A short distance from Spindletop oil field, the site of the gusher that triggered the Texas oil rush more than a century ago, scientists have found a purpose for the long-disused underground reservoirs -- as storage for the pollution emitted by burning fossil fuels.   

In the depleted South Liberty oil field near the town of Dayton, a University of Texas team successfully pumped 1,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide -- the principal greenhouse gas -- into the reservoirs of briny water more than 5,000 feet underground.

Scientists say those porous rock formations, which extend for hundreds of miles from Mexico to Alabama, could be ideally suited to storing the greenhouse gases widely blamed for global warming.

"We have lot of oil and gas fields in this area that are in decline," Susan Hovorka, a University of Texas geologist and the lead researcher on the pilot project told Reuters. "The Gulf Coast is one of the best places on earth for this."

The technology, known as carbon sequestration, has attracted global attention from industries and governments that are eager to capture and bottle up the gas that can linger in the atmosphere for decades.

The gases released by burning fossil fuels, scientists say, are the main cause of global warming, which is expected over time to lift the planet's temperatures and sharply alter weather patterns, raising sea levels and causing devastating storms.

With Russia's ratification of the Kyoto Protocol earlier this month clearing the way for the environment pact to come into force in February and the start of the European Union's carbon dioxide emissions trading market just a month away, demand for methods for eliminating or storing the gas are on the rise.

President Bush pulled out of the Kyoto pact in 2001, arguing it was too expensive and wrongly excluded developing nations, but U.S. research into carbon sequestration has proceeded, aided by government funding. The pact calls for industrialized nations to reduce CO2 emissions by 10 percent of 1990 levels by 2012.

Texas, with its high density of oil, chemical and refining industries is the fifth largest emitter of the greenhouse gas behind China, Russia, Japan and India. And it is perhaps best equipped to erect the infrastructure needed to put the gas back in the ground.

"This is going to be the place in the world where this is done," said Charles Christopher, oil giant BP's liaison with the Texas research project.

Hovorka said a preliminary estimate of the amount of carbon dioxide storage capacity along the coast regions of the Gulf of Mexico put the figure at about 300 billion tons -- enough to hold 1,000 years of pollution from the region at the current rate.

Many hurdles -- both technical and economic -- remain before carbon sequestration can develop as a viable enterprise, Christopher said, but much of the expertise and at least a limited transportation network already exists.

Since the 1970s, oil and gas drillers have injected carbon dioxide into oil wells in a process called enhanced oil recovery that increases the output from those sites.

"This is something we know how to do. We've been doing it for 30 years in West Texas," he said.

Houston-based energy company Kinder Morgan Inc. ships a billion cubic feet a day of the gas through its 1,100 miles pipeline network, much of it from Colorado into the West Texas oil fields.

That pipeline system would need to be vastly expanded to reach the major carbon dioxide emitters on the other side of the state -- an expensive and complicated endeavor but one the company has considered.

"If the opportunity is there and it's attractive, we want to be a part of it," said Rick Rainey, spokesman for Kinder Morgan.