YAKIMA — Researchers at a national science laboratory in Richland have found a way to achieve in days what takes Mother Nature millions of years: converting wood to mineral.

The ability to make petrified wood could hold promise for separating industrial chemicals, filtering pollutants and soaking up contamination, said Yongsoon Shin, research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

"Wood petrified is very hard and very porous material — it's not really a wood component," Shin said yesterday.

Petrified wood has a large, hard surface and a porous inside, making it ideal to soak up or separate substances or act as a catalyst in other processes, Shin said.

Natural petrified wood occurs when trees are buried without oxygen, then leach their wood components and soak up the soil's minerals.

For instance, at the Ginkgo Petrified Forest, a state park on the west shore of the Columbia River in Central Washington, trees were believed to have been buried without oxygen beneath molten lava millions of years ago.

To create petrified wood, the researchers bought pine and poplar boards, gave a half-inch cube of wood an acid bath, then soaked it in a silica solution. The wood was air-dried, cooked in an argon-filled furnace and cooled in argon to room temperature.

The result was a new silicon carbide that exactly replicates petrified wood, Shin said.

The research results were published in the journal Advanced Materials.

"If pores are too big or too small, it's not too useful," he said.

The Richland lab is a research center operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. It works on complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences. The laboratory employs nearly 4,000 people and has a $650 million annual budget.