The daily roundtrip from Vicksburg to Jackson for meetings of the Mississippi Legislature should seem like a hop, skip and a jump to Sen. Briggs Hopson III when lawmakers return to the Capitol Tuesday.

After all, over eight days in November, he logged more than 18,000 air miles as he jetted to the Far East and Europe with public and private officials from six states and Washington, D.C., to tour plants developing ways to generate energy via lower carbon emissions.

Hopson was the lone official from Mississippi chosen by a partnership of environment-friendly nonprofits to tour the GreenGen plant in China and the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss border with France, among other sites.

The goal was to build bridges toward enhancing traditional energy sources while working with the private sector to make new energy more affordable.

“There are means by which we can do a better job of capturing carbon dioxide emissions,” Hopson said. “With that, we can use that for enhanced oil recovery. There’s a lot of oil that’s in the ground right now we’re unable to get out without using the carbon.”

Boston-based Clean Air Task Force organized the tour and the nonpartisan, private Edgerton Foundation paid travel expenses for 24 public officials, academics, industrialists and others, according to CATF.

“Right now, alternative sources either aren’t suited for states like Mississippi or they’re way too expensive,” Hopson said, referring to energy produced by wind and solar power.

Most of Mississippi’s oil wells are concentrated in the southwest and eastern parts of the state.

However, several clusters of wells are in Hopson’s district in Warren, Issaquena and southwest Yazoo counties, including an enhanced oil recovery site run by Houston-based Denbury Resources in Yazoo’s Tinsley community. That facility, coupled with a lignite plant underway in Kemper County, formed a basis for including a Mississippi legislator on the trip, said special projects facilitator Pam Hicks.

Headed up by Gulfport-based Mississippi Power, the plant is expected to turn the low-grade coal into gas using so-called “clean coal” technology by 2014. GreenGen, which is near completion, will do much the same and will test fuel cell and membrane separation technologies.

A massive underground particle physics facility near Geneva, considered the most promising among research at the LHC though its realization is believed to be 10 to 15 years away, struck Hopson on a personal level.

“They’ve already developed an accelerator that can treat cancer tumors in a way that we’ve been unable to treat cancer because they say they’ll pinpoint the tumor without doing collateral damage,” Hopson said. “They have the technology to go right to the source and treat it.”

Hopson’s wife, Ali, and brother, Jay, are both cancer survivors.

The contingent also made a stop in Ireland, where they dined with former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern and visited financial centers as they learned about the country’s economic crisis, he said. Though he’d crossed paths with intrigue and exotic locales before — namely, meeting two men during a trip to Rwanda who were on opposing sides of the bloody genocide in Rwanda in 1994 who are now friends — Hopson admits the recent energy tour was a learning experience

“It was nice and unique — definitely a different world,” Hopson said.