Mohammad Ibraheem^(1)*  and, Ali Zidan ⁽²⁾

• Center of scientific agricultural research, Tatous, Syria.
• (2) Faculty of Agriculture, TU, Lattakia, Syria.

(*Corresponding author: Mohammad Ibraheem E-Mail:, Email: mohamadali.87@hotmail.com.(

Abstract:

This work was carried out at the Agricultural Scientific Research Center in Tartous, in cooperation with Tishreen University, with the aim of studying the possibility of manufacturing a simple device for locally producing biochar that could be accessible to every farmer, and testing its efficiency in charring different sources of biomass and studying the economic feasibility of the process of converting agricultural residuals into biochar. The experiment included manufacturing a model of the charring device locally and testing the efficiency of charring of four renewable sources of agricultural residuals, which are the peanut shells, the residuals of the olive mill, the residuals of pruning citrus trees and the residuals of barley molasses of the beer industry. Then, the economic feasibility of this experiment was studied by calculating the profitability factor resulting from converting (1 ton) of biomass into biochar or into compost or used as an energy source, and comparing it with the value of the outputs from biochar or compost or energy expressed in the amount of gas or oil equivalent to extract the same amount of thermal energy from this amount of biomass.

The results showed that the residuals of the olive mill gave the highest conversion efficiency into biochar, followed by the residuals of pruning citrus trees, then peanut shells and the residuals of barley molasses, and also showed that the economic feasibility of the option of converting biomass to biochar with this device achieved the highest profitability factor of about (675 %) with high superiority on the other studied options.

Key wards; Biochar, charring, biomass, agricultural residuals, economic feasibility

Full paper in Arabic: pdf