A new methodology for estimation of the smoke injection height from wild-land fires is suggested and evaluated. It is demonstrated that the approaches developed for estimating the plume rise from stacks can be formally written in terms characterising the wild-land fires: fire energy, size and temperature. However, these semi-empirical methods still perform quite poorly because the physical processes behind the uplift of the wildfire plumes strongly differ from those controlling the plume rise from stacks. The suggested new methodology considers wildfire plumes in a way similar to the Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) computations. The new formulations are applied to the dataset collected within the MISR Plume Height Project for about 2000 fire plumes in Northern America and Siberia. It is shown that the new method performs significantly better than the stack-oriented formulations. For two-thirds of the cases, its predictions deviated from the MISR observations by less than 500 m, which is the uncertainty of the observations themselves. It is shown that the fraction of "good" predictions is much higher (>80 %) for the plumes reaching the free troposphere.