This is brilliant. Thank you.

I like the article.
I have built a "retort" kiln for the production of charcoal. It uses a standard 275 gallon home heating oil tank and a 55 gallon barrel. Gasses driven off of the "load" are piped under the barrel and burnt to give addition heating.

So far what I have learned...
Since I have no thermometers I can only say that it takes a substantial amount of heat over a long period of time (hours to days)to get the process to be self sustaining. This may be my understanding of "dry" in the "load" is not the same as "oven dried". Once started, however, gasification is nothing short of amazing.

My tank is not insulated which I think would help. I plan to use this "kiln" to heat my shop and get charcoal at the same time. Some modifications are needed to provide combustion air and mixing to get better use of the gasses.

Grinding charcoal is very messy. I have built an electric grinder that uses 2 carbide saw blades 1/2 inch apart with a hopper above. This gives me charcoal less than 3/8 inch at the biggest.

It would be easy to divert the gasses from my kiln to other purposes. There are a number of different chemicals that can be "distilled" from wood. This "is" what you are doing, perhaps you backyard moonshiners can relate practical experiences.

While there are internet sites that deal with retort kilns the amount of information that I have found that relates to different temperature ranges to distill different chemicals is lacking in a consolidated site. I suspect that MSDS sheets for know compounds might have the very best information.

No measurable result on plant growth. We are already blessed with highly fertile soils so your result might be more measurable than mine.

best hopes for increased sanity...

D

Unfortunately, we're already "terraforming the Amazon," in the worst possible way:

Global warming aside, southern Amazon forest cover may fall to 20% by 2016
Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
September 3, 2008

Forest cover in the "Arc of Deforestation" of southern Amazonia will decline to around 20 percent 2016 due to continued logging and conversion of forests for cattle pasture and soy farms, report researchers writing in the journal Environmental Conservation. The results are independent of impacts resulting from climate change, which some researchers say could dry the Southern Amazon and turn it into a tinderbox.

We're just cutting it down and burning it up. Climate change will finish it off in other couple of decades. (By the way, that's 90 gigatons of sequestered carbon we'll be releasing, once the whole forest is destroyed.)