Finally! Clean Coal in Germany

Clean-Coal Debut in Germany, from ABC News, documents the opening of the first "clean coal" power plant. Owned by the Swedish utility Vattenfall, the small 30-megawatt pilot plant in Spremberg, Germany, captures the carbon dioxide and water given off when electricity is generated. After being "scrubbed" of pollutants that make acid rain, the carbon dioxide is cooled to liquid form, at -28 degrees Fahrenheit, and stored temporarily.

The liquid CO2 will eventually be trucked to where it can be safely pumped 3,000 feet underground for permanent storage. And one day, it will be sent to its final resting place in a depleted natural gas field via specially built pipeline.

"Carbon capture and storage" (CCS); "carbon sequestration"; "clean coal": these are all buzzwords for the idea that we can still burn coal to produce electricity, if we minimize its huge carbon footprint somehow. We heard a lot about it in the recent presidential election, with John McCain advocating it and Barack Obama being less thrilled. Most of the relatively liberal advocates of reducing carbon emissions purse their lips at CCS, saying it hasn't really been tried. Well, now it has!

Vattenfall spokesman Staffan Görtz, according to a recent article in Discover Magazine that is as yet not available online, calls clean coal more of a bridge to better renewable-energy technologies than a final solution to climate change: "Using this technology will buy us time."