File:Biochar Incinerator.TIF

English: This is simply an oil drum with holes at the bottom using a file and hammer. It works by loading it first with small wood at the bottom, and adding thicker branches as you fill almost to the top, packing it as tightly as possible. Then at the top you add starter (newspaper, small twigs, kerosene), light it, and place the chimney on top (attached to a metal grate) after a stable fire is established. This design is called the Top-down Up-draft Biochar Incinerator/Wood Gasifier. The idea is that by achieving a smokeless fire (this method is nearly smokeless), then the methane that would have been released over the normal decay process is released in one burst as carbon dioxide, which is twenty-five times less potent of a greenhouse gas as methane. Once the flames start dying down, the fire is "quenched" by adding soil, grass clippings, water, etc., cutting off the air flow, thus leaving charcoal, a prime soil amendment.