I’ve been researching this for the book I’m working on, “Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change.”

Last year’s wildfire season should have been a wake-up call. Climate change is killing our forests, and drying them to tinder. Much of Oregon’s coast range (I was just there, for some video of overgrown forests) and a whole lot of the rest of the West is so thick with underbrush you can’t move through it (neither can the deer and elk); it is literally impenetrable jungle. We need to clean that up–run tree farms like farms and pull the weeds–before future megafires destroy more towns and homes and lives.

Our age-old way of clearing brush is slash and burn. That wastes all of the vast energy in that woody biomass; and open burning is inefficient, creates a lot of nasty air pollution–which kills 177,000 Americans, maybe 7 million people around the world, each year–and dumps all of that sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, where it speeds climate change, forests drying, future wildfires…. Feedback loops grow exponentially. This is how we turn the world to desert.

Or we can harvest that energy and a lot of useful chemicals, and make char, cleanly, without all the air pollution, with pyrolysis plants. Some of the dozens of different pyrolysis devices already being manufactured around the world are small enough to drag out to the woods behind a pickup truck; others fit/are mounted in a shipping container or three, or they can be built big enough to turn the solids from a sewage treatment plant or waste disposal facility into energy and char. Pharmaceuticals in sewage are messing with creatures throughout the ocean food chain, where they concentrate and come back to us. Pyrolyzing the solids destroys those chemicals, and should decompose most other molecular nasties. If we can remove the heavy metals we might use that char for fertilizer; otherwise pumping it deep underground sequesters those toxins, too, and char is a lot easier to handle than CO2.

We’d be replacing fossil fuels with carbon that came out of the atmosphere in the first place; much less harmful cycling it in and out than adding fossil carbon. You get to sequester 20 to 50 percent of the carbon in the wood as char with every cycle, and you are improving the soil so trees and crops grow faster and sequester more carbon. Preventing inevitable future wildfires becoming megafires is almost a side benefit.

Use a big truck to pull right-size pyrolysis units out to a logging landing, clean up all the slash, and only pull the useful, concentrated oils (a stew of useful chemicals, or a replacement for fossil fuel oil), wood vinegar, and as much char for urban gardens as we can’t make from urban landscaping wastes, back to a refinery. Pull a trailer full of crushed silicate rock back out to the woods/farm, add minerals and biofertilizers, and blow it onto the soil (Enhanced Weathering), along with the char. Silicates (basalt, serpentine, olivine) combine with atmospheric CO2 as they decompose, sequestering it forever, The right silicates (already-crushed mine tailings with the right mineral profile?) could hugely improve the soil, and any that wash into the oceans will help decarbonize and de-acidify the waters. Including larger particles would improve the structure of the poor clay soils of so much of the mountain West, while continuing to pull carbon out of the atmosphere for decades—centuries?
Put right-size pyrolysis plants on articulated, off-road trucks like the Mercedes-Benz Unimog, put big, soft off-road tires on the trucks, and take the pyrolysis plants right to the slash/brush/trash/crop residues you want to clean up.

We need to clean up many thousands of square miles of overgrown forest, and we should do it again, in rotation, every decade or three. There are a lot of jobs in this. It will be hard work, mostly in incredibly rugged terrain; it has to pay well enough to attract workers.

Prevent future megafires;
Prevent megatons of killing air pollution;
Slow climate change by not uselessly dumping a lot of carbon back into the atmosphere, and by replacing fossil fuels;
Help reverse climate change via sequestering carbon and enhanced weathering;
Carbon-neutral fuel oil; replacements for a number of petrochemicals; wood vinegar can replace some herbicides;
Improve soils to grow more timber and crops for the too many people of the future;
Cleanly clean up all kinds of wastes, some pretty nasty; and
Lotsa Jobs.

If we can’t find enough value in all of that to pay people to do it, add in carbon credit monies.

And if we’re to get people to do this, government needs to lend, not grant, startups the money, maybe provide guidance and training….

John O.