{"id":279561,"date":"2025-11-08T15:34:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T15:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/279561\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T15:34:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T15:34:08","slug":"is-burying-the-trees-killed-by-wildfires-a-climate-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/279561\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Burying the Trees Killed by Wildfires a Climate Solution?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Gentry can clearly picture the first time she saw her family\u2019s ranch outside of Hardin, Montana, after the wildfire. A week after the burn, \u201cThe ground was still smoking,\u201d she remembers. \u201cThere were huge holes in the ground where the trees used to be. It was almost impossible to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normally a stretch of rolling, golden hills dotted with ponderosa pines, the landscape was painted a uniform gray.<\/p>\n

All told, the 2021 PF Fire killed more than 50,000 trees on the Gentry ranch.<\/p>\n

Almost four years later, in June 2025, Gentry stood on a rise, gazing into a 22-foot pit dug into a hillside on her property. A feller buncher that cuts down whole trees and a log loader chugged along inside the hole, grabbing handfuls of charred logs from a nearby pile in their clawlike grapples. Branches crackled under the treads as the log loader spread the wood evenly across the pit\u2019s bottom.<\/p>\n

As far as anyone could tell, this was the country\u2019s first biomass burial project in a post-wildfire landscape, and it was up and running.<\/p>\n

Bill Layton, director of forest operations for Mast Reforestation, a company better known for bringing trees back to surfaces denuded by fire or other disturbances than for putting them underground, stood next to her. \u201cThis may not look exciting, but it\u2019s very exciting,\u201d he said with a grin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AA woodpecker perches atop a wildfire-killed tree on Gentry\u2019s ranch. Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

Gentry first reached out to Mast looking for help planting trees, not burying them. There was no way she could afford to restore the forests across the entire ranch. It turned out, though, that the easiest way to get new trees on the landscape was to bury the old ones.<\/p>\n

Biomass burial is a relatively new entry into the high-tech world of carbon sequestration, based on a very low-tech idea: bury wood (or other biological waste) so that it won\u2019t decompose. The carbon stored within the tree\u2014that otherwise would have been reemitted into the atmosphere via rotting or burning\u2014will instead be sequestered underground. The companies doing the burying then make money by selling carbon credits to buyers who want to offset their own emissions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is basically a dry landfill,\u201d Layton said. When the company finished filling the wood vault last August, Mast topped it with compacted layers of soil and gravel and a sheet of polypropylene fabric. \u201cThe various funguses in the wood will eat the oxygen very quickly, so it\u2019ll be an oxygen-free environment. The idea is that dry, oxygen-free and cool [conditions] will preserve the wood for a long time.\u201d The company guarantees that means at least 100 years. Perhaps longer, say proponents. One team of climate scientists found a 3,775-year-old cedar log<\/a> almost perfectly preserved in clay-rich soil in Canada, 95 percent of its carbon still intact.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn aerial view of the 22-foot pit used for the biomass burial site. Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

\"TheThe filled biomass burial chamber. Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

The 22-foot pit on the Gentry ranch at the beginning of the log loading process (left) and the filled biomass burial chamber (right). Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

\"MoreMore than 10 million pounds of wildfire-killed trees went into the burial site. Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

Mast isn\u2019t the first U.S. company to get into the biomass burial business. Arkansas-based Graphyte<\/a> compresses sawdust and other timber waste products into bricks to bury; in Colorado, Wood Cache<\/a> seals off logs from local forest-thinning operations underground. But this Montana project is the first to tie biomass burial credits to wildfire restoration. Mast buried more than 10 million tons of fire-killed wood at the Montana site, generating about 5,000 tons of carbon removal credits. The company expects to sell them for about the same price as biochar credits (publicly listed around $100 to $200 per ton), but cautions that the price will vary depending on the buyer and contract details. The money from those sales will pay for replanting ponderosa pines on Gentry\u2019s ranch next spring.<\/p>\n

Biomass burial is particularly attractive to carbon credit buyers because it sequesters carbon immediately to generate credits. A more conventional tree-planting credit, on the other hand, typically takes years to come to market, until the tree has grown large enough to hold the requisite amount of carbon. That\u2019s what inspired Mast\u2014at its core a reforestation company built around gathering seeds, growing seedlings and planting trees\u2014to explore it at all. Next to seedling availability, \u201cWe realized the next-biggest challenge was around funding reforestation, especially in burn scars,\u201d said Maria Huyer, Mast\u2019s director of carbon product. \u201cTrees grow really slowly, especially in the Western U.S. We couldn\u2019t generate [reforestation] credits for 12 to 15 years.\u201d But biomass burial credits can be sold within a year of sealing off a wood vault.<\/p>\n

\"AA Mast Reforestation employee checks the heavy equipment used for loading burned logs into the burial chamber on the Gentry ranch. Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

Experts say the technique can indeed be a meaningful climate solution\u2014if it\u2019s done the right way.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne consideration is, where did you get the biomass?\u201d said Bodie Cabiyo, director of interdisciplinary science at the carbon management firm Carbon Direct. For example, chopping down an old-growth tree just to bury it clearly wouldn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother question is, what are the alternative uses for that biomass?\u201d Cabiyo added. \u201cIf you can make two-by-fours and put it in your house, that\u2019s a way better solution.\u201d In some situations, turning waste wood into biofuel<\/a> or biochar<\/a> would yield a greater climate benefit than burying it. If there\u2019s no other use for the biomass, however, then putting it underground might be the best option.<\/p>\n

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Lisa Gonzales-Kramer, Mast\u2019s vice president of forest carbon programs, pointed out that the dead trees at the Montana site were too damaged to be used for lumber; with no sawmills nearby, trucking the logs out would have been prohibitively expensive anyway. Like most landowners in this situation, Gentry was planning to burn piles of the fire-killed trees before she found Mast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no value to that wood to anyone, except if we consider the really big, really important point of the amount of carbon stored in it,\u201d Gozales-Kramer said. \u201cThe carbon market creates a value that wasn\u2019t there before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like any carbon sequestration project, a biomass burial credit must also have strict quality control, said Kevin Fingerman, an energy and climate professor at Cal Poly Humboldt. \u201cIf you have biomass that\u2019s a true waste material, and you\u2019re being conservative in how you\u2019re accounting for the carbon sequestration in that burial, then I think you could tell a reasonable story about a net climate benefit,\u201d he said. But, \u201cif we say that any carbon that is going to stay buried for 100 years is permanent, that ignores what happens in more than 100 years,\u201d he cautioned.<\/p>\n

\"OnceOnce filled, the biomass burial chamber on Gentry\u2019s ranch was covered with layers of soil, gravel, and a polypropylene cap. Credit: Mast Reforestation<\/p>\n

Questions also remain about how scalable the solution is. Mast employees are in talks with several landowners to develop new biomass burial projects, which they expect to be significantly larger than their pilot in Montana. The company sees opportunities to expand the work, not only in post-wildfire landscapes, but also in forests impacted by beetle kill and hurricane damage, Gonzalez-Kramer said.<\/p>\n

Fingerman pointed out that biomass burial could also be a particularly effective tool in forest management operations such as thinning. \u201cIf biomass burial is a way to support necessary wildfire risk mitigation and long-term sustainable outcomes for forest land, that could be a knock-on benefit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But experts say biomass burial shouldn\u2019t be expected to take off on a large scale. Instead, it should be considered a climate solution for scenarios where other options don\u2019t work. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely not a silver bullet, but it\u2019s a great solution in the right context,\u201d Cabiyo said. \u201cClimate change is such a big, all-encompassing problem that we need all the solutions that we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Gentry\u2019s ranch, grass is already reclaiming the soil atop the wood vault.<\/p>\n

The grassy hillside will likely look much like it did before the fire within a year or two, save for a handful of 12-foot poles bearing emissions monitoring equipment that ensures the buried carbon isn\u2019t escaping. The project won\u2019t be notable for what it left behind so much as what it didn\u2019t: roughly 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

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Thank you,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rebecca Gentry can clearly picture the first time she saw her family\u2019s ranch outside of Hardin, Montana, after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-279561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}