The chemistry is interesting, you're making bbq charcoal out of (yard) waste. You can also make town gas with some water and the waste (steam reformed carbon m

The chemistry is interesting, you're making bbq charcoal out of (yard) waste. You can also make town gas with some water and the waste (steam reformed carbon monoxide). The characterization of temperamental is an understatement, but given experience and a pile of tireless microcontrollers they're going to have better luck. WRT biochar if you go for town gas production you have no biochar output anymore. Also there is little difference between biochar and cooking charcoal so depending on local conditions it gets burned as fuel. Still carbon neutral. You can get quite a bit of process heat off a gassifier. The engineering tends to scale pretty well with size, so if you have functioning transport and economy you tend toward the American model of a very large charcoal production plant. Its interesting seeing the tech applied elsewhere. The forest idea is pretty cool, you could run a local sawmill off scrap and cutoffs and ship down the lighter boards instead of entire trees.