Biomass utilization through smokeless (emission-free, clean, and efficient) pyrol­ysis is a potentially significant approach for biofuels production and biochar car­bon sequestration at gigatons of carbon (GtC) scales. One of the key ideas here is to use a biomass-pyrolysis process to produce certain biofuels and more impor­tantly to “lock” some of the unstable biomass carbon such as dead leaves, waste woods, cornstovers, and rice straws into a stable form of carbon—biochar, which could be used as a soil amendment to improve soil fertility and at the same time, to serve as a carbon sequestration agent, since biochar can be stable in soil for thousands of years and can help retain nutrients in soil to reduce the runoff of fer­tilizers from agriculture lands that would otherwise pollute the rivers and water bodies. This “carbon negative” approach, which was co-initiated by Danny Day of Eprida Inc. and James Weifu Lee (the Editor) through their joint 2002 U. S. provi­sional patent application followed by a PCT application [2, 3], is now receiving increased attention worldwide [4, 5], especially since certain related studies have also indicated the possibility of using biochar as a soil amendment for carbon sequestration [6-9].

Chapter 3 provides an overview of this smokeless biomass-pyrolysis approach for producing biofuels and biochar as a possible arsenal to control climate change. For the immediate future, application of this biochar producing biomass-pyrolysis approach to turn waste biomass into valuable products could likely provide the best economic and environmental benefits. Globally, each year, there are about 6.6 Gt dry matter of biomass (3.3 GtC) such as crop stovers that are appropriated but not used. Development and deployment of the smokeless biomass pyrolysis technol­ogy could turn this type of waste biomass into valuable biochar and biofuel prod­ucts. Even if assuming that only half amount of this waste biomass is utilized by this approach, it would produce 0.825 GtC y-1 of biochar and large amounts of biofuel (with a heating value equivalent to that of 3,250 million barrels of crude oil). By storing 0.825 GtC y-1 of biochar (equivalent to 3 Gt of CO2 per year) into soil and/or underground reservoirs alone, it could offset the world’s 8.67 GtC y-1 of fossil fuel CO2 emissions by 9.5%, which is still very significant. So far, there are no other technologies that could have such a big (GtC) capacity in effectively cap­turing and sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. Therefore, this is a unique “carbon-negative” bioenergy technology system approach, which in the perspec­tive of carbon management is likely going to be more effective (and better) than the nuclear energy option, since the nuclear-power energy system is merely a carbon — neutral energy technology that could not capture CO2 from the atmosphere. This is true also in comparing the “carbon-negative” smokeless biomass-pyrolysis approach with any other carbon-neutral energy technologies, including solar pho­tovoltaic electricity, geothermal, wind, and hydropower, and all carbon-neutral biofuel technologies such as cellulosic biofuels, photobiological biofuels from car­bon dioxide and water, lipid-based biodiesels, and electrofuels, which are also cov­ered in this book. Consequently, nuclear energy and any other carbon-neutral energy technologies all cannot reverse the trend of climate change; on the other hand, the smokeless biochar-producing biomass-pyrolysis energy system approach, in principle, could not only reduce but also could possibly reverse the climate change. Therefore, this “carbon-negative” smokeless biomass-pyrolysis approach clearly merits serious research and development worldwide to help provide clean energy and control climate change for a sustainable future of human civilization on Earth [10].

Chapter 4 reports an invention on partial oxygenation of biochar for enhanced cation exchange capacity, which is one of the key properties that enable biochar to help retain soil nutrients to reduce fertilizers runoff from agriculture lands and to keep water environment clean. Chapter 5 describes chemical structural character­ization of biochars using advanced solid-state 13C nuclear magnetic resonance spec­troscopy, which is scientifically important in understanding the chemistry and application of biochar materials. As reported in Chap. 6, one of the ideas is to use biochar particles incorporated with certain fertilizer species such as ammonium bicarbonate and/or urea, hopefully to make a type of slow-releasing fertilizer.

Use of this type of biochar fertilizer would place the biochar carbon into soil to improve soil fertility and, at the same time, store (sequester) carbon into the soil and subsoil earth layers to achieve carbon sequestration. Chapter 7 discusses selection and use of designer biochars to improve characteristics of Southeastern USA Coastal Plain degraded soils while Chap. 8 describes biochar as a co-product to bioenergy from slow-pyrolysis technology.

There are significant progresses and scientific understanding in the arts of biomass pyrolysis. Chapter 9 reports the arts of catalytic pyrolysis of biomass for the produc­tion of both biofuels and biochar while Chap. 10 describes the selective fast pyrolysis of biomass to produce fuels and chemicals. As reported in Chap. 11, it is also possi­ble to produce advanced biofuels and biochar through hydrothermo processing of biomass.

To avoid negative impact on air quality with such a large (GtC)-scale operation required to achieve the envisioned global biochar carbon sequestration, the bio­mass-pyrolysis process technology must be smokeless (emission-free, clean, and efficient). Therefore, it is essential to fully develop a smokeless biomass-pyrolysis process to achieve the mission. One of the possible productive ways to achieve the smokeless (emission-free, clean, and efficient) feature is by converting the pyrolysis syngas “smoke” into clean energy such as liquid transportation fuel. Currently, there are a number of Fischer-Tropsch processing technologies [11, 12] that could be helpful for conversion of biomass-derived syngas into advanced (drop-in-ready) liquid biofuels, such as biodiesel, to replace petroleum-based transportation fuels. Chapter 12 describes the fundamentals of the biomass-to-liquid fuel process tech­nologies via Fischer-Tropsch and related syntheses. Chapter 13 reports Fischer — Tropsch hydrocarbons synthesis from a simulated biosyngas while Chap. 14 describes Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of liquid fuel with Fe catalyst using CO2 — containing syngas that can be produced from biomass pyrolysis.