October 16, 2025
5 minute read
Can we bury enough wood to slow climate change?
Wood vaults, a simple, low-tech approach to carbon storage, have the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, and some companies are already trying it.
10 million pounds. burnt trees are loaded into the chamber.
Humanity does not have much time to limit global warming and minimize the severity of its consequences. future climate disasters. And mostly with lukewarm attempts reduce greenhouse gas emissionsresearchers are trying to find realistic ways pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Flashy, high-tech proposals promising to clear pollutants from the sky or clear them from smokestacks before they enter the atmosphere have attracted attention and investment, but doesn't live up to expectations. Now a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying a much simpler approach: collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust and burying them.
Wood burial, also called wood vaults or biomass burial, has the potential to store more than 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year and reduce global warming by more than a third of a degree Celsius (more than half a degree Fahrenheit), according to a recent study in Nature. This difference seems small, but preventing a few tenths of a degree of warming could keep the polar ice caps from completely collapsing, coral reefs from collapsing, and other tipping points.
“If we want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says study lead author Yiqi Luo, an ecosystem ecologist at Cornell University, “we basically need to create new reservoirs on land, in the ocean, or in geological structures.”
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How do wooden vaults work?
The idea is simple: Instead of building huge machines to collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and inject it into the Earth's crust, forest hoppers simply divert materials from Earth's fast-changing biological carbon cycle into the much slower geological carbon cycle.
“Every year, land plants alone sequester six times more carbon than our fossil fuel emissions,” says Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland who has been a leader in biomass disposal for two decades and was not involved in the new research. “But almost all of it goes back into the atmosphere when the leaves fall and trees die and decay” However, if carbon dioxide is buried in just a few yards of soil, where bacteria no longer have the oxygen they need to break down wood tissue, then little or no carbon dioxide is released. If even a small portion of the woody debris that decomposes above ground each year were treated in this way, it would be easier to reach the 10 billion tons of carbon per year level that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations body responsible for informing global climate policy) agrees must be achieved by 2050 to keep temperature rise at planet by less than two degrees C (3.6 degrees F).
New research by Luo and his team shows that global logging alone would require more than enough wood to achieve this target. While waiting for the axe, trees in logging forests absorb about 170 billion tons of carbon each year, 14 billion tons of which ends up in the wood. Researchers say all this wood ends up wasted in one form or another: branches cut from trees before processing, sawmill debris, discarded furniture, demolished houses. If all of this wood could be collected and buried rather than burned or decomposed, those 14 billion tons of carbon could be safely removed each year. By 2100, this would remove a total of at least 770 billion tons from the atmosphere, lowering the global thermostat by at least 0.35 degrees C (0.63 degrees F), according to the research team's models.
“There's no reason to doubt the math and the research methods,” says Kevin Fingerman, a professor and carbon accounting expert at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. But as the proposed technology is implemented in the real world, practitioners will have to carefully and accurately calculate how much carbon their storage facilities keep from the atmosphere. This will require an assessment of the fate of the wood. would were without intervention – and this is no trivial feat. “Proving what would have happened to this particular pile of biomass if we hadn't buried it is somewhere between difficult and impossible,” says Fingerman. “We can never know for sure.”
Wooden vaults in action
In practice, of course, it is unlikely that it will be possible to redirect every piece of wood from a dumpster to an earthen crypt and achieve maximum carbon sequestration, as Luo calculated. But collecting waste from timber and forestry projects is It is doable and several startups have already started doing it.
In Colorado, for example, Serge Buschman and his company Woodcache collected and buried logging debris from forest thinning operations to reduce the risk of fire by keeping it from burning or decomposing in the open. They claim that their first commercial project it alone should prevent more than 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere, and several more projects are in the pipeline in the mountain west and southeast of the United States.
Another startup, Mast Reforestation, buried burned trees on a piece of private land in Montana. The trees had already been cut down and stacked by the landowner; the original plan was to burn piles of logs to reduce fire hazards.* CEO Grant Canary estimates the company removed about 5,000 tons of carbon in the first phase, with the potential to reach 30,000 tons over the long term. The carbon credits they sell will be used to finance reforestation of burned and denuded areas, a program the Canaries hope to replicate in burned forests across the West. Zeng also has his own company, Carbon Lockdown, which has completed several demonstration projects in the northeast and has one 5,000-tonne project underway.
While more research is needed to prove that biomass burial actually works as theories say, Zeng's own work has shown that wood placed in clay soils can remain stable for thousands of years. The fine-grained structure of the clay ensures that little oxygen reaches the buried wood, preventing bacterial decomposition. In 2013, his team excavated a red cedar log, preserved in clay for 3775 years.
Construction of the first trench of the world's first commercial-scale wood storage facility near the Potomac River, where the equivalent of 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide was buried.
But regardless of what has been shown in the past, every wood storage facility must be carefully monitored to ensure that the wood remains stable as intended. That's why Mast, Woodcache and Carbon Lockdown are designing their wood vaults to include tools that, for example, will monitor the release of methane from the soil surface. Abnormally high values may indicate that the wood is decomposing faster than expected, meaning the storage facility may need to be opened and possibly redesigned.
Although there are some potential barriers to the adoption of timber vaults, such as concerns about roads being able to accommodate heavy equipment or securing bank financing, such barriers are fewer compared to the larger ones direct air intake machines” says Holly Jean Buck, an environmental sociologist at the University at Buffalo who specializes in carbon removal and geoengineering. Communities are much more likely to support something they consider natural than something that involves lacing. miles of pipeline through their communities (which would be necessary in many direct takeover scenarios), she says.
With investment pouring into much more complex and futuristic climate technology ventures, the implications of Luo's paper amuse Buck. “What if the answer was to just dig a hole and put some wood in it?” she says. “A kindergartener could understand that.”
*Editor's Note (10/16/2025): This paragraph was updated after publication to clarify the role of mast reforestation in tree burial.
