Biochar is nothing more than a specific kind of charcoal. It’s less dense and finer-grained than the briquettes a grill boss might use to fuel their weekend barbecue, but biochar and charcoal are produced in much the same way. Wood is burned in an oxygen-poor environment through a process called pyrolysis, which unlocks its carbon-capturing potential by trapping CO2 in a stable, smoldering solid rather than releasing it in billows of smoke.

Biochar can be produced with varying degrees of sophistication. On one end, wood can be fired in large “big box kilns,” which McAvoy lovingly called “glorified dumpsters,” that foresters or landowners can easily move from site to site for pyrolysis on the go. On the other end, some companies have invested in multi-million-dollar facilities that create incredibly pure biochar while using the heat of the fire to generate electricity. 

Biochar exploded in popularity in the last few years as people across continents learned about its benefits. In addition to sequestering carbon, biochar can improve soil health when mixed into the earth. Page-Dumroese first started to research biochar about 15 years ago because it’s a boon for soils.

At the time, wildlife biologists working in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest wondered if biochar could promote foliage for elk forage in the forest’s “popcorn pumice” which, Page-Dumroese said, struggles to retain nutrients. The team had heard about how Indigenous cultures throughout the Amazon had, for centuries, mixed charcoal into the dirt around their settlements to create what scientists today call terra preta, a highly fertile soil. Scientists from Umpqua called Page-Dumroese at the Rocky Mountain Research Station to see what she knew about biochar, which, at the time, was just a baseline familiarity, but she joined the project anyway and has gone on to become one of the nation’s leading experts on the topic.

Still, despite the research of scientists like Page-Dumroese to understand biochar’s benefits, and the efforts of practitioners like McAvoy to improve and promote its use in the field, biochar production as a method for managing wildfire hazards has yet to expand beyond a small pool of early adopters.

In the eyes of Marcus Kauffman, Oregon Department of Forestry’s biomass resource specialist, biochar has struggled to grow beyond boutique applications because, to date, forest managers have approached the problem from the wrong direction. “We have a problem on the land, in these forests, and we look at biochar or we look at bioenergy as a way to help solve that problem,” Kauffman said, “but that’s not the way the market works.” In his view, the biochar industry will mature when producers and proponents spend more time educating potential customers and creating a robust market for their products instead of simply framing biochar as a method to clean up the land.

McAvoy, for his part, believes that the industry has already entered its adolescence. “As a field, we’re moving away from boutique and towards industrial,” McAvoy said. Production of biochar worldwide nearly quadrupled between 2021 and 2023 from 96,000 to over 352,000 metric tons per year, according to the U.S. Biochar Initiative, though ample room for growth remains.

An ensemble of Western municipalities has banded together to help spur that industrial maturation. The 4 Corners Carbon Coalition—the team-up of local governments from Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico—has pooled resources to support local businesses that aim to capture carbon dioxide while providing additional co-benefits. The bulk of their most recent round of seed funding went to startups that take hazardous forest waste and wood debris “and lock up the carbon into usable substances like biochar,” Susie Strife, Boulder County, Colorado’s director of sustainability, climate action, and resilience, said in an email.

But awareness and demand are the biggest obstacles to the biochar industry getting airborne. Though researchers have expended plenty of energy studying how biochar captures carbon and boosts agricultural outputs—benefits that Josiah Hunt, CEO of Pacific Biochar in California, believes will last for generations—many farmers and growers have simply never heard the good word. 

To address this, McAvoy has become something of a biochar evangelist, traveling the country educating people on how the material can bless their fields—and how they can produce it themselves. Everywhere he goes, he encounters people who are all but oblivious about biochar. “I did a workshop in Fairbanks this summer,” he said, “and as far as I know, nobody was aware of it at all.”

But an emerging trend gives McAvoy hope that such ignorance may shortly fade. A small cohort of companies in Utah may soon sell bags of biochar-amended soils and compost to home gardeners. “I think when that starts coming through, that will be a big leap in awareness,” McAvoy said. This would also open a new market for biochar producers, bolstering the industry.

Even with a mature biochar industry, however, swaths of forests are so far from any manufacturing center that hauling the wood would be cost-prohibitive. Although biochar may not be profitable in those cases, Page-Dumroese believes that it is still a smart forestry strategy. Producing biochar would reduce the risk of scarring soils, and raking it into the earth would support several ecosystem services by promoting vegetation, reducing erosion, and increasing water storage.

In these remote locations, teams could cure biochar in mobile kilns. What they produce won’t be as pure as can be, but the carbon it captures will surely last far longer in a forest than on a farm where tractor-tilling would churn carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Here, in the deepest neck of the woods, the only disturbance would come from the fauna foraging, burrowing, and scampering about as they return to the lands they once called home.