Bury Your Carbon in Wyoming, For a Fee

As the U.S. tries to find ways to use carbon without fueling global warming, a leading-edge scheme has carbon emissions stripped from power plants and factories and pumped deep underground.

Wyoming landowners, now, may be able to charge companies for the right to fill the cracks beneath their land. Similar legislation often preserves a landowner's ownership of minerals locked beneath their property, but this would be the first giving people right to space that has yet to be filled. Of course, before now, it just didn't have any value.

In a first-in-the-nation attempt, the Wyoming House of Representatives Wednesday passed a bill that sets in law a landowner's control over the "pore spaces under their property where carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and byproduct of burning coal to make electricity, could be stored," as the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle put it.

Wyoming, Vice President Dick Cheney's home state, is a major coal-producing state. The Powder River Basin, which also includes parts of Montana, is the single largest source of coal in the United States.

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