Carbon capture and global warming

The world has a dilemma when it comes to coal, 40% of our electricity comes from coal-fired power stations - 70% in the case of China.

It is a cheap and abundant fuel, and it is also one of the main sources of the carbon dioxide which is clogging up the atmosphere.

World leaders meeting in Copenhagen are wrestling with how to create cheap fuel with higher living standards - but also how to engineer a slow-down - or even a halt to global warming.

One answer might be in new technologies that capture waste greenhouse gases like the CO2 emitted by coal-fired power stations and simply bury it.

If that worked, it might be a way of minimising disruption to our living standards as we try to clean up the planet.

The Mountaineer coal power station in West Virginia is pioneering carbon capture, and it will store about 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

But this is just 1.5% of the plant's total CO2 output, and it will take ten years for the carbon capture to move to a commercial scale.

'We are the Saudi Arabia or Middle East of coal. We have more coal than anybody else in the world," Rocky Hackworth, mining manager, West Virginia

'This is brand-new technology. It's never been installed at this scale at a coal-fired power plant. Today it's at validation scale, and it will move to commercial over the next ten years,' Gary Spitznogle, engineering manager, Mountaineer plant

Elisa Young is a local opponent of this development of coal-fired power. 'It's a false solution. It's entirely too expensive. Time to get off coal is now. We are not supposed to be keeping coal on life support.'

The Mountaineer coal power station in West Virginia is the world's largest carbon capture plant, and will store about 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

First broadcast on Business Daily