October 16, 2025
5 min read
Can We Bury Enough Wood to Slow Climate Change?
Wood vaulting, a simple, low-tech approach to storing carbon, has the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year—and some companies are already trying it
10M lbs. of fire-killed trees loaded in chamber.
Humanity has only so much time to limit global warming and minimize the severity of future climate disasters. And with mostly tepid attempts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are scrambling for realistic ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Flashy, high-tech proposals that promise to vacuum pollutants out of the sky, or to scrub them from smokestacks before they hit the atmosphere, have attracted attention and investment—but are falling far short of expectations. Now a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying a vastly simpler approach: collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust—and burying them.
Wood burial, also called wood vaulting or biomass burial, could potentially store more than 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year and decrease global warming by more than a third of a degree Celsius (more than half a degree Fahrenheit), according to a recent study in Nature Geoscience. This difference sounds small, but preventing a few tenths of a degree of warming could keep polar ice caps from completely disintegrating, coral reefs from collapsing and other tipping points from triggering.
“If we want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says the study’s lead author Yiqi Luo, a Cornell University ecosystem ecologist, “we basically need to create new reservoirs in land, ocean or geological structures.”
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How Wood Vaulting Works
The concept is straightforward: instead of constructing massive machines to collect atmospheric carbon dioxide and inject it miles into the Earth’s crust, wood vaulters simply divert materials from Earth’s fast-paced biological carbon cycle into the much-slower geological carbon cycle.
“Every year, terrestrial plants alone capture six times as much carbon as our fossil fuel emissions,” says Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist, who has been a leader in the field of biomass burial for two decades and was not involved in the new research. “But pretty much all of that goes back into the atmosphere as leaves fall and trees die and decay.” If carbon dioxide is buried under just a few yards of dirt—where bacteria no longer have the oxygen they need to break down woody tissues—however, none or very little of it is released. If even a small fraction of woody debris that decays aboveground each year was treated this way, it would be easier to achieve the 10 billion tons per year of carbon that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations body that is responsible for informing global climate policies) agrees must be achieved by 2050 in order to keep the planet’s temperature rise to less than two degrees C (3.6 degrees F).
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The new study by Luo and his team shows that global logging alone involves more than enough wood to reach that benchmark. As they await the axe, trees in logging-focused forests take up roughly 170 billion tons of carbon every year, 14 billion tons of which finds its way into wood. The researchers contend that all of this wood eventually ends up wasted in one form or another: branches cut from trees before processing, sawmill debris, landfilled furniture, demolished homes. If all this wood could be collected and buried instead of burned or allowed to decompose, those 14 billion tons of carbon would be safely removed every year. And according to the research team’s models, this would remove a grand total of at least 770 billion tons from the atmosphere by 2100, turning the global thermostat down by at least 0.35 degree C (0.63 degree F).
There’s no reason to doubt the study’s math or methods, says Kevin Fingerman, a professor and carbon accounting expert at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. But as the proposed technique gets implemented in the real world, practitioners would need to carefully and accurately calculate how much carbon their vaults have kept out of the atmosphere. This would involve assessing what the fate of the wood would have been without intervention—and that’s no trivial feat. “It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to prove what would happen to this particular pile of biomass if we hadn’t buried it,” Fingerman says. “We can never really know.”
Wood Vaulting in Action
In practice, of course, it likely won’t be feasible to divert every single scrap of wood from dumpster to earthen vault and achieve the maximum amount of carbon capture that Luo has calculated. But collecting the debris from lumber and forestry projects is feasible, and several start-ups have already begun to do so.
In Colorado, for instance, Serge Bushman and his company Woodcache have collected and buried leftover logging debris from forest thinning operations aimed at reducing fire risks, diverting it from being burned or decaying in the open air. They claim that their first commercial project alone should prevent more than 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere, and they’ve got several more under development in the U.S. Mountain West and the Southeast.
Another start-up, Mast Reforestation, has cut down dead and burned trees on a plot of private land in Montana, removing what the company estimates is 5,000 tons of carbon in its first phase, with the potential for 30,000 tons in the long run, says CEO Grant Canary. The carbon credits they sell will be used to fund the reforestation of the burned and denuded acreage, a program Canary hopes to repeat in burned forests throughout the West. Zeng also has his own company, Carbon Lockdown, which has completed a couple of demonstration projects in the Northeast and has one 5,000-ton project underway.
Though more research is needed to prove that biomass burial works in practice the way that the theories say it should, Zeng’s own work has shown that wood interned in clay soils can remain stable for millennia. Clay’s fine-grained structure ensures that little to no oxygen reaches buried wood, preventing bacteria from decomposing it. In 2013 his team unearthed a red cedar log that had been preserved in clay for 3,775 years.
Construction of the first trench of the world’s first commercial-scale wood vault, near the Potomac River, where the equivalent of 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide were buried.
But no matter what’s been shown in the past, each wood vault must be robustly monitored to ensure the wood is staying stable as planned. This is why Mast, Woodcache and Carbon Lockdown design their wood vaults to include instruments that will, for example, monitor methane coming off the soil surface. Abnormally high values could indicate the wood is decomposing faster than expected, which would suggest the vault may need to be opened and potentially redesigned.
Though there are some potential obstacles to implementing wood vaulting—such as concerns over roads being able to handle heavy machinery or about securing bank financing—there are fewer such impediments compared with large direct-air-capture machines, says Holly Jean Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo, who focuses on carbon removal and geoengineering. Communities are far more likely to support something that they perceive as natural than something that involves lacing miles of pipeline through their communities (which would be necessary in many direct-capture scenarios), she says.
Given the investments pouring into much more complex and futuristic climate tech ventures, the implications of Luo’s paper amuse Buck. “What if the answer was just digging a hole and putting some wood in there?” she says. “A kindergartner could figure that out.”