JEANNA DUERSCHERL The Roanoke Times

Appalachian Power Co.'s Mountaineer plant is the site of an effort to store carbon dioxide.

NEW HAVEN, W.Va. -- Coal-filled barges navigate the Ohio River to deliver the black rock fossil fuel to the sprawling Mountaineer power plant.

Coal-fired power plants such as Mountaineer release huge volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, CO2 is considered by many scientists to be a major contributor to climate change.

In some circles, nationally and internationally, coal is now considered a villainous rock -- associated with mountaintop removal strip mining, pollution and a warming planet.

But coal was king Friday in West Virginia at the Mountaineer plant, an Appalachian Power Co. generation facility. For invited guests, Ohio-based American Electric Power, parent company of Appalachian, formally commissioned a demonstration project employing a new technology for capturing and storing CO2 extracted from flue gases produced by the coal-burning plant.

Mike Morris, AEP's chairman, president and CEO, described Friday as a historic day. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin said the carbon capture and storage system will allow coal to continue to play a key role in power generation until transition occurs to the "fuel of the future."

Philippe Joubert, president of Alstom Power, the international company that designed the chilled ammonia carbon capture and storage system, went further. He said the new technology will "change the power generation market and change the world."

Officials said the Mountaineer project is the first process worldwide to combine carbon capture with storage of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide removed from the flue gases is injected under pressure through two wells into deep geologic formations, believed compatible with storage, thousands of feet below Mountaineer.

But the technology is unproven, and many questions linger about its safety, effectiveness, long-term effects and financial viability.

For example, how much carbon dioxide can the underground formations accommodate? How far will the plume spread? What disaster might an earthquake render?

Carbon capture will be expensive, and kilowatt hour production costs of electricity are likely to double -- a reality consumers will discover in their electric bills.

And critics note that Mountaineer will still rely on a fuel harvested through practices that include mountaintop removal and other strip-mining techniques that disturb vasts swaths of ground and can affect ground and surface waters.

For now, the demonstration carbon capture and storage project at Mountaineer treats about 1.5 percent of the coal-fired power plant's flue gas and removes only about 1.4 percent of the plant's total carbon dioxide emissions.

At Friday's catered, tent-sheltered, white-tablecloth ceremony, U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said observers should not focus on the fledgling project's small treatment capacity.

"I don't care if it's a small sliver, because they want to go on to the next level," Rockefeller said.

He said government funding should help pay to scale up the treatment and storage capacity of the system once its process is proven.

"I'm for doing it carefully, scientifically, but doing it," he said.

Yet some environmental groups insist carbon capture and storage provide too little help too late to impact climate change and will simply perpetuate the burning of a dirty fossil fuel. AEP estimates the new technology will become commercially viable by 2015.

During an interview before the ceremony, Morris responded.

"I would say the critics are a bit on the negative side of the equation," he said. "If it is too late, does that mean do nothing?"

Morris and a host of others stressed Friday that coal will fuel power generation for decades to come, both in this country and many others. He said AEP agrees there is enough evidence to believe there is a link between human activity and climate change. But he said the United States has "the financial and technical wherewithal to address the issue."

Some environmental groups encourage carbon capture efforts such as the one at Mountaineer. Others ask tough questions.

John Steelman is program manager for the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center.

"We support the use of carbon capture," Steelman said Thursday. "We believe that for the next few decades the United States and other countries, including China, are going to use coal in significant quantities."

And this is a critical time, he said, to limit emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

John Blair is president of Valley Watch, a small environmental group in Indiana whose primary focus is the lower Ohio River Valley. The organization has fought coal-fired power plants since Valley Watch's founding in 1981.

Blair said he has been following the development of the carbon capture and storage system at Mountaineer.

"The Alstom technique is kind of fascinating, I must say," Blair said.

But he described several concerns, ranging from fears the CO2 could escape from the deep geologic formations to whether such a carbon capture system will be economically viable.

"The fact that they prove that they can actually capture it -- that's a reasonable step ahead," Blair said. "But it is not a panacea."

In addition, he said, carbon capture and storage could sway policymakers to swallow the continued use of coal-fired power plants and related mining practices he and others oppose.

"It's not just mountaintop removal. Strip mining, wherever it is done, is an abomination to the environment," Blair said.

Morris acknowledged that a major seismic event could potentially lead to some leakage of carbon dioxide. He anticipates legislation eventually will address any related liability issues and the payment of costs that might result -- such as the costs for evacuations.

Gary Spitznogle, AEP's manager of carbon capture and storage engineering, said such a scenario is possible but unlikely.

"In theory, yes," he said. "We made sure to select a site that did not have a history of seismic activity to minimize those kinds of risk."

And thousands of feet of shale rock above the storage formations should retain the carbon dioxide in permanent storage, he said.

Morris said the government and consumers will have to share the costs of reining in the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

"This is a societal decision," he said. "The American people have coalesced around the idea that we need to do something about global warming."