Three years ago, Park City officials asked whether biochar might be key to the city’s net-zero future. Now, that vision is becoming reality. Wednesday afternoon, hikers and joggers on the Armstrong Trail through Thaynes Canyon may have caught a glimpse of orange flames through the yellow aspen s.  While fuels mitigation work like pile burning is common in the fall, this work was different.  For one, there was hardly any scent or sight of smoke. Also, these flames weren’t burning piles of wood on the ground but came out of the top of a giant metal box. This was a biochar project.  The biochar project has a portable kiln, which is hauled along an access road by an excavator, so crews can continue adding materials to the contained burn. A water tender is then used to quench the flames once the material is cooked down into char. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record Similar to charcoal, biochar is the result of taking waste products, such as wood, manure, crop residues and solid waste, and burning or cooking it down into a long-lasting carbon source. In a controlled environment, industrial pyrolysis plants are used, but out in the forest, crews use portable kilns. Biochar kilns, like the round “Ring of Fire” kiln or a big box kiln, are designed to create a flame cap on the top of a burn, which limits oxygen and increases internal heat. This process results in biomass “cooking” rather than “burning” — the necessary environment to create biochar.  Until now, it’s been too difficult to consider using biochar methods on open spaces in and around Park City. The kilns were too bulky, the need for water too difficult and the hillsides too steep. But rather than giving up on the idea altogether, groups like Circle Forestry and Park City Municipal are trying to make it happen wherever possible. A biochar demo with Park City and Deer Valley Resort in November 2023 first brought industry leaders together to seriously consider how biochar methods could be used in fuels reduction projects. It was a personal passion for the city’s environmental sustainability project manager, Celia Peterson. She’d learned about biochar years before from Utah State University’s Forestry and Wildland Resources Specialist Darren McAvoy, a leader in the industry.  What attracted Peterson to biochar was its many uses, what she called a “green infrastructure” approach.  Biochar is a highly porous, carbon-rich material that improves soil fertility, retains water, captures toxins and even purifies water. When left on soils, it acts like a sponge for water and nutrients, multiplying a soil’s productivity. It’s also a completely natural byproduct of wildfire, said Alan Spadafora, co-founder of Circle Forestry. Alan Spadafora, center, is the co-founder of Circle Forestry. His company uses kilns to turn excess forest fuels into carbon-rich biochar. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park RecordWith the kiln and excavator, crews can process large amounts of excess fuels waste and turn it into a useful product. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record “When we do these fire mitigation projects, we’re trying to mimic fire behavior. We’re trying to sort of reset what the forest should be looking like with routine fire coming through,” he said. “All we’re doing is really robbing the carbon from the forest because we’re taking it, we’re chipping it, or we’re piling it and we’re burning all of it off.” As a firefighter and forester who spent much of his career doing pile burning, Spadafora wanted to find a better way. Biochar projects on a forest can retain 40-60% of the carbon, whereas pile burning leaves 1-2%, he said.  Biochar production is also a lot better for air quality. With the flame cap, most harmful gases are burned off in a kiln. Plus, the process has a quenching stage, where the whole kiln is doused with water to halt the burn before the wood is turned to ash. That avoids a smouldering phase, which typically releases harmful, inhalable pollutant particles called PM2.5. So he started Circle Forestry with the goal of doing more biochar projects on public and private lands in the Wasatch Back. While representing his company at the spring wildfire preparedness fair at Ecker Hill Middle School, Spadafora met Joe Sipe, the trails and open space resource specialist for Park City Municipal, who’d learned about biochar from Peterson.  Sipe knew the city had work to do in Thaynes Canyon, and he began to set a project in motion. “What excites me most is the potential to turn a waste product into a useful resource,” Sipe said. “Instead of just reducing hazardous fuels and being left with ash, we are creating a highly versatile resource that can be put to work across multiple city departments.” Ben Hoyt, a biochar and forestry technician for Circle Forestry, inspects a batch of biochar after a burn day in Thaynes Canyon. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park RecordTemperature readings are taken every 30 minutes to document the efficiency of the biochar burn. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park RecordThe crew will also weigh a bucket of biochar to calculate the final fuels reduction by volume. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record With the suppression of wildfires in wildland urban interface areas, landowners like Park City Municipal must manually remove overgrowth in forests to prevent potentially catastrophic fires, but also for forest health. So, Sipe said, why not find a use for all this biomass? He sees potential for biochar in several ways: as a soil amendment for city parks and trails, for ecological restoration, for mine site remediation and for soil stabilization and filtering in the area’s watersheds. That’s why Thaynes Canyon was chosen for this pilot. A 2023 wildfire risk assessment report identified Thaynes Canyon as a high-priority watershed for providing drinking water to Park City. Peterson said she’d heard horror stories from neighboring towns about how wildfires could endanger drinking water, like with the Dollar Ridge Fire in Duchesne County. “It burned so hot and kind of decimated everything, and the soils were exposed. So when the rains came, it just washed so much into the reservoir that was their drinking water that they had to do like $30 million of upgrades just because of a fire,” she said. As a pilot program, the biochar efforts in Thaynes Canyon will be tested for sustainability. For example, a sample of each batch of biochar will be sent to a lab for analysis to see how much carbon is preserved. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record This year’s monsoon season, following a record-breaking fire season in Utah, was more foreshadowing. Heavy rains caused flooding around Park City, Peterson said, and the state saw rivers choked out with debris in recently burned areas.  So the city looked to biochar for its ability to retain water. “In the face of extreme precipitation, drought and water scarcity, it’s a really good solution for us to start making sure that our soils can hold the water,” Peterson said. Peterson said the project enabled them to receive a highly competitive grant from Climate Smart Communities Initiative, and they brought on Korina Stark from Circular Spring to be the “adaptation practitioner.” Stark said she sees both an ecological and economic benefit in the city’s project, a way to use one problem to help solve another.  The grant requires a year-long project to dive deeper into the larger system, Peterson said. “(We’re looking at) what are the waste products, the inputs to a system for making biochar, and then what are the appropriate technologies, and then how can we market this and what does this look like,” she said.  Stark also sees biochar production — which produces very minimal smoke — as a safer alternative to pile burning, both from a fire risk and health perspective. That should be exciting for a community in the wildland-urban interface like Park City, she said. Jed Ross, a biochar and forestry technician for Circle Forestry, sprays the biochar kiln which stops the burning before it can release any toxic particles. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park RecordThe need for water tenders and hoses makes biochar processes difficult for most forestry projects. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record “If we can demonstrate and get people excited about another tool to help reduce that risk and get all of these additional benefits at the same time, then that type of practice can scale and be brought into more and more areas around Park City,” she said. And maybe even spread into other mountain towns. Stark, Peterson and Spadafora will be presenting about this project during the Mountain Towns 2030 climate summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, giving participants a “long-range coalition-building playbook and a near-term project screening tool they can apply to candidate sites within weeks of the conference.” The whole project area for Thaynes Canyon is around 200 acres, but only certain areas in Lower Thaynes Canyon were good candidates for biochar, Sipe said. Some sections will see regular pile burning, some can use a conservation pile burn, which quenches the pile before the smouldering phase, and some will be done with the biochar kiln. The biochar work will run through November, but Spadafora said people likely won’t notice because there’s no smoke column.  Sipe said it’s just the start, and his team is eyeing several other city-owned parcels that meet the biochar production conditions. The biochar produced in Thaynes Canyon will be spread in the area as a soil amendment, meaning the captured carbon stays local and can help improve water retention in the area. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record The post Park City pilots biochar method for fuels work on Thaynes Canyon open space appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less