Jayne Windeatt

Graduated with an interdisciplinary MSc/PhD in the Doctoral Training Centre for Low Carbon Technologies

Thesis: Assessing the potential for CO2 sequestration using biochar from crop wastes: Scenarios to 2100

Jayne's chosen area of geoengineering research was biochar, which is a charcoal like product produced by the pyrolysis of biomass.  Biochar may potentially enable removal of CO2 from the atmosphere (by photosynthesising biomass) and subsequent storage in soils.  Jayne researched how effective biochar may be at removing CO2 from the atmosphere under a number of different future scenarios. Supervised jointly by the School of Process, Environmental and Materials Engineering and the School of Earth and Environment, her project is truly interdisciplinary, using aspects of engineering, physical science and social science to address the research questions of her PhD.

Initial laboratory work on the yields and characteristics of biochars from different crop wastes gave Jayne primary data to feed into the second part of her research. The latter stages of her work were the development of a model to assess the global carbon sequestration potential of biochars under the different Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios used by the climate modelling community. The scenarios are future pathways of socio-economic development, resulting in differences in future emissions and land-use. Her main research question, answered throughout her PhD research, was how much CO2 could be removed from the atmosphere and stored, in soils, for long time periods, using biochars produced from crop residues?