Oct. 25--NEW HAVEN, W.Va. -- Later this week, American Electric Power will begin pumping a small stream of carbon dioxide from its Mountaineer Power Plant deep under the bottomland along the Ohio River in Mason County.

AEP hopes the gas stays there. The company wants it tucked safely away, were it can't add to the heat-trapping gases already building up to dangerous levels in the Earth's atmosphere.

If the Columbus, Ohio-based utility's pilot project works out, it might just help save the world -- and along the way rescue the coal industry.

But coal is in a race with the climate.

The planet is heating up faster than scientists thought it would just a few years ago. Experts say greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced soon, before it's too late.

At the same time, the coal industry says it needs more time to perfect and deploy technology to capture and store carbon dioxide from power plants.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is expensive. It sucks up a lot of a power plant's energy and takes up tremendous space.

Power companies haven't figured out exactly how to do CCS on the monumental scale needed. And experts aren't sure if pumping such huge amounts of compressed CO2 underground is really safe.

Nobody knows if coal or climate is going to win this important race, but the world is watching, and even some of the strongest advocates of CCS have started to make it clear that the path ahead for coal is far from easy.

"The Congress and indeed all Americans must come to recognize the gigantic undertaking and significant sacrifices that this enterprise is likely to require," Gary Spitznogle, AEP's manager of CCS engineering, told a House committee in Washington in late July.

In a recent special edition of the journal Science, Scottish CCS expert R. Stuart Haszeldine warned that carbon capture projects might be falling behind the pace that is needed.

Haszeldine cited a "lamentable lack of financial commitment to real construction." If more pilot projects aren't up and running by 2014, "learning from these to provide commercial credibility will drift beyond 2020."

"The worldwide construction of many tens of hundreds of large CCS plants -- necessary for a substantial impact on climate mitigation -- will then be delayed beyond the deadline set by climate change predictions," Haszeldine wrote.

Coal's 'elusive holy grail'

In recent months, one major media outlet called CCS coal's "elusive holy grail." Without it, another outlet said, the industry faces a "valley of death."

Report after report makes it clear that any real effort to reduce greenhouse gases must target coal.