Spremberg, Germany is a stone’s throw from the Czech border, and used to have the unfortunate moniker of “stinky town” due to the high levels of pollution. Kinda gross, I know. But the city is trying to turn that around in an unprecedented way: by operating the first ever coal-based power plant that is designed to capture and store the carbon dioxide produced.

Technology Review tells us that a Swedish firm, Vattenfall, is behind the conversion of this formerly-polluting power plant. The process is semi-confusing, so bear with this somewhat long block quote from the article. I mean, Technology Review is published by M.I.T., so should I really try to paraphrase? The odds of me getting it right are slim to nil.

Vattenfall’s small 30-megawatt plant burns the lignite in air from which nitrogen has been removed. Combustion in the resulting oxygen-rich atmosphere produces a waste stream of carbon dioxide and water vapor, three-quarters of which is recycled back into the boiler.

By repeating this process, known as oxyfuel, it is possible to greatly concentrate the carbon dioxide. After particles and sulfur have been removed, and water vapor has been condensed out, the waste gas can be 98 percent carbon dioxide, according to Vattenfall.

This waste gas, for the time being, will trucked 150 away from the city and injected 3,000 meters (approximately a billion miles) underground. At some point, the hope is to build a pipeline to transport this gas directly.

Though the company admits no power plant will ever be a zero-emissions power plant, Vattenfall’s goal is to get emissions as close to nothing as possible. The company also acknowledges that the process of capturing emissions lowers the overall efficiency of the plant, and is looking for ways to counter-balance this.

Some environmental groups are for this, seeing it as a win for clean energy. Some are against it, seeing it as falling off the path towards finding other renewable, sustainable energy sources. Personally, I’m not sure what to think about it.   Cleaner is cleaner, which we can always agree is a good thing, but coal is coal. I suppose if this is a way to start getting Eastern Europe cleaner, today, we might want to take the bad with the good on this one.

Until we figure out a way to do the same thing over here, or find our renewable energy sources, you can takepart and find some simple ways to save energy, so our power plants don’t emit so much carbon.