China Shows U.S. How to Push for Carbon Capture

It’s a tantalizing promise that one day “carbon capture” will remove greenhouse gases from the smoke made by coal-fired power plants. After all, these plants, which provide 45 percent of electricity in the U.S., account for more than a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Small-scale experiments have been successful enough that, at this point, engineers have little doubt the technology can work. Yet efforts in the U.S. to advance it are stalled. What was to have been the nation’s first commercial-scale project -- at Mountaineer, a coal-burning electricity plant in New Haven, West Virginia -- has been put on hold.