A new program in North Dakota aims to put less greenhouse gas in the air and more ducks in the sky.

A Grand Forks-based regional partnership funded by the federal Energy Department to study the storage of carbon dioxide in the ground - a fledgling technology known as sequestration - is teaming up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Ducks Unlimited on a carbon credit program.

North Dakota landowners in the so-called "prairie pothole" region, famous for its duck production, can enroll native prairie or expired Conservation Reserve Program land in the Fish and Wildlife Service's Grassland Easement Program.

Ducks Unlimited will pay the landowners for carbon being stored in the soil and then will sell those carbon credits to an equity fund that will, in turn, sell them to companies looking to offset carbon dioxide emissions that are blamed for global warming.

"Climate change will have a significant impact on ducks. In addition, ducks need large expanses of grassland for successful nesting," said Jim Ringelman, Ducks Unlimited's conservation programs director for North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.

Landowners who take part in the program will get a payment for the perpetual grassland easement based on the current value of the land, along with a separate payment for the carbon rights. Ringelman said that payment is based on the Chicago Climate Exchange, a private agency that trades greenhouse gases and other pollutants just as other exchanges trade such commodities as crops and livestock. Right now the payment would be about $36 per acre.

Landowners who sign the easements are prohibited from plowing the land. Turning up the soil would release carbon dioxide into the air and destroy duck habitat.

"Some of the most promising land management practices for enhancing carbon accumulations in soils … also improve the quantity and quality of waterfowl habitat," said Barry Botnen, a research scientist at the University of North Dakota's Energy and Environmental Research Center in Grand Forks.

The EERC is leading the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership, a broader carbon sequestration effort that includes more than 80 public and private-sector partners in the U.S. and Canada, ranging from utilities to government agencies. It is one of seven regional partnerships funded by the U.S. government.

Ringelman said the goal of the partnership's carbon credit program is to secure the carbon under 30,000 acres of grassland in central North Dakota.

Tammy Fairbanks, supervisor realty specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Bismarck, said the agency has a North Dakota waiting list for its Grassland Easement Program that includes about 100 potential contracts with a total of about 53,000 acres.

The backlog is the result of a lack of funding, and the financial help of the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership effort will help ease the problem, Fairbanks said.

"We haven't seen any downside in terms of any losers in this operation," Ringelman said.

Some landowners believe perpetual easements, though voluntary, are undesirable because they restrict land use for the future.

The National Farmers Union has a separate carbon credit program involving five-year contracts, not perpetual easements. It pays producers for using no-till and other farming practices that result in higher levels of carbon being stored in the soil.

The new partnership program focuses on preventing the release of carbon already in the soil, said Ringelman and Dale Enerson, director of the Farmers Union program.

"I think the two (programs) are going to complement one another," Enerson said.

Ringelman said officials hope to expand the carbon credit program to other states. The prairie pothole region, a network of wetlands, stretches from central Iowa to northwest Alberta in Canada.