Put Wildfire Risk Underground
forest adaptation through emissions mitigation
Five years ago, on New Year's Eve 2021, I stood on the second floor of a building in Boulder, CO, watching 100 mph winds lash 60-foot tongues of flame east across desiccated grasslands. This was the Marshall Fire, which burned nearly 1000 structures to ash. In the wake of the LA fires, as with the Marshall Fire, there’s been a pop in public interest around wildfires.
Part of that interest is a bevy of reporting around possible solutions to preventing or limiting wildfire losses, which generally fall into the categories of mitigation (i.e. how do we prevent fires from growing destructive), adaptation (i.e. hardening the natural and human environment to fire), and suppression (i.e. how can we extinguish fires).
The context for fire is very important. The Marshall Fire was a grass fire, the LA Fires are chaparral fires. In both of these cases, the fuels are different than in forest fires. But it’s wildland forest fires that generate the huge smoke waves the United States experienced nearly every year since 2018. The ones that blot out the sun. The reason we get those fires is that forests across the Western United States are overstocked relative to when they were traditionally managed with fire, and chock full of fuels that will otherwise burn.
Over the past three years, I’ve been developing systems to scale mitigation and adaptation, and in particular to reduce fuel loads and restore fire resilience to forests across the Western United States via thinning and prescribed burning, a primary objective of the U.S. Forest Service (through their Wildfire Crisis Strategy). It is notable that, among the multiple flashpoints in the politics of the Earth, figuring out ways to reduce wildfire risk is something most folks can agree to agree on.
Stated simply, I believe the most effective way to reduce wildfire risk across the West is to remove excess fuels from forests and put them underground.
Putting wildfire risk underground is likely to be the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly option for reducing fuel loads, while being relatively safe. This ought to be seen as a form of utilization, which repurposes fuels that would otherwise be disposed of by pile burning for durable carbon storage, which can be converted to a saleable product (i.e. carbon dioxide removal, CDR), for which companies have spent $3.6B in aggregate since 2022 (i.e. there’s a real market for the carbon cycle influence achieved).
Done right, there are several forms of burial which are likely to achieve durable CDR (durable means carbon is stored for 1000+ years) which are scalable in the near future:
Biomass Burial: Burying stabilized, raw biomass in a geologically engineered chamber, then protecting that chamber from disturbance (whether geologic, faunal, floral, or human).
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): Converting raw biomass to energy and CO2, and injecting the CO2 into geologically secure formations.
Pyrolysis with Byproduct Storage: Converting raw biomass into a C-rich byproduct, like bio-oil and bio-char, and storing these forms underground in a secure manner.
This is a sensible, cost-effective strategy which adapts forests to hotter, drier conditions. It ought to see more deployment!