One of Scotland's leading energy providers has drawn up plans to capture carbon dioxide emissions and transport the waste gas for permanent burial in rocks beneath the North Sea.

ScottishPower hopes to win a UK Government-backed competition to build a pilot power plant that will capture CO2 and store it safely.

The power giant, owned by Iberdrola of Spain, hopes the ambitious project will lay the ground for a vast new business opportunity if future European legislation to tackle climate change demands polluters trap and store carbon emissions.

Nick Horler, ScottishPower chief executive, said the company believed it had identified a rock in the North Sea that could store all of Europe's emissions of CO2 for the next 600 years.

Its plan to install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology at the Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife is one of four entries submitted to the UK Government competition to develop the world's first CCS power station of a commercial scale by 2014.

ScottishPower proposes converting one of the four burner units at Scotland's largest power station with generating capacity to use CCS technology, built by Norwegian engineering group Aker.

The UK Government is providing about £100m for the project to build a 300- megawatt CCS unit, which would be about 10 times bigger than the largest CCS unit operating at present in the world.

The competition winner is expected to be announced next summer.