Not only can carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology be developed rapidly, but there will be a booming demand for it from rapidly developing countries like India and China whose economies rely heavily on coal for electricity.

"The available evidence indicates that CCS could and should make a valuable contribution to reducing CO2 emissions and safeguarding energy security in the UK," the committee said in a report "Meeting the UK Energy and Climate Needs".

"It also appears likely that CCS technology could play a key role in mitigating CO2 emissions internationally and, more specifically, from China and India's ever-growing fleet of coal-fired power stations," it added.

CCS, also known as carbon sequestration, is still in its infancy but has been grasped at by politicians the world over as offering a quick and relatively painless way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

In essence it involves grabbing carbon emissions from smokestacks and injecting it deep into the earth in geological structures like exhausted oil wells and aquifers from which it cannot escape back into the atmosphere.

"Although renewable technologies for energy generation will be essential, especially in the medium to long term, the capacity of CCS to make a large contribution to reducing CO2 emissions in a short space of time could make it a very valuable tool for climate change mitigation," said the report from the all-party Science and Technology Committee.

Scientists have predicted that global average temperatures could rise by between two and six degrees Celsius this century due to global warming, triggering droughts and storms, melting polar icecaps and raising sea levels by up to several metres.

Most of the world has signed up to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

But the world's biggest polluter the United States has rejected it as economic suicide and neither China -- which is building one coal-fired power station a week -- nor India are bound by its targets.

But Kyoto only runs to 2012, and the diplomatic search is now on to find ways of taking it forward, broadening both its scope and membership.

The British government is in the throes of drawing up a new energy policy that must meet its international obligations to slash carbon emissions and fill a huge gap in electricity output when its ageing nuclear plants close in the next few years.