Abstract
Biochar is the stable, carbon-rich solid co-product of thermochemical biomass conversion. It has recently gained considerable interest, driven by the need to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration in soil. During pyrolysis, much of the carbon in biomass is transformed into recalcitrant form, so that biochar applied to soils results in storage of carbon for hundreds of years and simultaneous improvement of soil fertility. Biochar can display a wide range of properties such as pH, cation exchange capacity (CEC) and elemental composition due to the assortment of raw materials and reaction conditions. The suitability of soil to biochar application depends on these properties. This has led to the “designer biochar” concept, wherein biochar could be tailored with relevant properties to address specific soil quality improvements. This aspect and the promising results of biochar application to soil can be potentially optimized through biochar-based carbon management networks (CMN) with the aid of mathematical programming. In this work, a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed for the high-level planning of biochar-based CMN. Additional parameters, variables and constraints are given to account for the incompatibilities of biochar sources and sinks. An illustrative case study is presented here to demonstrate the applicability of the developed model.
