Mast Reforestation, a post-wildfire restoration company, has developed a novel carbon credit that retires more quickly than traditional reforestation credits and offers a co-benefit of replanting forests on scorched landscapes. For sustainability professionals seeking to offset their company’s hardest-to-cut carbon emissions, the company’s first tranche of carbon removal credits will become available this month on puro.earth.
Mast is working with a Montana landowner to bury charred trees on 900 acres of burned forestland in an oxygen-free landfill using a technology known as biomass carbon removal and storage. It plans to replant the landscape with native seedlings produced by the nurseries it owns, Cal Forest Nurseries in Etna, California, and Silvaseed, in Roy, Washington.
“We’re taking some of those [burned] logs and burying them underground, which locks away carbon and generates a carbon credit on a shorter timeline that allows a corporation to retire it as early as next February, while also financing reforestation as part of that,” said Brady Paron, director of carbon market partnerships at Mast Reforestation.
What buyers want
Mast fashioned its carbon credit in direct response to what buyers said they wanted, said Micah Kirscher, strategist at Redwood Communications and a Mast spokesperson: “Something with the benefits of a nature-based solution and the feel-good aspect of contributing to post-wildfire restoration, but with the tangible benefits of a carbon credit that retires more quickly and at a more affordable price than many other comparable options.”
The company recently raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by the venture capital firm Pulse Fund, which specializes in climate tech investments. It has also secured a pre-issuance project rating from carbon ratings agency BeZero for the Montana pilot of BBBe, meaning that there is a “moderate likelihood” that one credit will achieve one metric ton of emissions reduction.
The project should generate about 30,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits by 2026, the company estimates, and it is seeking corporate buyers for those credits. The new funding round will enable it to generate an initial 5,000 metric tons of credits on 100 acres to prove the technology.
Mast does not plan to sell carbon credits for the reforestation part of the scheme, which it calls a “co-benefit,” Paron said, even though that’s how the company got its start: “We view the biomass burial project as an evolution in our learnings and a tool to accelerate reforestation. He calls it “a good complement” to Mast’s core work, which focuses on scaling reforestation in North America.
Regenerating burned forests
With wildfires growing in intensity, they now burn at least twice as much tree cover as they did two decades ago. Last year, they scorched 8.9 million acres in the U.S., an area roughly equivalent in size to Vermont and Connecticut combined.
Leaving burned trees exposed further damages the ecosystem from soil erosion and secondary mortality events, such as beetle outbreaks. Burned trees also continue to emit carbon long after flames subside and can pose a future fire risk.
In the past, forests may have been able to naturally regenerate after wildfires, but the current megafires have changed that. “In high severity burns, management is almost always necessary to restore the natural regeneration processes,” Ricky Satomi, forestry and natural resources advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, said in an email. Key native species, like conifers, that grow from seeds dropped from live cones must be replanted after severe burns.
Government funding for such replanting is shrinking as the Trump administration slashes Forest Service jobs and threatens to reclaim billions disbursed through the Inflation Reduction Act for forest management and wildfire mitigation. Financing reforestation with voluntary forest carbon credits takes a long time and is tricky because many seedlings don’t take hold.
“Tree seedlings are having a really tough time surviving in these hot, post-fire environments,” said Matt Hurteau, a biology professor and director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico. Hurteau’s research pinpoints to the square meter where in post-wildfire landscapes seedlings are most likely to survive — information that is essential to any reforestation effort.
Details to figure out
Mast’s vertical integration, plus its “ability to work on the ground with the community,” attracted the new investment, Tenzin Seldon, the founder and managing partner at Pulse Fund, told Trellis. (Other biomass burial companies are doing similar work, including InterEarth in Australia and Carbon Sequestration in Texas.)
Mast has signed a second deal in Idaho. The pilot still has key technical details that need to be worked out, including data collection to measure the emissions associated with tree burial and design features of the burial plots, such as cap materials, temperature and humidity controls and monitoring.
“Mast will become a clear commercial choice and a clear private-public partnership choice for governments as well,” said Seldon.
