Burial can also rid the Earth of a large volume of carbon dioxide in a relatively short amount of time, Hovorka said.
"We've got almost all the carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere coming from fossil fuels," she said. "There's space equivalent in acreage to put all that carbon dioxide back underground."
If the project pans out, officials hope to capture carbon dioxide from the nation's power plants, oil and gas refineries and other manufacturing facilities "because that is the carbon dioxide today that is leaking into the atmosphere without any controls on it," Nummedal said.
One possibility is capturing the gas with scrubbers similar to those attached to smokestacks that remove nitrous oxide and other gases, he said.
Expensive storage
The storage process -- particularly compressing the carbon dioxide -- is expensive. Some estimates put it as high as US$100 per tonne, though Nummedal and others said they don't yet have cost estimates for Teapot Dome.
Even if it is a success, the Teapot Dome project could have little impact by itself.
"Globally we are releasing 7 billion tonnes of carbon per year," Nummedal said. "The amount we will be putting away here will be in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes."
But he added: "If we look at all the suitable, depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the world, and we were able to fill all of them up, we would be able to store the total global emissions over the next 100 years."
Some environmentalists worry about gas bubbling through cracks in the Earth or leaking into aquifers that supply drinking water.
"We very clearly need some field demonstrations of a storage system to make sure [we] don't have any surprises," said David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center in Washington, D.C.
Nummedal and others stress they're testing Teapot Dome reservoirs for those concerns.
"The early steps of this cooperative venture show the classic markings of a win-win proposition for American consumers," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said.
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