Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has used a visit to Crucible Carbon’s Newcastle R&D centre to renew his attack on the Rudd Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Strategy, saying it overlooks the “enormous opportunity” of turning organic waste into biochar and sequestering carbon in soil, potentially absorbing close to 20% of Australia’s emissions.

“The technology we’ve just been looking at is innovative, it’s exciting, it’s Australian, it’s great for the environment, it will create thousands of jobs, but it has been completely neglected by the [CPRS],” says Turnbull.

Crucible Carbon is developing high efficiency pyrolysis technology for the mass production of biochar, a product with potential to enhance soil quality and improve agriculture performance while also providing long-term carbon storage.

Managing director Matthew Warnken says the major feedstock for the process would likely come from plantations of crops such as Mallee Trees, although other material – including organic waste from urban areas – could also be fed into the process.

He says potential carbon abatement of 100-200 million tonnes annually is “extremely reasonable and would be very achievable”.

The company has signed an in principal agreement on the construction of its first commercial demonstration plant, with construction to begin at a site in regional NSW early next year.

That plant will process around 20,000-40,000 tonnes of feedstock annually, producing electricity and a biochar product that would be used to improve degraded soils.

Biochar has a half-life of “hundreds if not thousands if years,” says Warnken, making it highly suitable for sequestering carbon. Under the government’s CPRS white paper, however, the use of biochar is not recognised as generating any carbon abatement.

Warnken says that, assuming realistic prices for the value of the biochar and energy outputs of the plant, a value of $20-30 per tonne of carbon sequestered would allow commercial biochar plants to be built with a three-year payback period.

That cost is below forecast prices of carbon permits under the CPRS, but Warnken says without such a payment for carbon sequestration, return on investment figures get pushed to a level that would be less attractive to commercial developers.

The white paper says the agriculture sector should remain outside of the CPRS until at least 2015, which is one reason biochar has received little attention as yet. Another is “it doesn’t fit with Kyoto accounting methods,” says Warnken, who has welcomed Turnbull putting the issue back on the table for national debate.

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