that are grown specifically for the high amount of carbon containing material that they basically mow it down, dry it out, and then that becomes a feedstock for the manufacturer of biochar.
Alright, so once you've got your feedstock and the feedstock is essentially anything that contains carbon and as you know moisture content kind of needs to be low like 10 to 15% moisture content before you take it through the gasification process. Otherwise, you get problems. But the gasification process another word that you can look at describing it is pyrolysis. Which is just a fancy word of or a fancy term that describes the heating up of a carbon containing compound to a point that the carbon molecule or the various carbon containing molecules like, oh, I don't know, like methane and stuff like that starts to volatilize out of the mass and then becomes it becomes the gas that becomes the synthesis gas that we want and as I said synthesis gas consists of carbon monoxide which is highly flammable, hydrogen which is highly flammable, and methane which is highly flammable. Those three things are the major components for syngas.
And that's what you know, the Forest Walker system uses to power the great guts and feathers of that entire system. But for those that that, you know, are wondering about like gasification and does it work? This thing has worked since 16/99. You know, the year before the year 1700 is when the very first person started working with this stuff. His name was Dean Clayton. And that's when he first started experimenting with gasification. It was 16 99. It took until 1901 for the very first vehicle, like a car. Well, not a car like we have today, but you know, something with 4 wheels and an internal combustion engine. It took until 1901 for them to figure out because, you know, honestly the the the car hadn't wasn't all that old by that time. And somebody's like, oh, remember that gasification thing? Yeah. Let's let's strap it into this car and see if we can burn a log of wood and and get it to actually do, you know, ignite and and run an internal combustion engine. And lo and behold, it did.
To the point that by the end of World War 2, 500,000 vehicles in Germany alone were being run on what was also at that time called wood gas. It's the same thing. Syngas, synthesis gas, wood gas it's all the same. It's carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and methane. And if you can get that gas out of the gasification system and plug it into an internal combustion engine, you're going to be able to run that engine. At the end of the process of pyrolysis slash gasification after all the volatile chemicals are exuded out of it because you've heated the materials up to, oh, I don't know, like, you know, 200 to 600 degrees Celsius you end up with a very very pure form of carbon.
Straight up carbon. No, not a whole lot of ash. Not a whole lot of there's certainly no volatile chemicals in it. It's just straight pure charcoal except you would never use this shit on your grill. So what's the structure of biochar as it comes out of the gasification process? Well it's really high in carbon as you might imagine. Like I said, about 80% of what's left over is pure carbon. It can remain stable in the soil for 100 to 1000 of years. And here's the kicker.
[00:16:05] Unknown:
It's highly porous. It's not like
[00:16:10] Unknown:
it when you look at charcoal, it's, you know, that when you lift it up it's like especially like like something like biochar, it's very light. It has like almost no density because almost all of it is airspace. It looks solid. You know, you're holding in your hand and you're like, you can't see through it, yet there is an entire network of little tiny holes and pores. In fact, for the guys over in the live stream, I'm gonna throw this one up. There's another base, you know, basically it's another, Google spread of Google images that shows the what would be called micrographs of biochar.
And you see all that there's a whole like there in all these pictures there's a bunch of holes. Where are these holes coming from? Well, the holes in fact are essentially the like you're looking at the end of a bro you know in these pictures you're looking at essentially the ends of broken off pieces of biochar. But essentially they're not just holes, they're very long tubes. Very very very long tubes. Now, here's the thing. Think of a tree, or any like just a woody bush. It doesn't have to be a tree. It can just be like a shrub as long as it's woody. And this also, by the way, this also goes for bamboo and a lot of other grasses, but let's just stick with wood.
[00:17:48] Unknown:
If I go and I look at a pine tree, how in the hell does the water from the ground go up the tree all the way to the top when that tree can be a couple of 100 feet tall? I dare you to go find a water pump that can move water straight up a column above, you know, a 100 feet
[00:18:14] Unknown:
without having massive amounts of energy put into it. The kind of energy that you don't want to see. I mean moving water up 200 feet straight up in the air. The amount of energy you need the size of pump water pump you need to do that is not the kind of pump you're ever gonna see at a Home Depot. It doesn't exist. You need something else something industrial. So how do trees do it all the time? There's something called capillary actions.
[00:18:45] Unknown:
And capillary action without getting into the sides of it is just little a little tiny tube
[00:18:52] Unknown:
if, you know, if it's little enough if it has a, you know, if its diameter is small enough then water will just creep up a bit creep up it all the way to the end of the tube all by itself. No energy. It's bizarre. Yes, but it happens. So a tree is essentially a collection of very very tiny straws. When you burn all the hydrocarbons out of this the volatilizable hydrocarbons out of the wood what you're left with is a whole bunch of little tiny tubes, right? And that is what gives one of the main defining characteristics of biochar its structure, is these little tiny tubes. And that does a whole bunch of other stuff which we'll we'll get into. But again, these gasification or pyrolysis, this takes place at at temperatures of like anywhere between 200 and 700 degrees Celsius. That's hot. That's real hot.
The better biochar is produced between 50700 degrees C and there's variabilities in this depending on what feedstock you start with depending on what temperature you're going with. You know, it can produce different styles of biochar which we won't get into now. For our purposes, all biochar is good biochar, and it will work just fine. And in fact, in fact, you can do this at home. You can make this at home for all the reasons we're gonna go into here in a couple of minutes. You can make this stuff at home by yourself. And one of the ways that you can do this, and this is the way that I did it, okay?
Was just use a charcoal grill. So how does that work? Okay, so I go cook steaks. So I put I put the whole like I charge my charcoal grill my Weber with a slug of charcoal that I do use for cooking food, which is the kind that still got all the hydrocarbons in it, and I light it on fire and I do, you know, let it get all orange and glowy and stuff like that and get hot and then I cook my food and after I'm done cooking my food I put the lid on and shut off all the air. So I shut off the bottom vent of my Weber. I shut off the top vent of my Weber and the fire just goes out. The next time I grill, I put more charcoal on top of the charcoal that is already there because it doesn't turn to ash. Because you've killed all the air going into it, the heat just dies, the fire goes out, and you're left with charcoal that has less hydrocarbons than it did before.
So I put more charcoal on top of that and then I rinse and repeat. I cook another meal on it. Well, now after about 2 or 3 days of constantly doing that because the charcoal gets smaller and smaller, it starts to fall through the grate. By the time it falls through the grate, you have to pull the grate out and and get all the chunks of charcoal that are down below the grate, and that you can use as biochar because most of the hydrocarbons have been exhumed out of it. And that's exactly what I used to use. And after a season of grilling, I was able to fill up 215.5 kegs, you know, beer kegs. I had a couple of old beer kegs with the tops cut off. I could fill those both up with chunk charcoal that had been almost completely depleted of its hydrocarbons. I didn't need anything special.
I didn't need something like a like a tea lud kiln or an open pit kiln or a cone kiln or a can inside of a can. I was just able to use a simple Weber charcoal grill. So for the guys over in the, live stream, I've put up yet another set of Google pictures that shows these various different kinds of biochar production kilns. And one of them is called a T LUD. I'm not gonna point at which one it is. It's top lit updraft. That's what T LUD stands for. That is a type of kiln that you can use and and you can build these things in your backyard, honestly. I mean it's like you don't, you know, you don't need a complete manufacturing facility to do this.
TLUD is, you know, one of the ones that is used by a lot of people that make biochar to do that. And it's T L U D Top Lit Updraft. And if you want to go see that you can go see that. But honestly, you can get away with just digging an open pit and throwing wood in it and burning it. We'll get to that here in a second. There's also this thing called a cone kiln, which is essentially an open pit, except it's above ground so that you don't have to dig anything out of your yard, right? And then there's the can inside the can. And that is one of the most effective ways to do this. And what you do is you get a 35 gallon drum, and you stuff it full of wood.
And then you put the lid on it, and you put it tight. And there's like a sink there's like a couple of holes at the bottom of it, And we'll get to that in a second. That you poke into the very bottom of it. You take that can filled with wood and you put it inside of a 55 gallon, a larger oil drum. And you stood in the gap between you stuff a whole bunch of other wood. And then you light that wood on fire. So as the wood around as the wood inside the second can burns it gets the inside can really hot. And what happens? The gases inside the wood or the the cellulose and lignin and all that stuff starts to break down and cleave molecularly and turn into hydrocarbon fuel, you know, hydrocarbon rich gas.
And that burns, and it comes out of the holes that you poked in because otherwise, you've got a pressure container filled with hot wood and you don't want that because it will explode and make a very big mess. So that gas starts to escape at the holes in the bottom and continuously heats itself up. So as the wood on the outside burns away, it's the can on the inside has now gotten up to a temperature where it can self heat because now it's just pouring out gas which is continuously igniting and it's heating itself up and it will do that until it just runs out of gas.
At that point, you just let it cool down. And it did you put a lid on the on the 55 gallon drum at that point, so that you cap off all the rest of the air that could possibly get in there. And you just leave it alone. And you go out the next day, and you open them both up, and then you get a hose, and you basically flush all of the charcoal that's in that second kiln with water to make sure that it doesn't reignite. And you completely soak it down. Boom. You've got yourself backyard biochar. And there's other ways to do it. Like I mentioned the, you know, the, cone kiln or an open pit and tea lud. They all work essentially the same way. But it's not impossible. You can go do this. And there's good reasons why you want to go do this.
Now, one of the one of the reasons why we end up doing this, and like I said, you know, from last show, one of the reasons we're doing this for the forest walker system is to get the dead wood out of the forest so that it doesn't burn the forest down because we don't allow forest fires to actually ever occur in the forest anymore. So therefore, this is a waste management system. At its core, it's a waste management system. So you can do forest waste, you can learn, you can do all these other other things like agricultural waste and stuff like that. But for the forest, we're talking about cleaning up all the dead wood by using the Forest Walker system.
Now, I want to talk about something called terra preta. Because this is now we need to get now that we define what what we're doing and what biochar is and kind of one of the, you know, some of the different ways that it's made. Why? Why why why do we want biochar? Well, there's this stuff called terra preta. And it was first found and really examined hard in the Amazon River Basin mostly through Brazil. Alright. So back in the day when the conquistadors were still exploring the New World, you know, Spain pretty much had a lock on a lot of the exploration especially in Mexico and Central America and South America.
They were exploring pretty heavy. And there's a there's a book in fact named Terra Preta. And if you want a fascinating story about a trip down a river in the days of the conquistador, buy this book. The author's name is Ute Schub. That's u t e s c h e u b. He's written a book called terra preta and almost the first quarter of the book is a diary of a fruit like I think it was a Franciscan monk that went along with these guys and they were the first to go down the Amazon River. And they started not from the mouth of the river up, they started on the west coast in the mountains and they came down the river.
And there's a lot of different stories about some of the stuff that they saw which I won't get into but one of the things they basically saw was this a massive civilization. Several massive civilizations. This guy was describing millions of people millions of people in the Amazon River Basin. Huge cities, you know, not like, you know, New York style cities, but like massive settlements that were permanent. These guys didn't they weren't, you know, and they were farming and they were doing all kinds of neat stuff. They were staying put. They weren't migratory. And the only reason that they weren't migratory is because they had all the food that they needed right there.
But one of the things that we know about soil in jungles is that it's really shitty soil. It's almost completely devoid of nutrition like no nitrogen, no phosphorus. It's just it Even though that it's got this huge load of, you know, rainforest growing on it trying to grow food doesn't work so well. Well, and if you actually if you look at the soil, if you go down and dig in just regular non terra preta soils It looks like sand, it looks like this red and yellow nasty looking gunk. But these guys found several civilizations and they couldn't figure out how these guys were feeding themselves until they found this stuff called terra preta. They had these civilizations that have been there for centuries have been essentially digging pits in the ground, throwing clay pot shards, you know, they're from their broken toilet pots that they kept in their huts or whatever it was.
And they would burn, like, basically slash slash and burn. But they would throw all this slash into these pits along with these shards and all their food waste and all these bones, and they would light it on fire. And then after it got pretty good and burning, they bury it and lit the fire just smolder underground. And it would carbonize everything. It was like every like all the hydrocarbons would come out it would like go off into gas and the only thing left was a whole bunch of really pure carbon and a lot of clay pot shards. And they're talking human waste, you know, like excrement, food waste, dead animals, all that stuff. They all went to the pits and it all got burned except instead of allowing it to burn to ash, they would throw dirt on top of it when it got pretty good and going and then all of a sudden you get a whole a pit filled with a bunch of carbon.
And then they figured out centuries before that they could grow food on it. And that's when they started basically farming. Right? Because they had the soil to be able to farm on and it supported millions of people according to this Franciscan monk. Well, they almost all died by the time they got to the end of the river. Alright? So this guy was one of the survivors and he they they got rescued or basically found their way to a Spanish something and they got basically sent all the way back to Spain. And they were being debriefed by whoever it was that was debriefing people from the new world on what what it was they saw. And this guy recounts, we saw millions of people, we saw several 100 cities, we saw soils that grew the the amount of food that you just can't imagine.
It was beautiful and blah blah blah. And they the Spanish basically didn't send an expedition back to the Amazon River for about 40 to 50 years. And when they did, what did they find? Nothing. They found nothing. There were hardly any people. There certainly, what, millions and millions of people. Yet, this Franciscan monk said that there was. So they basically said that guy whatever he wrote down he was crazy. There's no way that this could have ever happened. So fast forward years years years years until, like, we get to modern times and we're going back down there and now archaeologists are looking at these soils saying no, this would be possible.
So what happened in the cities? Have you ever seen a jungle overtake pyramids in Central America? There's whole cities that are buried in the jungle because it doesn't take long for the jungle to just overgrow everything. It's like a huge vines and trees and all kinds of stuff and all of a sudden the only way that you can actually peer through the forest canopy is with, like, infrared and radar and stuff like that. And we're finding now that there might have very well been millions of people in the Amazon Basin around the time that this Franciscan monk wrote it all down. And the only way that that could have happened because the physics of the soil do not change, that soil would not have supported that many people.
The only way that it could have happened is with this terra preta, this high carbon containing soil. Now, it gets a little better. Check this shit out. This is one of this is one of the funnest theories. When the reason there was no people left in the Amazon Basin when the when the Spanish went back to finally do a second expeditionary force is because smallpox, measles, and cowpox, and all of the diseases that the Spaniards at the time, you know, Europeans, they came over with all these diseases and these Indians had never seen seen it. Their immune system had no idea this shit existed. So they talking 90%, 80 some people are saying anywhere between 50 95% of the people that were in the Amazon bases could have perished within a couple of decades because of these diseases. That's why they didn't see anybody else.
But as here's what here's here's the funny thing. They were there for centuries and they were burying all this stuff in the ground. They were like all these terra preta soils. And then they all died, so they can't continue doing what they're doing. So now the the rainforest sees all of this good nutrition and it goes nuts. The river basin jungle goes absolutely bonkers with growth to the point that it starts sucking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. And around this time, you've got a little ice age. This is the little tiny ice age. There's been several of them, but this is one of the little ice ages that have been recorded in recent memory that caused starvation across Europe because the temperature started falling. Why?
The theory goes that the forest ate up so much co2 because now it had a nutritional bank to be able to draw from that it sucked in so much carbon dioxide that it actually chilled the atmosphere. The death of the people in the Amazon Basin that was caused by Europe came back to haunt them by causing famine, crop failures, and all manner of shit. The Thames River froze solid at the time. And this is like way back. This is a long time ago. This is before probably, you know, Jonestown or not Jonestown. We're not thinking of yeah. The early early American settlements, right, in the United what would become the United States.
They didn't know why they're like, oh my god. It's climate change is gonna kill us all.
[00:37:35] Unknown:
Well, if it really was the fact that they had buried so much carbon in the in the soil
[00:37:42] Unknown:
and that carbon did all the things that we're gonna talk about and the forest saw that and there was nothing holding it back, there was no millions of people slashing and burning it, and it just took over and it was able to explode in growth then it's not outside the realm of possibility that it consumed so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that it caused a little ice age. And I find that fascinating. I find that fascinating. What we also find is that it wasn't just the Amazon where you found terra preta soils terra preta soils or also known as black soils because it's a high carbon has been found on every continent on the planet except Antarctica because humans have never lived there.
Australia, Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Central America, you name it. You name it. If it was a civilization that was not on Antarctica, they had figured out how important carbon is for the soil. So you felt we find terra preta everywhere. Now, everywhere we look, we're finding it, finding in the Highlands of Scotland, finding it in England, finding it in India, finding it in the middle east. It's everywhere Because back then humans somehow or another we figured it out that you put carbon in the soil and it does good things for you. And it good does good things for your civilization and you want as much carbon in the soil as you can possibly get.
[00:39:18] Unknown:
Right? So
[00:39:22] Unknown:
all that said, let me make sure I'm not missing something before I move on. All that said, we find ourselves now in modern times with this entire bogus crap of ESG. Right? The ESG stuff, the carbon sequestration and the carbon trading and credits, and you are the carbon that they want to reduce. And now I actually saw a Scientific American talking about how bad it was that humans exhale carbon dioxide because it's poison. It's a greenhouse gas and we're all gonna die because of it. Okay. This, in fact, we are right at the nexus point when I started thinking why I started thinking about something like the Forest Walker system.
If these guys are so blown up and so bent out of shape about carbon in the atmosphere, And there's this stuff called biochar, and we know how to make it with gasification. And we can use that process at to produce fuel that actually burns in an internal combustion engine. And we can produce electricity that will run Bitcoin miners to soak up any extra electricity that we're actually producing that is not being used by the system, and we're able to lay down carbon in forest soils and reduce its fire hazard potential, then we should probably think about doing that.
Because of all the great things that just by itself carbon in the soil does. Like for instance, let's talk about this the carbon sequestration thing. 1, this system the the Forest Walker system it kind of is a it could be, not it not that it does, but it could actually be a forcing function that forces the climate hystericists to put their money where their mouth is to fund a system like this. Because not only is it going to protect our forests from forest fires, but it's also going to sequester carbon long term in the soil. Remember that terra preta stuff? That shit been carbon dated being in the soil for over 1000 of years.
At least a couple of 1000 of years. Nobody's really sure how long solid carbon lasts solid. No. Like charcoal carbon. That's solid carbon. There's other forms of carbon in the soil. This is what's called recalcitrant. Like, it's just not gonna go anywhere. You put it in the soil and it stays there for 100 to 1000 of years. We're not sure, but I do know that the guys that are carbon dating some of the terra preta pits out in the Brazilian rainforest are saying dish it's at least 2000 years old from radiocarbon data or dating.
Right? So now we've got the hystericists on the rope saying, okay. Well, you know what? I I know how to put a shit ton of carbon into the soil. Let's get this shit done. Let's mine some Bitcoin while we're at it. And all of a sudden, Bitcoin is now connected to the way that we actually get these people to stop wetting their diapers. Because that seems to be all they do is just cry and cry and cry about co2. I we can take care of that shit. I mean, forget solar panels. The tree is your solar panel and it doesn't mean cut down forest in order to make biochar. You can get enough carbon from just the fallen litter waste around the world to power this civilization probably 4 times over every year.
Just by going out and burning this stuff, getting this in gas, putting it into a combustion engine and generating electricity with it everywhere across the world completely decentralized. So, that's what trees do. They basically take co2 and they add sunlight to it, and they produce sugars, and then those sugars are put into long chains of sugars and the longer the chain the sugar gets and the way that it's actually bound together, you end up with stuff like lignin and cellulose. If you can if you do something different with that sugar you get sugars that humans can actually eat. But all of it really boils down to just carbon carbon bonds which contain energy.
That's what we're after. Trees figure out how they can store that energy using carbon. We figured out how to take dead wood and pull the energy out of it. So the trees as they drop their dead limbs are actually providing us solid sources of energy. And if you take the entire landmass of the world and look at all the forest and how just start calculating how much biomass is dropped every year, it doesn't take too long for you to go, well, shit. We could power quite a bit of this stuff with just this stuff that's being left on the forest floor, but we just need to go be able to go get it and have a reason to go get it that returns money on an investment. And again, that's a numbers game, which I'm not gonna get into here.
But here's the the other thing about the climate hystericists. Check this one out. Biochar can reduce the need for chemical fertilizers. And the production of those fertilizers is what? It's energy intensive to produce. Thereby, it indirectly reduces greenhouse gas emissions associated with fertilizer production. Again, we're we're forcing the hysteris hysteresists to love Bitcoin because Bitcoin gives us the ability to go out and say, you know, this might not work on its own. But if we add Bitcoin to it, it it may just push us over the cliff and we start making money.
And that's all anybody that's all anybody actually wants to hear is a positive return on investment. Some people wanna hear 10 x, 20 x, a 100 x return on investment. Other people just wanna go, I just don't wanna be in the poor house because of it. Right? Bitcoin mining pushes this and a whole bunch of other things to where it's like, oh, if we just add Bitcoin mining it'll work. And that's what I think that the Forest Walker system does. Because, you know, now you got a you got a stable carbon structure, right? You throw it into the ground, it is resistant to decomposition, it remains stable in the soil for 100 and 1000 of years, It effectively sequesters the carbon over very long periods of time. So, therefore, all those people that are screaming about how we're all going to kill ourselves, they should actually be putting money into this. They should be the ones who are saying, yes, we will do this. I'm giving them a way to do this.
Right? It's the reason that it reduces fertilizer is because of something we'll talk about here in a little bit. Biochar not only does what it does that I've already told you about, it does other things too. Like, holds like it it will actually suck in and grab on to nutrients. Instead of letting them flow through the water table out out of the soil and into rivers, it actually will suck on to phosphorus and potassium and nitrogen and stuff like that, and it will hold it in place. We'll get to that. But because it can do that, because it can hold on to nutrients, you don't need as many nutrients as you did before you put carbon into your soil.
Before you put carbon into your soil you needed to always constantly put nitrogen fertilizer on your soil if you're growing a corn crop or something like that. But if you add a shit ton of carbon to it, all of a sudden what would have run off is now sequestered on-site. And the plant roots for next crop would be able to access that nitrogen. So therefore, you don't need as much, so therefore, not as much as produce. So therefore, the energy intensiveness that it takes to be able to produce this stuff isn't necessary. Again, the people that say we're all gonna die because we're burning too much fossil fuels, they should be happy about this. They should be very very happy about this. And in fact, I think that they would be.
And they've set themselves up to where they kinda have to be. And how is how am I getting there? The carbon trading and carbon credits action. I mean, check this shit out. I've mentioned it in the first part of the the first part of the series. But carbon credits, basically, right now for the last well, for the last 5 years, they've been talking about carbon credits. And so what is a carbon credit? Okay. Let's say that I've got this system built. I've got the Forest Walker system. I've got a thousand of these metal, you know, or carbon fiber critters walking around forest and they are producing 1 ton of carbon every hour, and I can prove it.
I I I can I can take somebody, you know, an auditor out there and they can go look at it go, yep, that's that's a ton of carbon and it's happening every hour? Okay. So then, they pay me money. Right now, we we're looking at carbon credits for for a metric ton, which is about £2,200.
[00:49:20] Unknown:
That's a metric
[00:49:22] Unknown:
ton. They'll pay me 40 to $100. Now, who's they? The broker dealers that have anything to do with this ESG nonsense, Right? So now, they've paid me money. And they get what do they get? They they get proof that sub that they paid somebody a $100 per ton to put carbon in the ground. They can go trade that as a derivative on on basically, like, trade it like stock. And then they can sell that shit to another company who has no ability to put carb like the like so like a company that has nothing to do with carbon whatsoever. They're making,
[00:50:04] Unknown:
I don't know, shoes. And they're using a lot of energy to do it.
[00:50:09] Unknown:
And then all of a sudden they're like, you know what? We're if we're gonna be ESG compliant, we've got to buy these carbon credits. Well, I provably put a metric ton of carbon in the ground, I got paid for it. And now they've got basically a share of stock, it's not an equity, but just let's just go go with it. And then they can say, okay. Well, you if you pay us a $120 per metric ton, you can have the share and that way you can at least say that you helped put carbon into the ground forever or at least, you know, a couple 1000 years. That's what a carbon credit is. That's what this carbon trading bullshit is all about.
I'm actually thinking that this is a way to tap into that even though we and we all understand that this is kind of lunatic they're kind of lunatics. But like I said in the last show, if they want to pay me money to go do this, I'm going to allow them to pay me money to put carbon into the soil en masse. At the same time, making sure that our forests are more protected from catastrophic fires. What's not to love about the system? And, you know, like Dan Balser was saying, too many moving parts. And I'm saying, where's the return on investment? I'm wondering if there doesn't even need to be return on investment other than being able to attach your name as a company and say, we funded this system.
See how good we are? See our little halos that they're shine, you know, it's all golden up above our head and and there's the sound in the background and all that shit because that's marketing. That's telling a story. That's that's making the people that could crush them happy. And say, look, well, we're we're doing our part. We're refunded the Forest Walker system. Look how much carbon we're putting into the ground, and we're making sure the forest don't burn. Who doesn't wanna be a part of that story? That's the marketing angle of this. That's a lot of times is just enough to where it doesn't matter if you're making money on a system like this or not. But all the while, we have to be able to soak up the extra energy that's being produced by each one of these critters that's on the ground. So therefore, Bitcoin mining comes along for the ride. So guess who gets to also say they're helping put carbon in the ground?
Bitcoin miners All of a sudden the the skull of Satoshi that's belching out all the nuclear waste out of the smokestacks on top of its head doesn't actually make any sense anymore Greenpeace USA don't have a leg to stand on anymore. That's where I'm going with all this. It's I think it could actually make money. But I know for a fact that it will definitely be the marketing story that everybody wants to plug into because it makes them look carbon trading and credit people are happy because why? Well, they're they've actually got somebody out there that's shoving physical carbon into the ground and can prove how much mass they're sequestering underground.
And as that carbon's in the ground, what is it doing? It's restoring soil health. In fact, biochar has become popular enough that without the Forest Walker system, metric tons of this are being sold to farmers and ranchers and other people for, you know, urban landscaping projects and all kinds of stuff. Because it's kind of you kinda can't argue against what happens to soil when you put this raw carbon into the ground. Not coal, not charcoal, but biochar into the ground. And after it charges up with a whole bunch of living critters and nutrient load, it ends up doing wonders for the soil to the point that people have paid anywhere and this is as of April 2023, from what I can gather the prices of biochar per ton £2,000 not metric ton, but regular ton American ton of £2,000 has been anywhere between $100 per ton which is very close to the 40 to a $100 per ton of carbon credit cost, all the way to $25100 a ton, sometimes over depending on the quality.
$25100 a ton is a lot of money for carbon. That's if you're selling it on the open market. Well, I've just told you that carbon credits would only get you between 40 and a $100. You know what I smell? Arbitrage opportunity. I smell a lot of arbitrage opportunity. And I don't know exactly how that works. All I know is that every single time I see a price for something that is one thing and a price of that exact same thing that is much much higher or much much lower than the other thing then there's an arbitrage opportunity on open markets. But be that as it may, $25100 per ton of biochar is nothing to sneeze at. And in a forest walker system, sure, it's designed to actually put the carbon right there back into the forest soils, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that it couldn't be collected.
I wouldn't wanna do that because you're robbing the forest of its potential carbon, but it could be done. You know, and it's like especially if we go, okay, we'll take half and we'll leave half. So we produce 2 tons, we put a ton into the soil in the forest, we take the other ton and we sell it for 2 grand. Well, that could actually especially if you're producing a ton. Let's say you're producing a ton, 4 tons a day with a thousand of these critters. Well, 4 tons at 2,000 is 8 grand a day. Well, actually, 4 tons will take 2, so 4 grand a day. 365 because these things operate all by themselves. Sure. They have to be repaired, but I'm just saying for the great gusts and feathers of what we're talking about, they're just out there doing their thing and they're mining Bitcoin on the side.
Well, wow. So why are people paying between a $125100 a ton to put on their soil? It's because of what it does to the soil. Soil health. Remember those little straws and tubes and the the amount of the sheer amount of surface area that like, this biochar has? It does all kinds of stuff. For 1, let's just look at 1 gram of biochar. Let me go back. Actually not, I think it well, did I kill him? Hold on.
[00:57:04] Unknown:
Let me see if I've got this back.
[00:57:09] Unknown:
Biochar. I'm just gonna say micrograph. I'm putting these pictures back up for the guys up in the live stream. Okay. So here you go. Here's a bunch of micrographs that you see all the surface area that you can get. So how much surface area is there in a gram of biochar? If you were to take take a gram of biochar and flatten it out to where it's literally just just nothing but surface area is 2,000 square feet. There's another one that says that it's basically an NBA an official NBA basketball court. So if you know what the size of an NBA basketball court is, that's 1 gram of biochar when it's laid out flat.
That's a lot of surface area. Why is surface area important? Because bacteria and all manner of soil fungus and other bacteria, they have a tendency to need a place to stick on to. They need a place to adhere to. And with all this porosity and all this biochar, not only can they stick on to it, it protects them from predators so that they can have little little baby micro, you know, microflora and microfauna. So it provides a home for a bunch of the stuff in the soil that is absolutely required for soil health. If you have soil that has no life in it, no bacteria, no fungus, no nematodes, no plasmodium, no algae, no nothing.
You have dead soil. Congratulations. You're not growing anything on that soil without a Monsanto or a Bayer Crop Science labeled chemistry set. You're not growing
[00:59:02] Unknown:
shit. Now if you've got a lot of carbon,
[00:59:05] Unknown:
all this biology does all manner of things like mycorrhizae fungi. You have to have it for most plants to be able to for the plants to function properly. We won't get into why. That's an entire show all by itself. Bacteria, there's a lot of people say, oh, you know legumes are plants that associate with a certain type of bacteria, and that bacteria fixes nitrogen into the roots of the legume plant. Legume think of bean, it's a bean plant, that kind of thing.
[00:59:39] Unknown:
And then when that plant dies,
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all the the the bacteria in its roots die, the roots die, and then all of a sudden all this free nitrogen spills out, and it got that nitrogen from the air. So for a long time people thought only legumes could do this. That that's not correct now. We now know that there are free living bacteria in the soil that fix nitrogen directly into the soil from atmospheric nitrogen. But if there's not any of that shit in your soil, they're not going to be fixing nitrogen in your soil. So happens they like to have a place to live, they like to have structure, they like that kind of stuff, and biochar provides that in mass, Right?
So, these things also produce certain items like like, you know, mycorrhizal fungi and a fair amount of different types of bacteria, they produce this stuff called glomalin. Glomalin is a biological glue. Let's just call it that. And it glues soil particles together. And as long as you've got little clumps of soil particles instead of just sand, you know, or or like really hard packed clay, what you get is water infiltration. Because it's aggregating the soil particles up into like little balls, and if their soil particles are in little balls then there are spaces in between these little balls and that's where water and air can get back into the soil. And because air can get into the soil, a bunch of these critters that live in the soil also need air. You need good aeration.
You need good water infiltration. The aggregation of the soil particles by being glued together by glomalin, which just so happens to be produced by the very same critters that need water infiltration and air living in the soil, all of it goes together to de compact soil. Because compacted soil, when water hits it, it runs over the top. If you've got good aeration, good aggregation because of all these critters making glomalin in the soil, then you get natural decompaction and water instead of flowing over the top causing all manner of problems, actually infiltrates into the soil.
And then there's where biochar plays yet another role because of all the surface area, water likes to cling on to carbon. It has a natural affinity, especially to things like biochar. And with 1 gram being equal to the surface area of a court, you know, NBA official basketball court, 1 gram can hold a lot of water. In fact,
[01:02:30] Unknown:
some biochars have been tested
[01:02:33] Unknown:
and they have held anywhere between 5 10 times their weight in water. Split the difference, let's call it 7 x. So I got 1 gram of biochar, 100 percent dry. Let's just call it 100% dry, absolutely bone dry biochar. And I put 7 grams of water together with the biochar in like a beaker. And eventually, all that water is going to adsorb to the biochar. It doesn't this is hard to do this is hard to do, in a podcast. Two different words. Absorb and adsorb. 1 is spelled abzorb a b as in boy. The other is a d, d as in David, zorb. When you have a sponge on your sink and it gets wet, it absorbs water. If you squeeze it, the water easily comes out.
That's absorption. A towel is good and absorptive. However, I can wring the water out of it, and it doesn't really take that much energy. Adsorb adsorption is different. It chemically holds the water, which means you ain't just gonna squeeze a bunch of biochar and get all the water out of it. It's still going to hold 7 times its weight in water. That water is just going to stick to all this surface area that the biochar provides. Not only is it providing homes for like little critters and little, you know mycorrhizal fungi, no it's also providing a home for water. And it wants that water, it holds on to that water.
So by putting more of this type of carbon into your soil, whether you're a farmer, you're worried about pasture management, your ranch, you're going to be able to be resilient through droughts more and more depending on how much more of this carbon you put into your soil. If you get good water, you're gonna get good water infiltration. That water is gonna infiltrate the soil, it's gonna come into contact with the biochar, it's going to it'll suck it up like a sponge, but it will hold on to it like an iron grip. And the only way you're gonna cleave that water off of that carbon is through the physio chemical action of a root actually touching the biochar and stripping the water off.
That's the only way that water leaves. Now eventually, if you leave wet biochar out in the sun, sure it'll dry. But if it's underneath the ground, you've got living systems in the ground that water is gonna stay there. Which means your drought more drought resilient, the more carbon you put into your soil. Right? So the water holding capacity alone is one of the reasons why you want this stuff in all soils, whether it's a forest soil, whether it's pasture soil, whether it's agricultural soil, whatever. Your backyard soil, your lawn soil, all of it gets better.
And it's not just water that has this adsorption this AD as in David absorption
[01:05:48] Unknown:
capacity nutrients. Alright nutrients.
[01:05:53] Unknown:
One of the major things that biochar does, not only does it hold on to water, not only does it give these little critters a place to stay like apartment buildings, it also grabs on to nutrients like nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, a lot of positively charged ions love to stick to biochar. Which means, like water, the only way these plants are getting this stuff out of the biochar is literally by stripping them off through physio chemical action. It's not just free flowing through the soil anymore. It's not like a dead farmer soil that's been dead for 20 years and the only way they're getting a crop out of it is to put more nitrogen on it. Because at the end of that season, the nitrogen that they put on that was not used by the plant is going to flow through the soil and it's going to go into a river and it's going to leave the farm.
But if you've got a bunch of carbon in your soil, it will not leave your farm, which means you don't have to use as much. And eventually, as this carbon builds up and this type of recalcitrant carbon builds up into your soil, and you've got enough microfauna and microflora in there, and many of those actually take nitrogen out of the air and put it into a form that plants can use, and that sticks to the biochar that's in the soil, all of a sudden, there are people that are finding they don't really need to put any nitrogen on their soils. Now that is an extreme case, I will grant you. And if you are a farmer right now that's farming corn and say, you know what? I'm just gonna throw a ton per acre of this diabetic biochar on my soil soil and everything's gonna be great. You're gonna be out of business in a year.
Your crops will die. Your crops will die. Your crops will die. Because it takes a long well, it takes a while to charge this stuff up in the soil. You can speed that up in various, you know, mechanisms, but when you're talking about tons, like for instance, when I was doing my backyard biochar, the way that I was charging it up was literally I had put it into these beer kegs and, I urinate on it and fill I filled them both up with water so like, you know, so all this charcoal is basically chilling out in water for days days days, and then I was just pissing on it. I'd go out in the backyard just piss in the barrel because that attracts a bunch of bacteria specifically the kind of bacteria that like to be able to work with nitrogen and they start growing into the biochar.
And I did that for, like, you know, a couple of months before I even put it in the soil. At that point, it's fine. But that's 35 gallons of biochar. That's not 35 tons. There's so it's it's gonna be different. Right? If you go out and try to do this on your agricultural fields on a broad acre scale, what I'm discussing or describing will actually hurt you upfront. But after a season, a couple of seasons, if you continue to if you put down biochar and you continuously still put down your nitrogen fertilizer, eventually you'll start using less fertilizer.
But if you were to neglect any kind of fertilization process or fertility regime that you've been doing just because you put biochar on the soil, you're going to go out of business as a farmer.
[01:09:34] Unknown:
So you have to earn the right
[01:09:37] Unknown:
to be able to do this, which means you have to really understand how this system in the soil actually works. You know, one of the ways that it works is like, you know, nitrogen comes through and its plant available form has a couple of, you know, it's like n,
[01:09:55] Unknown:
was it like n2+. So it's got like 2 positive charges on it. Hydrogen has got one positive charge.
[01:10:05] Unknown:
So all of a sudden, nitrogen has a stronger bonding affinity to the side of the biochar than hydrogen does. So it strips off the hydrogen basically gets displaced. Yeah, well one of the ways that a plant can get that nitrogen back is to put basically flood a whole bunch of hydrogen ions until it finally is able to kick off a couple of these nitrogen ions and then scoop those up and then the hydrogen that's produced by the plant sticks on to the empty spaces on the biochar. So this is what's called nutrient buffering, right? And this is one of the reasons why the nitrogen will not just leave your soil if you've got a bunch of recalcitrant carbon inside of it, right? But the same is true if for those that know anything about chemistry the same is true for pH buffering.
Because pH stands for potential hydrogen. The lower the pH, the more actual hydrogen ions you've got in your solution and that you can look at the soil as a solution. The higher your pH, the less hydrogen ions you have in solution, but you've got more potential hydrogen. So if you've got like a really really high pH soil, biochar not only will lower the pH, but it will keep it there over long periods of time it buffers it. And it's through this action of adsorption that it is able to cling on to water that it's able to cling on to nutrients and it's able to have some kind of trading ability between those positively charged nutrient ions and hydrogen ions. And it's the hydrogen ion amount.
If it's not if it's just chilling out in your soil and it's not really attached to anything, you're gonna have lower and lower and lower pH. And if you've got really high pH soils, you want to make sure that you don't lose your hydrogen ions. So all this action that biochar does from water to pH is doing nothing but helping your soil do its job.
[01:12:22] Unknown:
So, essentially, we're gonna come to the end of the story for biochar as of today anyway.
[01:12:30] Unknown:
But I want to leave you with this. First of all, we're talking about recalcitrant carbon, solid carbon, and you have to put it in the soil. And we could do this with the forest walker system, right? 2nd, this is this is a worthwhile endeavor for very many reasons, but from a market standpoint, like a free market standpoint, I've already told you. People have paid up to $25100 a ton for biochar. If you think that that means that you're gonna go broke doing this, I don't think so. Doesn't mean you're gonna get, like, you know, stinking rich either, but I mean shit. I I would rather do this than a lot of things for money.
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When this stuff is in the soil,
[01:13:17] Unknown:
it makes soil better. It holds on to water longer. It holds on to nutrients longer. It makes the soil a hospitable place for all the plants and all the critters that the plants need to be in the soil and it puts everything back the way God intended. As a forest fire happened that wasn't catastrophic, it would drop a load of charcoal on the ground. And then the little critters of the soil would take it into the ground. It wouldn't be as recalcitrant as digging, you know, digging it deeper into the soil, but that's for a later show. But it would incorporate that carbon into the soil.
We already know that it made the forest more water resilient. Why? Because it had carbon holds on to water. We know that any of the nutrient cycling was basically buffered because of the adherence factor of the carbon in the soil. Why? Because of chemistry. It's just the way it is. So any nutrition that was falling out of the pine needles and leaves in a forest that were being turned over by the soil critters, anything anything that was, like, able to get away through the water stream wasn't. It was adhered to by on onto this carbon that was put down during these forest fires. But we don't get forest fires anymore because the minute that they flare up, we put them out. And we've been we've gotten so good at it that the fuel load in the forest is why the whole this whole story began in the first place.
Being able to convert all this wood waste into usable energy and have byproducts on the other side. Now, through the pyrolysis and gasification process, there's at least 3 other
[01:15:10] Unknown:
products. There's heat clearly because we're talking about burning shit, right? But there's one other thing that people miss Carbon dioxide production.
[01:15:25] Unknown:
I think that that it may be that that's gonna be in a different show.
[01:15:30] Unknown:
But there's a third one.
[01:15:33] Unknown:
Wood vinegar. What the hell is it? That's not for today's show. We are already well over an hour. I've said my bit about why you need to start thinking about biochar and how it fits with the Forest Walker system. But wood vinegar is gonna be an entire show all by itself.
[01:15:53] Unknown:
If you want to know what wood vinegar is now,
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you can go to your nearest grocery store
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and go to the condiments aisle and go buy a bottle of liquid smoke. That's wood vinegar. That's right, you eat it. It's completely okay for you. Doesn't seem like it would be, but it is. In fact, it's got a lot of benefits.
[01:16:19] Unknown:
And we're gonna talk about that in another show. But for now, I gotta go. I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction to Bitcoin Ant Podcast
Forest Walker System Overview
Challenges and Science Fiction of the System
Biochar: The Core of Forest Walker
Biochar Production and Feedstocks
The Mystery of Terra Preta
Biochar's Role in Carbon Sequestration
Market Potential and Carbon Credits
Biochar's Impact on Soil Health
Future Topics: Wood Vinegar