Nov 3 - McClatchy-Tribune Business News Formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Mike Keller The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

Mississippi Power's Jackson County electric plant will soon be host to an experimental project to trap waste carbon dioxide from burning coal and shoot it almost two miles underground.

The goal of the project is to understand whether deep-well injection of CO2, the predominant gas contributing to the warming of the Earth, is an option to drastically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

"Over the centuries, the relative amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up," said Dr. Jerry Hill, a senior advisor of the Southern States Energy Board, the group that is leading the project. "What we are trying to do is reduce that by tying CO2 up in geologic formations."

Hill said the experiment will begin at the end of 2007 when researchers pump 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the formation directly under Plant Daniel. The $6 million jointly funded project will end in 2009, after a couple of years of measuring pressure in the well.

Because the technology that will separate and capture CO2 from power plants is still being developed, researchers will get their gas commercially from a naturally occurring carbon dioxide reservoir near Jackson.

Hill said this area was chosen both because it offered a 46,000-square-mile geologic formation underground that should hold CO2 and because it is home to several significant sources of the gas, including plants in Alabama and Mississippi.

Plant Daniel, where the two monitoring and injection wells will be dug, is a major regional source of the gas. In 2005, it pumped out 9.3 million tons of CO2, the most in the state and more than double the second largest producer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The second largest CO2 producer is Mississippi Power's Plant Watson in Gulfport, which threw off 4.2 million tons in 2005.

A study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory found carbon dioxide emissions rose in the Gulf states by 175 percent between 1960 and 2001.

Nationally, power plants burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas made up 39 percent of all CO2 emissions. America creates 23 percent of the world's emissions of that gas.

The project is part of U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored research to combat climate change, initiated by the Bush administration's Global Climate Change Initiative. A regional partnership formed to complete the work lists over 70 members including universities, corporations and government offices.

Three other projects in Virginia, Alabama and either Texas or Louisiana will test whether injected CO2 can aid in the recovery of oil and natural gas deposits and if it can be stored in unminable coal formations.

Data coming from these tests will be used to capture carbon dioxide in the transitional period between the current crop of power plants and the development of next generation fossil fuel-fired plants. Those plants, which are also being spurred on by the government, will make both electricity and fuel hydrogen and will also produce almost no greenhouse gas emissions.