The new store at the Barendrecht shopping centre looks much like the neighbouring clothing shops and fast food chains, but it is much more exotic.

Like a real estate sales office, its walls feature colourful posters with diagrams of the local geology and reassuring conclusions from environmental assessments. Since April, the Dutch government and energy group Shell set up an information centre at the mall to sell to a sceptical public a promising but untested new environmental technology: carbon capture and storage.