The ninth of September will see what may well turn out to be a key moment in industrial history when the world's first oxyfuel boiler is formally inaugurated at the Schwarze Pumpe power station in north-east Germany.
The plant is a pilot project for carbon capture and storage and aims to be the first coal-fired plant in the world to capture and store its own CO2 emissions. Oxyfuel combustion aids the capture and storage of CO2 by creating an exhaust with very high carbon dioxide content from which the other pollutants can readily be separated.
In the fully realised plant the separated CO2 will be pressurised to one 500th of its original volume and transported to a gas field where it will be stored 1000 m below the surface in porous rock caverns.
For the operator Vattenfall, who funded the 70million Euro project themselves, this moment will be the culmination of two years hard work in getting the pilot running. It is gambling on gaining a significant lead in a technology that may solve the problem of providing energy security through burning the country's and the continent's plentiful coal supplies while avoiding the CO2 emissions that cause climate change.
But there are big questions still to be answered, particularly over where CO2 will be stored and whether or not customers will be willing to pay the high costs of building and running CCS plants.
The EU wants to see twelve full-scale power plants demonstrating CO2 capture in operation within the next few years. But although a number of other firms are planning pilot projects, no full-scale CCS coal plant has yet been commissioned.
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