A report has revealed that chocolate could counter climate change and reverse the carbon cycle.
The report published on Physcis.org cited the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), saying that biochar, a substance extracted from cocoa could potentially be used to capture 2.6 billion of the 40 billion metric tons of CO2 currently produced by humanity each year.
“We are reversing the carbon cycle,” Peik Stenlund, CEO of Circular Carbon, told AFP at the biochar factory in Hamburg.
The biochar factory in the German port city of Hamburg, uses cocoa bean shells which go in one end and at the other end, comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change.
The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 Fahrenheit).
The plant, one of the largest in Europe, takes delivery of the used cocoa shells via a network of gray pipes from a neighboring chocolate factory.
The biochar traps the CO2 contained in the husks—in a process that could be used for any other plant.
If the cocoa shells were disposed of as normal, the carbon inside the unused byproduct would be released into the atmosphere as it decomposed.
Instead, the carbon is sequestered in the biochar “for centuries”, according to David Houben, an environmental scientist at the UniLaSalle institute in France.
One metric ton of biochar—or bio coal—can stock “the equivalent of 2.5 to three tons of CO2”, Houben told AFP.
Biochar was already used by indigenous populations in the Americas as a fertilizer before being rediscovered in the 20th century by scientists researching extremely fecund soils in the Amazon basin.
The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete.
While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts say.
The production process, called pyrolysis, also produces a certain volume of biogas, which is resold to the neighboring factory. In all, 3,500 tons of biochar and “up to 20 megawatt hours” of gas are produced by the plant each year from 10,000 tons of cocoa shells.
The production method nonetheless remains difficult to scale up to the level imagined by the IPCC.
“To ensure the system stores more carbon than it produces, everything needs to be done locally, with little or no transport. Otherwise it makes no sense,” Houben said.
And not all types of soil are well adapted to biochar. The fertilizer is “more effective in tropical climates”, while the raw materials for its production are not available everywhere, Houben said.