Colorado Pilot Site
Codename: WOCO
Project Description and Overview
Key Woodcache Personnel
Ray Bongiovanni
Colorado Lead
Jesse Williams, PhD
MRV Lead
Serge Bushman
President
Florentino de la Cruz, PhD
Monitoring and measurement adviser
Project Overview
Our Colorado Pilot project is located within the River Ridge Ranch subdivision in rural Huerfano County, Colorado.
- Ten small test pits were created on the property in late 2022 to test our sensor suite in the exact soil conditions of the project.
- Wood used for burial was sourced from existing dead wood on the property that posed a fire risk.
- After cutting dead trees into manageable portions, logs were separated by species, weighed, and staged for later burial.
- Colorado Lead Ray Bongiovanni lives nearby, and was physically present onsite for substantially all harvesting operations.
- Solar powered sensors and security cameras are present at the site to provide continuous oversight.
- The operational timeline below provides an overview of key project milestones.
Timeline
Image Gallery
- All
Ray driving a load of Wood to its Final Resting Place
View of the pit in process. The poles allow us to drop monitoring equipment into the pit after burial is completed.
Excavation in progress!
Visitors observing work in progress.
The team appreciating their shiny hard hats. Safety First!
Ray posing with a pile of wood
Jesse explaining the sensor suite to Ray and Whit
Marc demonstrating the proper use of a chainsaw
Jesse Demonstrating his off-road computing techniques during some sensor calibration
Environmental and Social Safeguards
Health and Safety
Our health and safety protocols were still informal at the time project work began, but all staff were instructed on the proper use of their equipment and provided with the proper safety equipment (including helmets and eye protection).
Environmental Permit
The Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment granted approval to our plans on 17th July 2023.
Raw Materials
Eligible Biomass
All of the biomass stored in our facility is high-quality softwood (Juniper and Pinyon Pine ) which has a rigid physical structure, a high lignin content, and a C:N ratio of 104 or higher (target > 80). These chemical and physical traits make the biomass especially recalcitrant to microbial decomposition (Zhu et al., 2010).
All of the wood has been harvested from our own 70-acre property. It is made-up of >95% dead-standing or dead-fallen trees that posed a fire risk and were cut and removed as a fire-mitigation effort.
Record of Biomass Sourcing over the Reported Period
Detailed production data for the entire audited time period and data trail of the direct measurement of woody biomass weight.
Other
