More than a century of fire suppression and removal of Indigenous cultural burning have contributed to overstocked forests, primed for fire with climate change. Ecological thinning, or the selective removal of small trees and brush, is one tool for restoring forests and reducing severe wildfire risk. These ecological thinning treatments across the Western U.S. are estimated to generate over a billion tons of waste wood by 2032. Today, it often gets piled and burned, which costs money, releases carbon to the atmosphere, and fills valleys with smoke.

Our new paper in Science Advances asks what else we could do with it, and where.

We mapped 11 Western states and ran every high-priority county’s residue through the full menu: burn it, leave it, cook it into biochar, send it to a bioenergy plant with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), or bury it under an engineered soil cap. Each option was scored on carbon kept over 100 years and dollars earned.

Four things we found:

• Pile burning is costly and polluting. Pile burning keeps 4.5% of the carbon and loses about $49 per ton of CO2 under every scenario we tested.

• Geography is everything. Anoxic biomass burial can provide a low-cost, low-tech carbon-storage pathway. But where you bury biomass matters: modeled burial depths vary by 4 orders of magnitude. In the wrong location, burial could release more carbon than the biomass stores. Yet we found potentially suitable burial locations within reach of every high-priority county evaluated, with modeled average carbon efficiency of ~78%.

• Burial could serve as a near-term bridge. BECCS had the highest modeled average carbon efficiency (~81%), but requires infrastructure, supply chains, and workforce that are not yet widely available. Carefully sited and monitored biomass burial could potentially serve as a bridge while BECCS capacity develops.

• The two crises can pay each other’s bills. Routing this year’s wildfire treatment acres to burn piles costs over $3 billion. Route the same wood to storage instead, and you save 60+ million tons of CO2 and generate roughly $2 billion in net profit. Together, both can mutually facilitate each other happening at scale.

Key Takeaway: There is no silver bullet, but place-based, rigorously designed solutions can tackle multiple challenges at once. Forest health, wildfire resilience, and durable carbon storage don't have to be separate goals. With the right economics and diligent implementation, they can reinforce one another.