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.
From 2023 to 2025 I worked on systems attempting 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. Stated simply, I believe the an effective way to reduce wildfire risk in the Western US is to remove excess fuels from forests and put them underground. You can read more about the approach we piloted and associated research here:
Whitepaper: Kodama Systems’ Frontier CDR Purchase Application
Biomass burial LCA: Life cycle emissions associated with vault storage of wood cleared for fire management in the Western United States
Co-benefits of using forest residues for CDR: Assessing costs and constraints of forest residue disposal by pile burning
Putting wildfire risk underground is likely to be a 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 $11.4B in aggregate from 2022 to 2025 (i.e. there’s a market for the carbon cycle influence achieved). (2026 edit: the current geopolitical climate is, perhaps obviously, not great for carbon markets)
There are places, such as where machines can’t go (too steep, too ecologically sensitive, etc.) where this is not a good solution. But there are many places where today piles are burned into the atmosphere, where it is costly and slow to actually conduct the burning (see ). Paying for removal of piles as biomass for CDR feedstocks is an alternative that avoids burning, but requires more machines and personnel during thinning operations.
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). [see Graphyte, who acquired Kodama’s project]
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): Converting raw biomass to energy and CO2, and injecting the CO2 into geologically secure formations. [see Arbor Frontier application].
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. [see Carba Frontier application]
If projects have a willing CDR buyer (2026 edit: big “if”) this can be a cost-effective strategy which adapts forests to hotter, drier conditions.