Carbon can be captured from electricity plants that burn coal or natural gas, or from oil refineries and other kinds of industrial plants. The dominant source, though, is coal-fired power plants, and last month the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rules to limit emissions from new coal plants and said it would also write regulations to reduce emissions from existing facilities.

But the technology for capturing carbon has not been proved to work on a commercial basis, either in the United States or abroad. The Energy Department canceled its main project demonstrating the technology in 2008. It would have turned coal into a mixture of gases and captured the carbon dioxide before combustion.

The department eventually started over with a plan to burn coal in pure oxygen so the flue gases would be nearly pure carbon dioxide, eliminating the task of separating it from other gases. That plan was aided by financing from the federal stimulus program, although construction has not begun.

The institute’s new report said three American projects began operating in 2013, all based on natural gas. One of them, the Air Products Steam Methane Reformer Enhanced Oil Recovery Project, in Port Arthur, Tex., captures carbon from natural gas that is used in an oil refinery. The second, the Coffeyville Gasification Plant, recovers carbon dioxide from a fertilizer operation in southeast Kansas; a firm called Chaparral Energy compresses the gas and ships it 70 miles by pipeline to an oil field. The third project is the Lost Cabin Gas Plant in central Wyoming, where the gas is also used for oil recovery. Brazil started up one carbon capture plant, for use in an oil field.

Carbon capture experts say two important projects will open soon in North America: the Southern Company’s Kemper County plant in Mississippi, which will burn coal to make electricity and provide carbon dioxide for oil recovery, and the Boundary Dam coal plant in Saskatchewan, which will do the same.

Carbon capture and sequestration was demonstrated at a coal-burning power plant in New Haven, W.Va., built in 1980 and run by American Electric Power. But the utility shut down the carbon capture equipment in 2011 because it could not sell the carbon dioxide or recover the extra cost from its electricity customers, and the equipment consumed so much energy that, at full scale, the project would have sharply cut electricity production.