International climate-change negotiators who gathered in Poznan, Poland, to draft a follow-on to the Kyoto Protocol appear to have rejected the talks' most controversial proposal: giving a big boost to carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, whereby carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired power plants is trapped deep underground.

The proposal was to award carbon credits to developing countries that installed CCS equipment--credits that they could then sell to industrialized nations or companies--but this morning, opponents successfully tabled the proposal until next June, according to climate policy blog Climatico.

Countries pushing the credits-for-CCS proposal included Japan, Norway, Australia, and Canada. All are major coal consumers eyeing CCS as a way to meet their own greenhouse-gas reduction targets and a way for oil and gas producers to use captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery. Japan and Canada also figure among the nations farthest behind in meeting emissions cuts mandated by the Kyoto Protocol, and they could be big buyers of CCS-generated carbon credits.

International Energy Agency (IEA) executive director Nobuo Tanaka had also added his support for the idea (see video above). Tanaka calls credits a means of accelerating development of capture and sequestration technologies, which the IEA sees as crucial to controlling emissions in countries like China that will remain heavily dependent on coal for decades to come. "These technologies need all the financial help they can get," says Tanaka.

But the idea has been red hot among the climate activists swarming Poznan this week as it unites a controversial technology with an already controversial program. The activists see carbon sequestration as a potentially risky technology that could delay the transition from coal to solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. Furthermore, the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which manages the awarding of carbon credits to developing nations, attracts scorn from some who see carbon trading as a numbers game by which countries can avoid making real emissions cuts.

Many question whether emissions cuts certified for millions of dollars' worth of credits under the CDM wouldn't have occurred anyway. The UN recently acknowledged possible problems after spot-checking a leading CDM certification firm and identifying a series of "nonconformities" in its auditing practices. The firm, DNV Certification AS, was suspended but insists that it is addressing the concerns identified to regain its accreditation.

Poznan's ministerial-level talks start tomorrow and should wrap up on Friday. Unless they pop CCS back onto the agenda, the credits proposal will be stalled until next June's follow-up meeting in Bonn. That meeting is a prelude to the big game that will define global energy policy: final negotiations and, if all goes as planned, the signing of a "Kyoto II" treaty in Copenhagen next December.

The quickest and most effective way to deal with emissions from new coal power plants might be to capture perhaps 60 percent of the gas, and not press for more ambitious targets, according to an analysis presented today at the 9th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies, in Washington, DC.

Howard Herzog, a principal research engineer at MIT (where he manages an industry consortium on carbon capture and storage), explained to me that this route might be akin to the progression we are now seeing in automobiles: from gasoline-powered cars to hybrid versions, en route to a future full of plug-in hybrid or full-electric cars charged from an electric grid that conveys mainly clean renewable power.

Given that right now none of the 600 U.S. coal power plants--or virtually any other source of greenhouse gas--captures and sequesters CO₂, you have to start somewhere, he said. "We are trying to look at it from an energy security viewpoint, an economic viewpoint, and a carbon-capture viewpoint," said Herzog, who coauthored the analysis with Ashleigh Hildebrand, a graduate student in chemical engineering and technology policy.

Herzog went on to explain that coal is a secure American resource that doesn't require importing liquefied natural gas. Partial capture would be cheaper than full capture (which would require extra processing steps). Depending on the type of plant, reducing coal's CO₂ emissions by between 45 and 60 percent would mean that it emits as much CO₂ as a natural-gas power plant. And because the partial-emission version would be more economical, it could mean faster implementation, which would, in turn, help prove the feasibility of capturing and burying CO₂ (in various underground reservoirs, for the most part) on a massive scale. Research is continuing into the optimal capture levels on both coal-burning and coal-gasification designs, Herzog added.

The conference is mainly a technical affair, full of presentations on the suitability of various geologic formations for CO₂ storage, how to do seismic analysis of CO₂ reservoirs, and the experience of various pilot projects. Ruben Juanes, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, described his new model for calculating how much CO₂ a geologic formation can safely hold, for example.

But the critical importance of these various geologic and modeling studies was driven home in a keynote by Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, who gave a primer on climate change over lunch. It wasn't new ground, but it's always good to be reminded of some basics, such as "We have made CO₂ [concentrations in the atmosphere] higher than it has been in more than half a million years, and that is the predominant cause of today's global warming."

Solomon reminded everyone that if we are to avert the worst effects of global warming and climate change--the droughts, the species extinctions, the water shortages, the catastrophic sea-level rise--we must act now and essentially dial our emissions back to something close to zero over the next few decades. Part of that will mean burying CO₂ rather than spewing it into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we were reminded of these sobering realities while being served steak--that most fuel-intensive source of protein--in a banquet hall lit by hundreds of incandescent lightbulbs.

To reduce greenhouse-gas emissions enough to avert the worst effects of climate change, "we have to get coal out of the system." That succinct bottom line was delivered yesterday by Henry Jacoby, professor of management at MIT's Sloan School and codirector of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, in a keynote talk at a conference in Washington, DC. Jacoby didn't mean that coal can't be used--just that its carbon-dioxide emissions will need to be removed and disposed of by underground burial. The good news, he said, is that although the scale of the enterprise would be massive, there is no apparent technology obstacle: "We can solve the technology. We can solve the storage." But the roadblocks ahead are monstrous: uncertainty over whether the Obama administration and Congress will institute a carbon cap-and-trade policy, unclear economics of installing CO2 capture and storage technologies, and widespread public ignorance.

Jacoby pointed to "coal's catch-22": when it comes to burying the CO2, "you can't have the technology without the price, but you can't have the price without the technology." In other words, you won't drive technology adoption unless there's a cap-and-trade or other disincentive on emitting CO2, but you can't know what it will cost to do this--and thus how to operate under such a policy--until you start installing the needed technologies at huge scale. (Today, coal supplies about half of U.S. electricity, but no U.S. coal plant sequesters its CO2.) And right now, the general public--despite awareness of the benefits of, say, wind and solar power--doesn't have much of a clue what "carbon capture and sequestration" means. In surveys, Jacoby said, Americans ranked it as the least advisable approach to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions--even though it's one of the most important ones. (He thinks some people might be confusing it with pouring toxic waste down the nearest hole.) The industry's recent "clean coal" ad blitz doesn't help much, he said, because the ads gloss over the central importance of CO2 burial and don't spell out what that would entail. "They need to explain what 'clean coal' means in this context. If you want to save the coal industry, explain to the public what is involved in this technology," Jacoby said.