posted 1 hour ago
Spoiler alert: it does! Feeding biochar to ruminant animals results in reduced methane emissions, up to 25% in some studies, and in doing so it offers better feed conversion efficiency.
The mechanism behind it is complex but it boils down to some pretty fascinating electrochemical stuff that happens in the rumen. Evidently, as the complex sugars in the plant matter are broken down, free hydrogen molecules get knocked off. The archaea (sort of like bacteria but in their own biological kingdom) use the hydrogen in their metabolism of other components of the soup, and the end product of this is methane. Biochar is very good at snatching up and binding the hydrogen so that the archaea can't use it, cutting off the fuel for that emission pathway. As a bonus, the hydrogen is still available to other bacteria that use it to produce propionates, which provide energy to the animal. Biochar in livestock effluent ponds and sewage treatment systems does a similar thing to the anaerobic digestion and limits methane production there as well.
It gets better, too...when the biochar goes out the tailpipe and into the soil, it modifies the chemical processes that break down nitrogen and prevents the formation of nitrous oxide (a far more potent and long-lived greenhouse gas than methane).
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