Cleaner coal's last stand

China's first coal-gasification power plant starts operating amid high hopes, delays, and cost overruns - For more than three decades, gasification technology has promised a smarter conversion of coal to electricity. By using heat and pressure to turn coal's motley mix of molecules into a consistent stream of simple gases, gasification plants squeeze more power from a ton of coal and control the resulting by-products better. In April, engineers in Tianjin, China, fired up a gasification power plant that will provide a "critically important" test of the technology's commercial potential as a low-carbon power source, according to Julio Friedmann, who leads the carbon management program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California.