We need to start making a gigantic fungible market for charcoal right away!

We can call it "BioChar".

The Lake Chad basin is clogged with an available source of charcoal: Typha Australis (big Cattail) is everywhere.  Its clearance is desperately needed.  It is the dessication machine that is destroying Africa.  Not only can it be made into charcoal for fuel or biochar, the portion that has been grown in clean water and soil is generally edible.  There is enough cattail going to waste to feed all of Africa, and what isn't fit for human consumption (it cleans your streams!) can be made into charcoal or ethanol.  Hiding underneath it, and needing clearance to restore streams and lakes to functionality, is a reserve of topsoil, quite suitable for remediation projects. Look into this plant as a problem and as a resource. Its control and exploitation will solve many troubles.

Any biochar climate remediation program will be destroyed by charcoal demand.

This situation cries out for waste stream biogas for cooking fuel that backs up solar cooking.  When the sun shines cook with the solar, when it's cloudy use biogas from a local or individual biogas system.

People use biogas to substitute for wood and oil based cooking fuel in Coasta Rica, as documented here in Grist a few years back, why not spread that carbon preventing method to Africa and the world?

Dr. X, this is where I accuse you of not seeing the forest for the trees. You see cut trees and claim that biochar is a bad idea because it might encourage the use of cooking charcoal. As if charcoal cooking somehow needed encouragement. It's used wherever charcoal can be procured despite an almost complete lack of biochar utilization.

I think that forests are more about rainfall, soils and nutrient retention. Where rainfall is sufficient and water and nutrients are retained in the soils trees flourish. A tree can't grow on wet rock but it can survive dry seasons if it can tap into a freshwater lens in the soil. Biochar dramatically and permanently (in human terms) improves water percolation in soils, particularly clay soils.

I agree with your support of biogas manufacture and utilization where possible. In most of the world we can't get people $20 rocket stoves to replace primitive three-rock fireplaces. How we are supposed to make the jump from fire pits to piped gas is beyond me. Whether that's done with pyrolysis of waste or digestion tanks who pays for it?

Finally, biochar, tilled into the soil is likely a longer lasting solution to poor soils than biogas waste. A soil carbon improvement that lasts millenia trumps one that lasts a dozen years at best. The benefit received for feedstock input is simply higher.

Biochar increases the rate of biomass breakdown Pang.  That doesn't add biomass sequestration, it cancels it.

Prairie soil proves the sequestration effect of biomass fertilization.  It had built year after year, inch by inch to 20 to 30 foot levels before it was plowed.

You need to add biomass and fertlizer to the soil ecosystem to increase it's sequestration levels.  Biochar halts them.  It burns biomass and fertilizer in it's bacterial colonies feeding on filtered nutrients.  It not only does not add biomass to the ecosystem, it helps convert it to GHG.  Subtracting biomass sequestration as the study found.

How to police black market charcoal diversion from biochar kilns?  How are you going to police biochar offset markets once they start bubbling?  I smell more derivative trading.

Not knowing the specifics of Chad soil qualities (is it really that poor) I would vote with John Schneider for solar stoves. It seems to me that Chad as well as most of the Southern emisphere (and the rest of the world as well by lowering GHG) would benefit from their use.