But when Baxter was on leave in Denmark, researching at a power plant there, he came up with a new method to achieve carbon sequestration. He has not yet found a name for it but has filed requests for patents. He plans to market it through a company tentatively named Sustainable Energy Solutions.

Although expensive, the technique would be "less expensive and more energy-efficient," he said.

With his method, sequestration would limit a power plant's efficiency drop to about 15 percent, rather than 25 percent or 30 percent, meaning fewer tons of coal would be burned per megawatt of electricity. Also, it's less expensive to install the technology, so a new power plant using the technique could produce electricity at 8 cents per kilowatt-hour of generated power, compared with 11 cents.

Experts from Denmark happened to be due to visit his home the day of the interview, checking into the new technology.

"What we would hope to do is license it to people who would build it," Baxter said. "It's a type of process that costs literally hundreds of millions of dollars to put in place."

Coal gasification

This is a system whose time may have come, Baxter said. It may finally be feasible from a commercial standpoint.

In gasification, coal is broken down into hydrogen, water, waste products, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Clean components can be burned for power and the pollution more easily controlled.

Coal gasification has been around for decades, he noted. It was used by Germany during World War II when the Allies cut off oil supplies. But other than extreme situations like that, he said, gasification has not been commercially viable.

That is, not until now. Not only has Baxter been working on better techniques in his BYU lab, but global warming fears may have made coal gasification worth the investment.

In experiments, the team found that the cost of separating the usable organic components of coal is only one of the expenses. Another part of the cost is dealing with inorganic material that "just melts or runs down the wall."

Contending with the inorganic component must be a major part of the design for coal gasification systems, he said.

Baxter spoke about gasification during a panel discussion by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 15. The symposium, "Coal Gasification: Myths, Challenges and Opportunities" took place during the AAAS annual meeting, held in Boston.

Baxter said until now, coal gasification always has been "more expensive than alternative ways of doing things. ... There's never been a business proposition for gasification."

But the energy business is changing. Production is much more expensive, more companies are competing fiercely for resources, and global warming concerns are prompting use of more expensive technology like carbon sequestration.

"For the first time," Baxter said, "gasification competes with — it's not clearly better than — all the other technologies, if you have to clean up the CO2."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com