Biochar like gold dust for firms ready to profit

British businessman Craig Sams loves Tony Abbott's climate change package.

TONY Abbott's climate change package relies more heavily on soil management than the climate policies of any government in the world, and British businessman Craig Sams could not be happier.

"It is great news for us," says Mr Sams, co-founder of a firm that is believed to be the first in Europe to make, retail and franchise biochar, a charcoal-like form of carbon that can be mixed with soil to improve crop yields and lock away climate-warming carbon.

"Governments everywhere have been dragging their feet on finding ways to get carbon back into soil but I think the Americans and everyone else will now follow Australia down that road."

Mr Sams said his firm, Carbon Gold, was already in talks with an Australian business about opening an Australian branch of the operation, which burns farm waste or wood in low-oxygen kilns to produce the powdered black biochar.

The Rudd government last year promised subsidies for biochar and other ways of managing soil carbon after prodding from the then opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull.

The use of biochar is still a divisive issue in other countries, with several European scientists warning yesterday that it would take years of tests before they would be confident that the practice could be safely deployed on a large scale. The UN has not recognised the technique under its programs to reward efforts to limit carbon emissions, and no other government is offering the sort of incentives for biochar that have been proposed by both sides of Australian politics.

Mr Abbott announced this week that up to 60 per cent of the carbon reductions sought by a Coalition government would come from paying farmers to use soil carbon measures such as biochar and adopting low-impact types of ploughing.

Guy Kirk, the head of Britain's National Soil Resources Unit, said: "You have to burn a hell of a lot of material to produce biochar and it is still not clear what the consequences would be if you put huge amounts of it into the soil."

Stuart Haszeldine, a professor of carbon capture and storage at Edinburgh University, said the use of biochar was "a policy I have a lot of sympathy for but we don't yet have enough knowledge to feel secure about it".

"If you are going to turn the red and grey soils of Australia black then you first need to do your investigations properly," Professor Haszeldine said.

"We and others are doing field trials on biochar but it is difficult to extrapolate from two or three-year tests into what will happen over thousands of years.

"If you do it on industrial scale and problems emerge 10 years later then you are really in trouble. You need a variety of field trials with different soils, different crops, different types of charcoal.