In the shadow of two hulking boilers, which spew 10 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year, the Swedish owners of this coal-fired power station recently broke ground on what is to be the world's first coal-fired plant that produces no carbon dioxide emissions. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, presided at the ceremony.

"We accept the problem of climate change," said Reinhardt Hassa, a senior executive at Vattenfall, which operates the plant. "If we want a future for coal, we have to adopt new technologies. It is not enough just to make incremental improvements."

But the new plant here, which will be just a demonstration model, pales next to the eight coal-fired power stations Germany plans to build for commercial use between now and 2011 none of which will be free of carbon dioxide emissions. "That is really a disappointing track record," said Stephan Singer, director of climate and energy policy at the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brussels. "Just replacing old coal plants with new coal plants won't enable Germany to meet stricter carbon emission targets."

Europe likes to believe it is a place that has moved beyond its sooty industrial past, where its energy comes from the windmills that dot the Dutch countryside and the Danish coastline, or the carbon-free nuclear plants that dominate France's power industry.

But with oil prices soaring along with worries about the reliability of gas piped from Russia, Europe must depend heavily on coal a cheap, plentiful fuel, but one that emits twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas. Coal-fired plants generated half the power in Germany and Britain during this year's chilly winter.

While Europeans stand out for their commitment to controlling gases that contribute to global warming, some of their largest energy companies are reluctant to invest in technologies that could further protect the environment, like equipment in the demonstration plant here that will trap carbon dioxide and pump it into underground storage areas. Only a handful of such "carbon-free" plants are planned in the European Union.

There is another downside to coal, evident about a kilometer from the plant here. Bulldozers have begun demolishing a 450-year-old mill town, which blocks the path of the open-pit mine that supplies coal to the plant. The last residents are being forced to pack their belongings and abandon their homes for a new settlement nearby.

Such uprooting is an unavoidable cost of Europe's hunger for coal, executives here say, adding that the technology to capture carbon dioxide is too costly at a time when they are spending billions of euros to replace Europe's aging power plants. Finding places to store the carbon dioxide is a headache in countries like Germany, which are densely populated and have a history of protesting against the storage of pollutants like nuclear waste.

In Europe, where power companies say they have been more diligent than their American counterparts in cleaning up more visible pollutants like sulfur dioxide, some executives are suspicious of current proposals to convert to "clean coal" technology.

They describe it as mainly a public-relations ploy championed by the administration of President George W. Bush and American power companies, even as only a few plants that capture and sequester carbon dioxide are actually planned for the United States. They suspect that the Americans are trying to circumvent mandatory cuts in carbon emissions and avoid making steady improvements in plant efficiency. "There's a lot of media-driven talk," said Alfred Tacke, chief executive of Steag, a major German power generator, with eight coal plants scattered in the Rhine, Ruhr and Saar regions.

"In the United States you defer all investments, because in the future maybe you have the perfect solution," said Tacke, who was deputy economics minister under the previous German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder. "I would prefer a solution that improves the situation now."

By that, Tacke means using existing technology, like raising the temperature or pressure of the steam that turns the turbine, to make conventional coal plants more efficient. Steag's company is building such a plant in the Ruhr city of Duisburg a $1 billion plant that, he claims, will be more efficient than any rival in the United States.

The debate over coal in the European Union has to be seen within the context of the Kyoto Protocol, a global climate-control pact that commits Germany and 34 other nations to measurable reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases.

With a legal imperative to cut emissions by up to a fifth within the next six years, European power companies face a clearer challenge than those in non-Kyoto countries, like the United States and China. Nevertheless, the recent spike in the price of oil has thrown the spotlight back on coal, even in Britain, where the industry had been in a death spiral for decades. Richard Budge, a long-time British coal executive, has announced plans to reopen a coal mine in South Yorkshire. With financing from Russian investors, he also hopes to build a $1.5 billion power plant on the site, equipped with technology to capture and store carbon dioxide.

"Fifty-eight percent of the world's gas is owned by Russia, Iran and Qatar," Budge said. "Coal is on every continent."