Biochar @ Climate Action Week

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https://events.humanitix.com/climate-action-week-marlborough-2024

Yealands Wine Group and Green Circle will showcase new pyrolysis equipment at the Climate Action Week Marlborough on 20 February.

“Immersion Experience: Yealands Estate Winery, Seddon and their journey to Climate Positive including a showcase of The Green Circle bio-char pilot.

Yealands Estate was the first winery in the world to be certified carboNZero from inception. Since 2008 it has made significant progress towards achieving its ambition of becoming carbon positive. Its wide-ranging sustainability activity incorporates utilisation of renewable energy produced on site, extensive biodiversity practices, innovative technology and key partnerships with industry and tertiary institutions. 

The Green Circle is a waste up-cycling business which takes by-products from primary industry to create valuable products that are returned to the same ecosystem, creating a lower carbon economy.

The Green Circle will be showcasing their pyrolysis technology to demonstrate how waste streams can be converted to biochar.”

Yealands LinkedIn page has some background

Pukaki wilding workshop

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The Pukaki biochar workshop was reported in the June ABE newsletter. The organisers are still hopeful that large scale followup trials will be supported going forward. Fire restrictions and weather windows will be factors for timing and an associated funding proposal has yet to be submitted.

Phil Stevens has generated some content from the workshop:

Case study – Wilding pine residue management

Pukaki workshop presentation video

BNNZ also had some presence at the 2023 Wilding Pines Conference in Queenstown. A report was provided by Andrew Finlayson in the November ABE newsletter.

ETNZ learns about biochar

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Dylan Graves has been an active advocate for biochar & BNNZ in the deep south. His workshops & training has been featured in previous AllBlackEarth newsletters (& there will be another in the November edition). Another advocate for biochar in NZ has been Richard Allison, Chair at Energy Trusts NZ, who invited BNNZ to speak at their 2023 conference. Dylan’s presentation (link here) on Biochar at the ETNZ biannual conference on 9 Nov was well received.

Scion include biochar in discussion

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“Gaugler says he sees a few other technologies that have potential to add more value, helping overcome the tyranny of distance and cost to market.

They include converting slash to biochar for soil remediation, a process that can also produce syn-gas for powering the biochar plant, and biochemicals that are a viable alternative to hydrocarbon-sourced chemicals.

………….

Other work in Northland includes a study on the value of biochar and its value in soil remediation.”

Slash for Cash

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I’ve been trying to find out more about this initiative, thinking that BNNZ might be able to help or collaborate. I posted to the BNNZ FB page on some earlier media coverage and tried to engage via Eastern Institute of Technology but not much success so far.

It would be great to see BNNZ connected & collaborating on technical aspects of biochar production from beached biomass.

MFE invites biochar discussion

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Developing a Carbon Removals Strategy

“New Zealand currently relies on continually expanding forests for the carbon removals needed to meet emissions budgets and the Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement. A broader portfolio of activities is needed to sequester atmospheric CO2. This paper seeks agreement to develop a Carbon Removals Strategy.“