BiCRS Field Experimentation and Durability Framework

Biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) approaches promise to lock away carbon that would otherwise return to the atmosphere through decomposition, disturbance, or fire. However, many of the pathways proposed remain scientifically underexamined. Claims about how long carbon stays locked away often rest on assumptions developed by other industries, and those assumptions can vary enormously depending on feedstock composition, climate, soil biogeochemistry, and the biological communities present at a given site. Without empirical data across a range of real-world conditions, it is difficult to know which storage approaches actually work, where they work best, and how long their carbon benefit really lasts.

The Carbon Containment Lab runs field experiments and synthesizes existing science to close this gap, generating the empirical foundation that high-integrity BiCRS crediting depends on. In particular, we study how storage outcomes shift across climate, feedstock, and site conditions. We actively collaborate with academics, project developers, and registries to address the key outstanding questions facing the field as a whole. Below, we describe how we identify the open scientific questions driving this work, the field experiments we run to test them directly, and how we synthesize this evidence, alongside the broader literature, into a durability framework the field can use to inform implementation at scale.

Timeline

investigation

Identify key scientific unknowns Identify collaborators interested in co-developing science

experimentation

Deploy several long-term experiments across the United States to investigate the role of climate and experimental treatments in mediating near-term decomposition Harvest experiments and analyze results to share via peer-reviewed publication

experimentation

Deploy large-scale field experiment quantifying role of feedstock form, burial depth, packing strategy, and disturbance on decomposition Continuously measure surface fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane Harvest field experiment to determine burial successes and failures across contexts

implementation

Synthesize empirical findings and academic literature into durability framework Expand and improve durability framework as new science is available--and ensure registries, developers, and buyers have access to the most up-to-date information

Currently

First, we identify the key unanswered scientific questions.

Before running an experiment, we start by mapping what is actually known, and not known, about how biomass behaves once it enters a storage pathway. Decay is governed by a tangle of interacting factors, including moisture, oxygen availability, temperature, feedstock species and size, and the fungal, bacterial, and insect communities present at a site. The relative importance of each of these factors can shift depending on context.

Because no single field has developed a complete picture of how buried or stored biomass behaves over time, we draw on a wide range of disciplines to build ours. Landfill and waste engineering offers decades of practical experience with the long-term fate of buried organic material, including how compaction, cover design, and moisture management influence decomposition at depth. Soil science and geology inform how gas and water actually move through different soil types and structures, often in ways that defy simple assumptions about depth and oxygen. Wood science and forest pathology describe how species, size, and moisture content govern susceptibility to fungal and insect decay. Microbiology and ecology explain which organisms drive decomposition under a given set of conditions and how those communities shift across climate and disturbance. And archaeology and paleoecology, through the study of ancient buried wood and peat, offer some of the only direct, centuries-long evidence of what happens to organic material under sustained low-oxygen conditions.

Claims of durability often rely on assumptions borrowed from just one of these fields in isolation, like reasoning from general soil science that burial should slow decay by limiting oxygen, without incorporating what landfill engineers know about how real-world compaction and cover design affect gas movement, or what wood scientists know about how feedstock properties change that calculus entirely. We treat these cross-disciplinary assumptions as hypotheses to test in the field and in contexts of greatest relevance to the residue generated from fuel reduction treatments. In practice, this means working closely with a broad range of academic researchers, agency scientists, and industry practitioners across these fields to understand what each has already established, where their findings conflict, and where the gaps most directly threaten the integrity of a storage or durability claim. We prioritize our own field experiments around the questions that emerge from this synthesis with the most direct bearing on whether a storage claim actually holds up in practice.

Next, we deploy multi-site, multi-year decomposition experiments.

Testing these cross-disciplinary assumptions requires observing real biomass, in real conditions, for long enough to see how decay actually unfolds, so we run experiments designed to capture variation across both geography and time. This includes continuous, depth-resolved monitoring of gas dynamics within engineered burial sites, directly testing load-bearing assumptions behind burial as a durable storage pathway, alongside a longer-running, multi-site experiment testing whether simple, low-cost management treatments, including elevation off the ground, burial, submergence, and encasement, slow the decomposition of woody biomass. Together, these experiments span a wide climatic gradient and a multi-year monitoring horizon, letting us see both the fine-grained mechanics of decay at depth and how treatment effectiveness and decay pathways shift across climates and over time, a much richer picture than any single site or snapshot measurement could provide.

To learn more about ongoing experimentation or to request interim data, please contact Sinead Crotty at sinead.crotty@cclab.org.

View of experimental designed to quantify role of feedstock form, burial depth, packing strategy, and disturbance on decomposition

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Finally, we synthesize this evidence into a field-wide durability framework.

Our own experiments are only part of the picture. Existing research on how buried, encased, or otherwise stored biomass holds up over time is scattered across many different scientific fields, often using different terms and different ways of measuring success, which makes it hard to compare one storage approach to another. Along with a fantastic group of collaborators, we pulled this evidence together into a single framework that puts storage pathways like burial, biochar, bio-oil injection, and others on common ground, so they can be fairly compared side by side. This also helped us see clearly where the science is solid and where real gaps remain, including many of the same questions our own field experiments are working to answer.

This work is captured in our review, "Nonenergy Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS): Assessing Durability of Nongaseous Carbon Products Across Terrestrial Storage Fates," published in ACS Chemical Reviews (2026). It gives practitioners, funders, and policymakers a shared, honest reference point for evaluating how durable these carbon storage claims really are.

From Crotty et al. (2026). Durability matrix crossing feedstock forms (along left column) and storage fates (along top row).

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Download the publication here

Nonenergy Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage (BiCRS): Assessing Durability of Nongaseous Carbon Products Across Terrestrial Storage Fates

By Sinéad M. Crotty; Peter W. Reiners; Leah K. Clayton; Edward Young; Andrew Jones; Melissa A. Cregger; Anne K. Starace; Anne E. Harman-Ware

Download

Risks & Risk Mitigation

Generalizability Across Contexts

Field experiments can only test a finite set of climates, feedstocks, and treatments, and findings from any given site may not transfer cleanly to conditions we haven't tested. A treatment or storage approach that performs well at one site can behave very differently under a different soil type, moisture regime, or climate. This creates real risk of overgeneralizing early findings into broad durability claims before enough contexts have been tested to know where those findings actually hold.

Time Horizon Mismatch

Durability claims for carbon storage are often made on decade-to-century timescales, but field experiments are necessarily bounded by how long funding, staffing, and site access can be sustained. Even a well-designed multi-year experiment can only offer a partial window into processes that may unfold or evolve over much longer periods. Some of the most consequential risks to durability, like rare disturbance events or slow-accumulating structural changes in soil or wood, may simply not show up within an experiment's observable timeframe, leaving a gap between what we can directly measure and what a durability claim ultimately needs to cover.

Cross-Disciplinary Translation Risk

Bringing together landfill engineering, soil science, wood pathology, microbiology, and archaeology means reconciling fields with different terminology, different standards of evidence, and different assumptions about what counts as a well-supported claim. There's a real risk of losing nuance in translation, either by importing a finding into a new context that doesn't actually apply, or by oversimplifying a complex, field-specific result to fit a general framework. Careful, ongoing collaboration with experts in each field helps guard against this, but it remains an inherent challenge of synthesis work that spans this many disciplines.

Keeping the Framework Current

A durability framework is only as useful as its ability to stay current, and the science underlying it is still actively evolving. If new findings, whether from our own experiments or the broader field, aren't incorporated promptly, registries, developers, and buyers may end up relying on an outdated picture of what's known without realizing it. Maintaining and updating the framework as new evidence emerges requires sustained investment and clear communication with the practitioners who use it, and any lag in that process risks the framework falling out of step with the actual state of the science.

Partner with us

We're always looking to connect with academic researchers, agency scientists, project developers, and registries working on questions related to biomass storage durability. Whether you have data from your own field sites, expertise in a discipline we're drawing on, or an outstanding question you think we should be testing, we'd welcome the conversation. Reach out to explore a collaboration, share findings, or help shape where this framework goes next.

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