The problem of sequestering surplus atmospheric carbon dioxide is thought to be so difficult that in 2007 Richard Branson and Al Gore launched the $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge prize for a viable technology that can achieve this feat. The best candidate is biochar, which functions in nature as a long-term carbon store. In this project I am investigating and validating a new methodology for sustainable charring of biomass waste. Novel principles of reactive thermal coupling are being developed and applied to optimize a balance between char and fuel production and achieve emissions capture. These principles applied to the flue gas emissions problem also have the potential to effect a carbon capture technology of unprecedented economic viability.

Sustainable carbon sequestration – or charXiving – involves the interaction of carbon cycle science and technology with human communities and employment, particularly in rural and remote regions of Australia. The outputs of this project will help to strengthen resilience and adaptation to climate change in rural Australia. There is strong potential to generate employment and sustainable industry in rural and remote regions because charXiving will be essentially a distributed industry. A key aim of the project is to disseminate the “biochar revolution” in rural and remote Australia.

Co-production of biochars and bio-oils using Endex methodologies according to charXive principles has the potential to create wealth, employment, and industry in rural Australia, fertilise and remediate soils on a large scale, and achieve significant additional greenhouse gas abatements.

In roughly ten year periods of work, Rick Farley (1952-2006) shaped Australian understandings of economic reform, environmental sustainability and Indigenous reconciliation. His noted public achievements are in forging new modes of 'agro-politics', the co-founding of Landcare, work in Native Title negotiations and in building support for reconciliation. Behind these activities, however, was also a career of influential private lobbying and facilitation. This project analyses Farley’s work as architect and builder of partnerships across these concerns. It catalogues what he did, reflects on the infrastructure he created, and explores the contribution he foreshadowed but his early death prevented. It documents, for the first time, Farley’s contribution to understandings of the urgent questions of Australia’s economic, cultural and environmental sustainability. Farley’s insistence that community alliances were vital to meeting global challenges, magnified by Australia’s degraded landscapes and the alienation of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous custodians of those lands, remains as relevant now as it was when he brokered initiatives such as Landcare