Location: Forage Seed and Cereal Research Unit
Project Number: 2072-21600-001-004-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2022
End Date: Sep 30, 2024
Objective:
1. Develop stand alone hard coded biochar lifecycle analysis (LCA)/greenhouse gas model;
2. Integrate the LCA model with existing online Biochar Atlas
Approach:
The cooperator will work with agency scientists to develop a stand alone model that estimates a lifecycle analysis (LCA) of biochar application to soils. This model will be integrated into existing decision support platforms to assist farmers in making decisions about soil amendments. This hard-coded LCA will be a fully functional multi-scale biomass-C LCA for estimation of biochar-technology climate services. The program, BGRAM v2.0, will be enabled for multiple feedstock classes, biochar production methods, soil types and alternative biomass management strategies, and be capable of operation by general (default) and expert (research) users while leaving room for further improvements, expansion, and eventual linkage with other relevant codes such as GREET ( https://greet.es.anl.gov/ ), soil biogeochemical process models such as DAY-CENT ( https://www.nrel.colostate.edu/projects/century/index.php ), national climate models, and even global-scale General Circulation Models (GCMs). While focused on the single-farm scale and using USDA GIS databases for soil and crop information in the USA, BGRAM v2.0 would be capable of operating up to the global scale, although each scale would require a different amount of preliminary work to generate the input dataset. Coding would be done using GFortran, an open-source compiler consistent with the Fortran 95 standard and containing some for the features of Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 ( https://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/ ). The entire algorithm would be made publicly available and housed as part of the Biochar Atlas package on a well-maintained server.
Output for a given farm analysis would be similar to that used in previous iterations of BGRAM (e.g., biochar LCA for Washington State, Amonette 2021) but also would provide carbon payback periods for different combinations of alternative biomass scenarios and biochar production methods.
