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Industry can’t herd unruly carbon dioxide into pens in the same way that a rancher herds cattle, but deep in the jagged basalt landscapes of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, scientists think they’ve found a new sort of cage to contain the trouble-making greenhouse gas.

In January, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory workers will begin testing the potential of the common volcanic rock to store and bind with carbon dioxide, a gas emitted by cars and industrial sources such as power plants, concrete manufacturers and ethanol fuel producers.

In the test, scientists will inject food-grade liquid carbon dioxide about 3,000 feet into a basalt flow at the Boise Inc. paper facility, located in Southeast Washington near the Oregon border. Scientists at the lab will monitor interactions between the chemical and the rock over the next 12 to 18 months to see how well it has been absorbed.

If successful, the method could be more effective and potentially less expensive than the common practice of injecting the chemical into sandstone rock and capping it to contain it so the carbon dioxide won’t escape for thousands of years.

“Lab experiments so far indicate this will be a much faster way to remove carbon dioxide,” said Pete McGrail, a PNNL scientist working on the project. “In conventional sandstone systems there aren’t many minerals that can absorb the CO2, so you have to rely more on containment. But with this method it looks like it will only take a few decades or a few hundred years for it to bond into solid rock.”

Carbon dioxide bonds with basalt and essentially transforms it into limestone, or calcium carbonate. Limestone is a common ocean sediment that is a harder rock type than basalt.

Tests so far have shown the process works a lot faster than scientists had initially anticipated, McGrail said.

“When we first started looking at this back in 2001 or 2002, we really weren’t sure it would work,” McGrail said. “We just wanted to set up some experiments. But in our first experiment with basalt we found carbonate (limestone) all over the place, which was surprising.”

Basalt flows in the Pacific Northwest are up to 15,000 feet deep, and estimates so far suggest they could hold between 10 to 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide. In comparison, a small coal fired power plant produces about 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide per year and the United States produces about 5.8 billion tons of the gas each year.

The rock deposits were created during an 11-million-year period from 17 million to 6 million years ago from lava erupting through fissures and vents throughout the three-state area, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Similar deposits are common in the Southeastern United States and in other parts of the world, McGrail added.

The test, which is the first of its kind in the world, is the culmination of about eight years of research. It’s projected to cost about $10 million, and Boise Inc. will get “a nominal fee” for participating in the research, said Destry Henderson, a spokesman for the company.

“We’re just glad to be a test site for this technology,” Henderson said.

Companies like Boise Inc. aren’t required to remove carbon dioxide from their emissions yet, although they are required to report them to environmental agencies.

In the future, however, many experts expect that producers of the gas – such as coal-fired power plants and other industrial sites – will have to pay to remove at least some of their emissions from the air.

“In order to commit to that as a company, you’d have to have a facility to do this nearby,” McGrail said. “In some models we’ve looked at you could see unique opportunities for new businesses to start up. Or there might be opportunities for federal funding or incentives to store carbon dioxide this way.”

Right now, the technology is too expensive for a company like Boise Inc. to use, but in the future it would certainly be something the company could consider, Henderson said.

“In order for us to do something like this it would have to pan out financially,” Henderson said. “Right now we’re approaching this as a partner in science. We hope one day though that this will have benefits for our industry and for other businesses around the globe.”