The 6-ft.-high steel wellhead jutting up from a weedy field next
to the R.E. Burger coal-fired power plant in eastern Ohio
doesn't look momentous. If anything, it resembles a supersize
fire hydrant. Yet the wellhead and the borehole extending
through a mile and a half of rock below it represent an
ambitious goal: nothing short of entombing global warming. In
practice, simply capturing CO2 is a daunting task, both energy-
intensive and costly. But this pales beside the task of storing
so much carbon. Bradley Jones, a vice president at the giant
Texas utility TXU, has compared the dilemma to a small dog
chasing a car. "Once he catches it, he's got to figure out what
to do with it." A single 1000-megawatt coal-fired power plant
can send 6 million tons of CO2 up its stack annually--as much as
two million cars. Hundreds of such plants around the world spew
more than one-third of the 25 billion metric tons of CO2 humans
pump into the atmosphere each year, with no sign of slowing.
More than 100 new coal-burning power