Finding products produced by forest restoration that can be sold to fund their efforts has been a perennial challenge for officials in northern Arizona.

Scientists and forest officials are now considering new tools to help in that effort.

Called a “charvos,” the machine can burn material produced during forest thinning operations to produce a charcoal-like substance called “biochar,” said Coconino County Forest Reforestation Director Jay Smith. It is possible.

In the future, CharBoss could emerge to complement burning and other restoration strategies, and the biochar produced could be marketed for any number of uses, Smith said.

“Right now, pretty much everything else is losing money. That’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve,” Smith said.

Still, the machine isn’t a silver bullet, says Han Sap Han, professor and director of forest management and biomass utilization at Northern Arizona University’s Institute for Ecological Restoration. The institute studies charboss and the potential uses for the biochar it produces.

“We need all the tools,” Han said. “We need to open burns, we need prescribed burns, we need charvoss, we need to get whatever is possible and available for our administration.” [forests]”

Coconino County worked with the Forest Service and ERI last month to test the machine.

Smith said he is testing Charvos against the county’s current air curtain burners.

Both machines work in a similar fashion. Small logs, branches and pine needles, often called biomass, are fed to the machine. The material is then burned in a manner and at a temperature that limits the smoke produced by the fire, greatly reducing the impact of poor air quality on local residents.

But charvos wastes the material before it’s completely consumed, creating biochar material, Smith said.

Air curtains, on the other hand, produce only ash.

Han said biochar can be used in a myriad of ways, from supporting soil and agriculture to use in water filters.

“This greatly improves soil productivity and improves agricultural production,” Han said.

Han’s research shows that when biochar is used in soil, the soil retains more water than normal, meaning less water is needed to grow the same number of plants. . So far, using biochar seems to reduce water loss by 15%, significantly reducing the amount of water needed to grow plants.

Han said this could have applications in everything from agriculture to pedestrian uses such as golf courses.

And putting biochar in the soil has another beneficial side effect. It’s about capturing and storing some of the carbon dioxide released when biomass is burned.

“If you convert biomass to biochar and use that biochar as a soil amendment product and put it into the soil, the carbon can be sequestered and stored in the soil for hundreds of years,” Han said. “That’s really good.”

Han said testing charvos also found that the amount of biochar produced depends on what kind of material is burned.

Preliminary findings, Han said, show that burning more environmentally friendly materials, such as dried or unseasoned wood, or smaller materials, such as twigs, pine needles and twigs, will reduce the amount of material fed to the furnace by about 90%. % of biochar is produced. charboss.

In other words, putting 1,000 pounds of recently cut small twigs and branches into a burner will produce about 90 pounds of biochar.

But that amount increases by 17%, or 170 pounds in this case, to feed the machine with larger, drier material.

Your logs don’t have to be large to see the difference. If the logs are only 2 to 4 inches in diameter (the size commonly cut in thinning operations), you will start to see an increase in biochar production.

“As you might expect, we found that the drier material burned faster inside the CharBoss and produced more biochar. There will be less biochar available,” Han said.

Both Smith and Han said the charvos would be improved over the next few years, increasing its size to allow it to burn more material at once, and further automation to reduce the number of people required to operate it. said it could happen.

At this point, the county’s current air curtain burner can consume about three times as much material as Charvos and can be operated by just one person.

“We’re saying this is like Apple 1.0. This was 1.0. There will be 1.2, 1.3,” Smith said.

But in the meantime, CharBoss’s small volume also has other advantages, such as ease of transportation.

As opposed to having to bring biomass to the CharBoss, the machine is small enough that it can be towed to where the material is already and simply burned there.

“So where this is leveraged in communities like ours is when doing community cleanups,” Smith said. “It’s on a trailer on wheels that can be hooked up to a truck and pulled to Mann’s Park or Belmont…you can just sit there and burn this thing down. And then we can create all this biochar so people can come back and take as much as they want and put it in their garden or wherever they want.”