Have you seen Cody's Lab's "Will it Charcoal" series, also on YouTube? Might be interesting to compare your approach: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKhDkilF5o68NFFy5p5nM...

Anyway, gave you a sub and liked the video on fresh salsa. Home grown salsa is incomparable to any other.

I have seen some of Cody's Lab videos, I'm not really certain it matters whether or not a given resource is desirable for turning into charcoal since, what you are left with at the end of the process is nearly the same either way.

You could think of charcoal as a "substrate" or "substrata" which living organisms can live on and with in.

My process is a simple fire pit, filling over the period of a couple hours from the bottom up (it's fun you can cook on it too) and at then end once the pit full top you douse the entire thing with water. This is the stereotypical dug in, campfire.

During this process material is placed on-top of the burnt material, which slows it's burn (due to lack of oxygen) and the material will transition to charcoal but not further to ash.

There is very little smoke and the coals stay very hot all throughout the process. Due to the lack of oxygen, the syn gases are instead burned fully instead of going into the atmosphere.

Anyways, I can create a 5 gallon bucket of charcoal in a couple hours.

The next step is charging the charcoal, since it has nearly infinite microscopic holes in the material, it acts as a sponge with immense surface area. The charging process fills the holes slightly with goodies for microbiology to utilize, for example nitrogen.

Eventually the charcoal itself starts to be break down (over tens, hundreds, and potentially thousands of years) and serves as a "battery" to fertilize plants and other higher life forms.

I'm super curious about retorts and other systems as well. And how complex it is to capture the syngas for use as a fuel (e.g. could I heat a home with it?)

Thanks for watching the salsa video, I had a blast putting that one together.