Near-term Opportunities for BiCRS Pathways to Address the Wildfire Crisis: New Learnings from Early Geospatial Analyses and Field Deployments of Biomass Burial in the US West

Forests across the Western United States are at risk of severe and destructive wildfires resulting from a combination of fire suppression and climate change-induced increases in temperature and drought conditions. Fuel reduction treatments, such as hand and mechanical thinning, can reduce the risk of severe wildfire by helping to address forest overstocking. Business-as-usual is typically to pile and burn the thinned residues, but this emits greenhouse gases and criteria air pollutants, and also requires suitable weather conditions and additional time, resources, and permitting. One alternative end use for these residues is Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS) pathways, which seek to durably store photosynthetically-derived carbon dioxide underground or in long-lived products. BiCRS pathways, in combination with the voluntary carbon market, have been proposed to utilize the biogenic carbon in residues for carbon storage and economically facilitate the removal of these fuels from the landscape. However, any BiCRS implementation must overcome systemic challenges, and there are still significant scientific unknowns about BiCRS durability, best practices, and monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV). Here, we focus on one BiCRS pathway, termed biomass burial, and present a suite of scientific approaches used to address the range of unknowns from large-scale geospatial modeling, regional network analyses, small-scale implementation, and bench-scale lab experimentation. We describe the key takeaways and challenges from biomass burial field experiments, including learnings around measurement infrastructure, control treatments, and sampling frequency. Finally, we highlight our systems-oriented approach for determining the most suitable, durable BiCRS pathways for specific contexts, including establishing counterfactuals, assessing feedstock availability and logistical roadblocks, understanding policy and permitting landscapes, quantifying carbon efficiency, and projecting scalability.