AT their peak in the early 1960s the mines of the Nottinghamshire coalfields produced over 14 million tons of coal. With collieries spread from Cotgrave to Clipstone, thousands of miners toiled to keep the nation's fires and power stations burning.

Today, of Nottinghamshire's last three remaining deep mines, only Thoresby continues to be operated by UK Coal. Welbeck is now exhausted of coal and production ceased last May while Clipstone closed in 2003 and was demolished last year, only its headstocks remaining to remind future generations that the black stuff once fuelled the nation.

As far as the UK is concerned, the coal mining era appears to be slowly drawing to a close. Britain now imports more coal than it produces to feed its coal-fired power stations, whose numbers are dwarfed by nuclear and gas-fired power stations plus an increasing quantity of hydro schemes and wind farms.

Tough environmental legislation also means that no new coal-powered plants can now be built without technology in place to capture carbon dioxide emissions, although green campaigners argue there is no such thing as "clean coal" since deep coal mining causes environmental damage.

Yet those who write off a future for coal in Britain may be premature. In fact, outside Europe demand for coal is growing, not diminishing. Driven largely by the growing economies of China and India, world coal use has grown by six per cent over the past five years and is set to grow substantially over the next ten years. Almost all of this demand will be in the developing world, with China and India accounting for almost half of growth. Although China has the world's largest renewable energy programme, coal currently supplies 70 per cent of its energy needs.

In Britain, too, coal seams may soon be exploited thanks to a technique called Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), in which coal is literally burned underground to produce a gas called syngas. When this raw syngas is cleaned it can be used to generate electricity. The technique is being explored along Britain's east coast and is regarded by some as a more environmentally acceptable method of tapping Britain's vast fossil fuel reserves – provided that the CO2 generated can be captured.

Indeed, some energy experts believe tapping into coal in this way will be essential for the UK's energy supply in the years ahead. "We've got millions of tonnes of coal off-shore right up the east coast to Scotland," says Prof Colin Snape, an efficient fossil fuel technologies expert at the University of Nottingham. "And we are going to need coal to contribute towards Britain's energy security. We've just had two cold winters with low wind, which isn't what you want for wind turbines. The best option for exploiting coal is UCG but we need a commitment from the Government to demonstrate that the technology can both capture CO2 and is commercially viable for the big utility companies."

However, not far from the northern border of Nottinghamshire, a figure well known to local mining communities has also been trying to make coal gasification a reality using newly-mined coal. Richard Budge, whose former company RJB Mining bought Nottinghamshire's remaining coal mines in 1994 as part of a buy-out of Britain's coal assets, spent the last few years trying to build a new clean coal gasification power station using coal from Hatfield Colliery, near Doncaster.

Despite winning £164 million in European funding, Budge's company Powerfuel went into administration last December. But in May this year it was purchased by a clean energy developer called 2Co Energy, which plans to begin generating low-carbon electricity from 2015 and make Hatfield the centre of a clean energy network serving Yorkshire and Humberside.

With potential new coal seams off the east coast, and a new clean fossil fuel technology network being developed in South Yorkshire and Humberside, Nottinghamshire is at the geographical centre of a possible new clean coal industry.

And while the county may not be supplying much of the coal itself anymore, it has a world-leading scientific expertise in an essential area called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) – without which there will be no such thing as "clean coal".

Dealing with carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power stations, as the law now demands, means you have to find somewhere to store the carbon and build an infrastructure to get it there. On Humberside, one of the UK's biggest carbon-emitting regions, the method favoured by partners in the Hatfield project such as the National Grid is to develop a network of pipes which will channel carbon to permanent storage deep under the North Sea.

The problem is that CCS on such a large scale is still untested in the UK.

But this is where Nottingham comes in, since the University of Nottingham hosts one of the world's leading CCS research centres at the National Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage.

The centre, developed and run in co-operation with the British Geological Survey, has state-of-the-art laboratories where scientists are working on safe and reliable methods of transporting and storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide.

CCS is critically important if Britain is to keep the lights burning with a "decarbonised" energy supply.

"Carbon capture and storage is a technology that has the potential to reduce emissions from power stations and other industrial sources by up to 90 per cent," says Dr Sarah Mackintosh, programme director at the National Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage.

"The individual processes involved in CCS are not novel, but the full chain – capture, transport, and storage – has yet to be demonstrated at commercial scale."

One important area of research at the centre is the viability of a carbon capture and storage "cluster" based around the east Irish Sea, where up to one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide could be stored in undersea gas fields off the coast of Liverpool and Morecambe.

That's enough room to store 20 years' worth of carbon dioxide produced in north west England, north and south Wales, Northern Ireland, east Ireland and western Scotland.

Ironically, some of Nottinghamshire's remaining colliery sites are also being considered as sources of renewable energy including solar, biomass and methane capture.

These, together with local expertise in carbon capture, should help ensure that Nottinghamshire's reputation for producing energy from the black stuff continues in the green energy revolution.