Biomass Supply Scout
Colorado · forest-slash sourcing intelligence · 100% public data
A decision tool that ranks every active forest-thinning project in Colorado by how well it fits Charm Industrial's biomass-sourcing operation — haul cost to the Fort Lupton pyrolyzer, green-ton estimate, wildfire urgency, timing, and contractor coverage.
What this is
Charm Industrial (Fort Lupton, CO) converts slash from forest thinning into bio-oil via mobile pyrolyzers and permanently sequesters the carbon underground. Their #1 operational bottleneck — per CEO Peter Reinhardt on every podcast he's appeared on — is feedstock throughput: finding enough slash piles from real, scheduled thinning projects within haul range of their Fort Lupton Miniforge.
This tool surfaces the entire Colorado pipeline of public-record USFS and CSFS fuel-treatment projects, ranks them by Charm-specific economics and priorities, and generates a one-page "call sheet" per project — contractor likelihood, NEPA signature date, draft outreach email, and a direct link to the federal document that governs it.
Why this matters for Charm
🚛 Haul cost
Fort Lupton is the dominant cost variable. Euclidean × 1.3 to truck route; $0.14/loaded-mile/ton. Closer projects pencil better.
🌲 Pile timing
Slash piles perish in ~2 years. The tool filters to projects completed in the last 2yr (piles exist) OR planned in the next 12mo (lead-time for relationships).
🏗️ Contractor fit
Charm buys through forestry contractors, not landowners. Projects inside the service radius of known CO operators (Altitude Forestry, Tall Timber, West Range) score higher.
🔥 Regulatory alpha
Inside the Front Range 7-county burn-ban + Ozone NAA, pile burning is legally constrained — Charm's alternative is worth more there.
How to use it
Every project is scored 0–100 on a weighted composite. Sort by composite, recency, size, or haul distance. Use flag filters to zero in on burn-ban zones, stewardship contracts, or beetle-kill overlap.
The call-sheet includes acres, green tons, haul cost to Fort Lupton, contractor status, pile-status badge (fresh / curing / aging / planned), and a pre-drafted outreach email.
Jumps straight to the Schedule of Proposed Actions quarterly report for the national forest — the public-record NEPA schedule that drives the entire project pipeline.
Scoring weights are transparent — move sliders to stress-test priorities. Export the ranked list to CSV for circulation inside the sourcing team.
Core scoring signals
- Haul (30%) — miles to Fort Lupton, $/ton delivered.
- Biomass (25%) — green tons estimate (acres × tons/acre × 0.6 recovery).
- Urgency (20%) — Wildfire Hazard Potential + WUI overlap; forest-type fallback when WHP raster isn't available.
- Timing (15%) — pile perishability; full credit ≤12 months, fades to 24 months out.
- Contractor (10%) — known Charm-friendly contractor in service radius.
All thresholds live in a single, inspectable policy file
(pipeline/refs/charm_policy.py). See the
Data Sources page for the full cheat
sheet — hard eligibility filters, bonus flags, out-of-scope decisions.
About the data
100% public. USFS FACTS, WHP, Wilderness, Administrative Forest boundaries; TIGER/Line; SILVIS WUI; CSFS regional contractor lists; CDPHE open-burn ban; EPA ozone nonattainment boundaries; USFS R2 Aerial Detection Survey. No proprietary data, no paywalls, no Regrid, no Esri Business Analyst. Anyone at Charm can reproduce this pipeline from the source repo.
Data refreshes: FACTS via live USFS EDW REST query (nightly feasible); SOPA reports every quarter per forest; TIGER annually; everything else static until superseded.
Who built this
Ito Geospatial — geospatial
intelligence for land and resource operators. This tool is a demo of
how public data plus real operational context produces a decision
surface that in-house GIS would otherwise cost a team of three to
maintain. Contact: ian@itogeospatial.com.