At the small town of Schwarze Pumpe in eastern Germany, the Swedish energy group Vattenfall has built a power plant that would have bemused an earlier generation of electrical engineers.
The heat source is conventional: lignite, brown coal. What is new is that the coal is burned in pure oxygen, and the carbon dioxide that is the principal exhaust gas is captured, compressed and liquefied, and pumped into tankers. The trucks then drive the liquid CO2 to an exhausted gas field, also in Germany to be pumped 3.5km below the surface.
