Beginning this week, the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia will try a new strategy for dealing with its gas problems: it will bury them. Maligned by many for the large quantities of undesirable emissions, coal driven power plants such as Mountaineer will soon be trying out the first commercial demonstration of the technology known as sequestration, in which an unwanted compound is bound up chemically for later disposal. Carbon dioxide may be nearly impossible to filter out in its gas form, but once it has reacted with ammonium carbonate it can be compressed and liquefied for underground disposal. Once underground, the CO2 would slowly seep into microscopic pores before reacting harmlessly with assorted minerals.

While the scope of the Mountaineer project - half a million tons of carbon dioxide over the next five years - accounts for only a small fraction of the plants total emissions, success could pave the way for higher efficiency and more widespread usage in the future.

Read more at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=burying-climate-change