Burying wood to fight climate change

Bill Gates gave Kodama 6.6 million seed funding to invest in capturing carbon in the ground by burying dead and live trees in wood vaults.

Essentially by sealing the wood from exposure to air, water and decomposition, they interrupt the carbon cycle and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from decaying wood.

"Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in trenches or stowed away in above-ground shelters. The largely anaerobic condition under a sufficiently thick layer of soil will prevent the decomposition of the buried wood. Because a large flux of CO2 is constantly being assimilated into the world's forests via photosynthesis, cutting off its return pathway to the atmosphere forms an effective carbon sink."😳

"Kodama hopes to address both the wildfire dangers and the emissions challenge. The company says it’s developing automated ways of thinning out overcrowded forests that will make the process cheaper and faster (though it’s not yet discussing this part of the business in detail). After stripping off the limbs from trees too small to be sold for timber, they’ll load them into trucks and ship them to a prepared pit."

Kodama says:
"But there are still many unknowns.
“We have to recognize that the science of wood harvesting and storage is still evolving,” says Daniel Sanchez, chief scientist for biomass carbon removal and storage at Carbon Direct, which evaluates carbon removal efforts and corporate climate plans. “Most importantly, our understanding of what drives or doesn’t drive decomposition of wood needs to be refined.”
On top of that, residents and environmental groups are often opposed to forest thinning. Sawing down trees and removing them from the steep slopes of dense forests is a laborious and costly process that will be difficult to automate effectively. Hauling around bulky tree remains and digging big holes is also expensive and requires a lot of energy.
The climate emissions produced by removing, transporting, and burying wood will need to be carefully tallied and counted against the total carbon stored."

Merritt Jenkins, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, says they plan to earn revenue from their forest thinning work, as well as by selling usable timber and carbon credits from its burial projects.

There’s some risk that eventually all these efforts could create perverse incentives to remove more trees or agricultural material than necessary for fire prevention or healthy for ecosystems. After all, removing biomass also reduces the levels of nutrients that forests and farms get from rotting plants.

Kodama says it has done economic and carbon assessments for its full process. It’s confident that it can achieve costs below $100 a ton of carbon, and estimates that emissions from the pilot project will only reduce the net amount of carbon ultimately sequestered by about 15%."

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Sources

https://kodama.ai/

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/15/1065016/a-stealth-effort-to-bury-wood-for-carbon-removal-has-just-raised-millions/

https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1