The New York Times is reporting this morning that China is emerging as a leader in clean coal technology. Reporter Keith Bradsher writes:

China has emerged in the past two years as the world’s leading builder of more efficient, less polluting coal power plants, mastering the technology and driving down the cost.

He goes on to say that

While the United States is still debating whether to build a more efficient kind of coal-fired power plant that uses extremely hot steam, China has begun building such plants at a rate of one a month.

I was a little confused about what he meant until I read that China's

most efficient plants achieve an efficiency as high as 44 percent, meaning they can cut global warming emissions by more than a third compared with the weakest plants.

In the United States, the most efficient plants achieve around 40 percent efficiency, because they do not use the highest steam temperatures being adopted in China....

 So these are essentially very efficient conventional coal plants. They are not  coal gasification plants and they clearly do not capture or store the CO2 emissions generated by coal plants. Bradsher does go on to write:

China has just built a small, experimental facility near Beijing to remove carbon dioxide from power station emissions and use it to provide carbonation for beverages, and the government has a short list of possible locations for a large experiment to capture and store carbon dioxide. But so far, it has no plans to make this a national policy.

My first reaction to this is that I'm going to avoid drinking carbonated beverages next time I am in Beijing. My second reaction is to wonder whether this is a big deal--or even progress? The story also doesn't say anything about where the coal comes from or under what conditions it is mined.

What's more interesting, to me, anyway, is this:

China is building considerably more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined, and these do not emit carbon dioxide after they are built.

Your thoughts?