Geoff Staneff

@gstaneff.bsky.social

273

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Former thermoelectrics and fuel cell scientist, software and data product manager; current forestry startup guy trying to reduce the impact of future wildfires. PNW based, have visited high intensity burns this year from Northern BC to the Sierras.
He/Him

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Hey all, going to be hot for a few days here on the West Coast. We've been green so far, but everything is going to dry out fast. Burn conditions are going to rapidly change through each day and over the next 2 weeks. Be prepared out there and know which way the wind is blowing.

Got out into the woods on Monday, checking in on a project 4 years after the fire and 1 year after the restoration work. Lots of regeneration coming up (too much tan oak; dead and downed still piled up). Was good to put the hardware through its paces on some large trees (~84") in a familiar place.

@drandrewthaler.bsky.social Um, I have questions.

In some areas local land managers are strapped for cash & looking to timber harvest to support direct fuel reduction service work. In other areas the cost of accounting ($ + delays to timelines) for a timber sale leaves the project losing money per tree harvested so it all goes into the grinder.

There is a pernicious thing in purchasing carbon dioxide offsets where folks will complain when avoidance is blended into their removals. Avoidance, especially where the mode is a replacement of fossil fuel consumption with electricity, is 100x better than removal in terms of impact over time, yet.

I should be sleeping. Or preparing my seminar presentation. Definitely not whatever this is.

It is increasingly clear that fast and slow carbon ought to be tracked separately even though they have similar impact on global heating. There is a critical difference in the lifecycle of each kind, and interchanging them introduces time-travel.

It can be hard to parse how misguided carbon offsets and credits for retaining forest biomass can be in Western US forests. I saw this chart out of 4FRI in Arizona illustrating what will happen with their 2.4 million acres with and without thinning (5-10 tons per acre, I estimate from this chart).

What is the deal with mill closures? The story is always "fiber constraint" but the cited causes don't necessarily line up: beetle kill and wildfire result in stumpage that is pennies on the dollar to salvage (esp. in BC, where single mills have 1/6 the capacity of the State of California).

Had to take a break from flooring to make something too nice for its own good. A silly little bunny themed plate, by an artist who doesn't know what this adorable, cute, bunny is doing.

Today I set down a shoulder plane, picked up a sawzall, and continued working on the same project. I am possibly doing woodworking wrong.

Dealing with US Based Healthcare services today. Doesn't anyone get nervous about how the evil insurance company joke from The Incredibles is basically every experience dealing with health insurance today? Reality is worse than the joke ever was. How has this become our normal?

Well, that was a trip. A cold and miserable test for the people and the equipment, but a successful one to shake down before the coming work season. Just a few more months until things dry out enough for mechanical fuel reduction projects to get underway for the '24 season.

Why isn't anyone selling an emissions avoidance credit against the act of capping abandoned oil wells emitting methane? At 10 tons/hour you'd need only a week of leakage to drive the cost per CO₂ equivalent down to $1/ton. And it is a one-and-done operation, no need to keep capping it annually.

My tape has reached its equilibrium state.

@queenofpeat.bsky.social or other Northern folk, do you know anyone using InSAR to evaluate permafrost loss/subsidence (esp. boreal topsoil loss due to wildfire). The geologists use InSAR to measure earthquake impacts at mm scale over landscapes, and that seems to fit alongside site depth studies?

Did the High Atlas really grow 20 cm in the Moroccan earthquake?earthquakeinsights.substack.com Well, almost - a small area did rise about 15 cm. Let's explore how we know.

California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force - Core Reporting Workshop video dropped! Super exciting for the half-dozen people who couldn't attend and want to keep up to date ;-)

Core Metrics Recapwww.youtube.com

Excited to participate in studies at Blodgett Research Forest next year evaluating tooling to make DxP (Designation by Prescription) projects easy, accurate, and speedy. Machine operators are not usually professional foresters, so we provide useful information in real time to help improve outcomes.

If your CDR story leverages basalt mineralization and local geothermal for green energy is it on you to include eruption and subsequent storage escape in your lifecycle analysis? Sure, these are 30 miles apart (today) but with a 10,000 year storage claim you have a lot of lifecycle to worry about.

I haven't seen it over here yet (& visited recently). 20-year forest treatment study investigating resilience approaches (proscribed burns, thinning, and combination) in Blodgett Research Forest update. news.berkeley.edu/2023/12/12/t... Super Interesting: Mosquito fire burned into the study area.

I don't expect to be able to perform CCS for profit by definition. Conventionally we liberate energy to do work in exchange for the perceived value of doing that work. In CCS, energy is spent to undo previous work and the promise is to avoid new work with the stored potential energy in the future.

If companies and countries were tracking towards net zero or a phase down of fossil fuel use, wouldn't the book value of fossil fuel companies be tending towards zero? Especially as many have curtailed their renewable CapEx investments. What is market cap here but a promise by the market to burn?

End of feed.