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Rebuilding after a wildfire isn’t cheap. The recent Los Angeles wildfires, for example, incurred up to $164 billion in property and capital losses. But restoring the forest isn’t, either, with a few thousand acres running a couple million dollars, Grant Canary, co-founder and CEO of Mast Reforestation, told TechCrunch.
“If you’re a land owner and it’s going to take 60 to 80 years for those trees to grow, any money manager is going to be like, put your money literally in anything else.”
The biggest cost in reforestation is dealing with the dead, burned trees. Frequently, they’re cut down, piled up, and burned on site. “That’s the cheapest way to do it,” Canary said.
Canary said Mast has devised a way to pay for reforestation today, without landowners needing to wait decades to either harvest timber or claim carbon credits. Instead of burning what’s left, Mast will collect and bury the trees to prevent decay — and sell the carbon credits that result.
Mast recently raised $25 million to develop the new business, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Pulse Fund and Social Capital with participation from Seven Seven Six. The startup’s first project will be in an area in Montana affected by the Poverty Flats Fire, which swept through in 2021.
Biomass burial also avoids sending more soot into the air, but without proper site preparation, it could still release methane and carbon dioxide.
In most soils, the wood decays as microbes munch on the cellulose, releasing methane and carbon dioxide.
Mast has a different approach. The startup will entomb the trees in an area rich with clay, which limits the flow of air and water, stifling microbial activity. The holes are up to 30 feet deep and span up to three acres. After throwing the dead trees inside, Mast will cap the hole using clay and other natural materials, similar to how landfills are constructed.
Once completed, Mast will lace the burial site with monitors to ensure that the wood doesn’t decompose. It is also endowing a foundation, the Northwest Permanence Foundation, to watch and maintain the site for the next century, which is the minimum duration of the resulting carbon credits. If anything is amiss, the foundation can make repairs to prevent decay.
Because the carbon will remain locked in the trees, Mast can sell up to 30,000 metric tons of carbon credits, the proceeds of which will reforest 900 acres.
Canary founded Mast a decade ago as Droneseed, which like the name suggested, used drones to reseed areas scarred by wildfire.
He soon realized that a low-cost way to spread seeds was only part of the problem; the company would have to find a source for the seeds, and really, reforestation efforts are more successful with seedlings grown in nurseries, not seeds scattered by drones. So, Droneseed acquired two other businesses, Silvaseed and Cal Forest Nurseries, and changed its name to Mast Reforestation.
By contrast, the startup is building its biomass burial business from the ground up.
It’s acquiring data and developing the technology to determine where on fire-scarred landscapes should biomass burial take place. The goal, Canary said, is to use the data platform alongside carbon credit sales to speed up reforestation at wildfire-scarred sites across the western U.S.
“It would take three to five years to do a reforestation project,” he said. “We can get this done in six to 12 months.”
Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor. De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
