The wood pile at the back has grown and we think about setting it alight and burning everything so we can tidy it up and create more space for more wood and brush.
The Wood Pile is actually a large store of Carbon and when the wood is burned, the carbon combines with oxygen in the air to produce CO2 which we know is not good for the environment. Let’s examine if there is much CO2 trapped in the Wood Pile:
Estimated Size: 336 feet long x 20 feet deep by 7 feet tall on average. The wood pile is semi circular, but let’s assume the 336 feet is in a straight line. That’s longer than a football field by 20’ wide. (Estimate based on 5/25/26)
If the wood pile is 50% wood and 50% air, it would release 1,293,600 lbs or 647 tons of CO2 if we were to burn it all.
Details:
| Volume | 47,000 | cuft |
| Weight | 1,520,568 | lbs 760 tons |
| CO2 | 2,587,200 | lbs |
| Hauling CO2e | 13,859 | *1 lbs – Instead of burning it…. |
| 1,293 | tons CO2 emitted if we burn the pile | |
| If Wood Pile is 100% wood | ||
| Equivalent to | 2,587,200 | lbs CO2 |
| 394 | *2 Humans living, driving, eating, buying stuff, electricity, gas – for one year (All the CO2 you would emit in a year) | |
| 3,187,573 | miles driven in a Toyota Camry 3.5 liter car | |
| If Wood Pile is 50% wood | ||
| Equivalent to | 1,119,586 | lbs CO2 |
| 196 | Humans living, driving, eating, buying stuff, electricity, gas – for one year | |
| 1,602,279 | miles driven in a Toyota Camry 3.5 liter car | |
| If Wood Pile is 25% wood | ||
| Equivalent to | 566,165 | lbs CO2 |
| 98 | Humans living, driving, eating, buying stuff, electricity, gas – for one year | |
| 809,632 | miles driven in a Toyota Camry 3.5 liter car | |
What we Plan to do:
The wood will rot and degrade over time releasing much of it’s carbon as CO2, however some carbon from slow decomposition returns to the soil as organic matter rather than all going back to the atmosphere as CO2. We should really be burying the wood pile to trap the carbon underground, but that would take a lot equipment, pollution and money to accomplish.
However, it seems right to not burn the pile and release all that CO2 in one big hit, instead, let it rot over the next 5 -10 years and release CO2 slowly.
This delay in releasing the carbon has some real climate value, even if it’s not a formal carbon offset, so it could be valuable keeping the wood pile as it is.
Details of calculations
Toyota Camry with 3.5 liter V6 emits 0.37 Metric Tons of CO2 per 1000 miles driven. This is 0.408 tons.
How much carbon dioxide is stored in my wood product?
Carbon dioxide isn’t stored in wood, per se. Carbon is stored in wood—and if that carbon were released into the atmosphere, it would combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Therefore, we can calculate and report an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide stored in the wood.
Carbon has a molecular weight of 12. Oxygen has a molecular weight of 16. Therefore, carbon dioxide—one carbon and two oxygens—has a molecular weight of 44.
So, for every 12 pounds of carbon we’re storing in wood, that’s equivalent to 44 pounds of carbon dioxide that would otherwise occur in the atmosphere. Our calculations above showed that one cubic foot of Douglas fir-larch contains 15 lb of carbon. How much carbon dioxide is this equivalent to?
Every cubic foot of Douglas fir-larch stores the equivalent of 55 lb of carbon dioxide!
A summary of this data for common structural wood species is provided in the table below. For reference, burning one gallon of gasoline produces about 20 lb of carbon dioxide.2
Adapted from:
Dovetail Partners, Inc. (2013). Carbon in Wood Products – The Basics.
2 EPA. Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator
*1. Hauling Wood Pile to Land Fill
The numbers are calculated for hauling the wood pile to Cloyd’s Mountain using trucks and lifting equipment to load them. The mileage and number of loads to haul this account for the calculated CO2e impact.
*2. Personal Carbon Budget
The sugested amount of annual CO2e emissions per person per year to achieve less than 2 degrees C warming by end of 2030.
Source: https://www.unep.org/