Biochar, a love letter!

Biochar is a really cool soil amenity. I just learned about it a few weeks ago, but it sounds really smart. It involves burning biomatter at a very low temperature, in a oxygen depleted environment. The advantages of biochar are many and I will in no way make an exhaustive list here.
 First, it creates a stable substance. In the case of compost, it loses carbon to the atmosphere at an exponential rate. In the first year from when you collect the original biomass it can lose more than 50% of its mass to the atmosphere. Every year after that it looses and less until it reaches about 10% of its original mass. Biochar looses about 45% of the original mass in the making of it due to the combustion. After that the biochar is stable and will not decay further. Put simply, if you start with two piles of wood chips each 10 lbs. you let one compost and one you make into biochar. The one you turn to biochar will immediately become 5.5 lbs of biochar. Then you let those two piles sit, in 5 years you will have 5.5 lbs. of biochar and about 1 lbs. of composted wood chips. All the matter that disappeared returned to the atmosphere as CO2 a green house gas. 
Another really cool advantage to biochar, is that it in theory "cleans" your biomass. One of the problems with compost is that unless you have a "hot" compost many things can survive in there. There are some micro-organisms that you want living in your new composted soil. However, there are also lots that you don't. If you have lots of weeds that have gone to seed and you compost them in something to cool you are just spreading the weeds around your garden the following year. In addition there are many substances you can't compost in the same way you compost plant matter. As someone who follows the paleo diet I end up with a lot of animal waste. Animal products will not break down in a regular compost. They will rot and become disgusting, I have neighbors. No one would be happy. With something like biochar from what I can tell there would be no issue with throwing a few bones, and the other bits I can't eat or use, in the fire and letting them cook down. 
The energy used to produce biochar is something to be considered and captured as well. In simplest terms you are burning a lot of stuff to produce biochar. Even the relatively low temperatures required for biochar is plenty of heat to heat homes, water or do work. I know that one of the towns I used to live in Ashland WI, used biomass gasification for its power. According to them the biomass was burned completely in the process and there was no solid waste left in the end. It's beyond the scope of this blog post to get into the different technologies out there for stuff you could build in or around your home to capture the heat from biochar. A quick google search I am sure will give you lots of information. 
If you can't tell I am very excited about biochar. From what I am seeing on the DIY side of things, a 55 gallon metal drums is the way to do it. There are people using those in different ways to contain the burn and reduce the oxygen getting to it. I haven't found a design yet that I am really in love with, but I am sure I will. When I do I will let you know how it goes.