‘Wood vaulting’: A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of

By Kylie Mohr
Grist
July 23, 2024
Category: Carbon, Climate & Bioenergy
Region: United States, US East

In northwestern Montana’s Swan Valley, a pile of about 100 small logs, 10 feet long or so, sits neatly stacked. Surrounding the logs are several acres of U.S. Forest Service land, which was thinned of dead, downed, and dense understory trees last year to reduce wildfire risk. The log pile that remains is too small to be processed into lumber, plus the sawmill just down the highway recently closed. So the wood may get sent to a pulp mill or it may sit in the forest for years. Smaller limbs may be burned in a prescribed fire. But Ning Zeng, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, is sizing up the pile, too. He sees another solution: burying the logs, and all the planet-heating gases they’d otherwise release, underground. That’s the idea of a carbon sequestration technique called wood vaulting. 

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