Santa Fe, N.M. ? Rancher Jack Chatfield sees untapped value in the spaces that lie beneath New Mexico’s dusty landscape. But he said the state needs to first decide who owns them.

Scientists are looking at underground fissures and caverns as places where carbon dioxide emissions captured from fossil fuel power plants can be stored. Carbon emissions are among the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The underground space also could store compressed air as part of a process to generate clean electricity.

“This is a huge issue for our society today. It’s technology that is on the cutting edge and if New Mexico blinks, we’ll be left in the dust. Let’s don’t do that. Let’s be ready,” said Chatfield, who is leading an effort to settle the ownership of the underground spaces in the New Mexico Legislature.

The ownership of the spaces has become a hot topic across the West. Wyoming was the first state to tackle pore space ownership. Montana and North Dakota followed, and dozens of states — from Texas to Michigan — are considering legislation that would lay the groundwork for carbon capture and sequestration.

“Every year there’s more legislation and the area of property rights has been of increasing interest,” said Melisa Pollak, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota who is part of a national team studying the potential of carbon capture and storage.

New Mexico’s bill is considered the first step toward establishing a carbon storage market in the state, said Mark Fesmire, director of the state Oil Conservation Division. Once ownership is established, lawmakers would then have to clear the way for the state to develop regulations.

Fesmire said he believes common law is clear: surface owners own the rights to the pore space beneath their land. The legislation is aimed at spelling that out to avoid legal challenges.

Storing carbon dioxide deep below the earth’s surface has not yet been tested on a large scale in the United States, but researchers point to Norway’s North Sea, where the world’s first commercial carbon capture and storage project is sequestering about one million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.