12/28/07 Money From Carbon

Money from Carbon. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. The upcoming Harvesting Clean Energy Conference will feature a number of speakers on a wide range of topics including Chad Kruger, BIOAg Educator with WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. Kruger will be hosting a panel discussion called "Money from Carbon: Mechanisms & Markets." KRUGER: When you think about bioenergy or other kinds of renewable energy sources from agriculture, one of the issues that always comes up is carbon management and climate change so we put together a panel a couple of years ago to look at what are the options for farmers. He says there are a number of issues that will be discussed. KRUGER: This particular panel this year will continue on that track of helping to provide some information to producers on what's going on out there in the world of carbon trading in the policy arena, about what kind of carbon issues are emerging, what places farmers might be able to get payments from and what kinds of things they can get payments for doing. Kruger says there are several new technologies upcoming that show some exciting promise. KRUGER: One of those that's kind of come on the radar screen very recently is biochar and a group of my colleagues has been working on this for the last few months. Biochar is basically a residual carbon that's produced through some types of bioenergy production known as pyrolysis or gasification. BioChar is really just an activated charcoal but according to Kruger, it has some benefit to farmers. KRUGER: There's been some research around the country and in other parts of the world looking at using that carbon as a soil amendment or the biochar as a soil amendment because it has some interesting properties and if we do that the likelihood is that we can probably get a carbon payment for using that material as a soil amendment. For additional information on clean energy and the Harvesting Clean Energy Conference, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org