How carbon

Set back from the grand museums of Kensington’s Exhibition Road, deep in Imperial College London’s chemical engineering department, is the future of British industry. A tangle of gleaming stainless steel piping, stretching four storeys high, offers energy generators and heavy industries a solution to a pressing problem: the chance to wipe out their greenhouse gas emissions.

By catching gas from a power plant or steel cement factory before it is puffed into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can be absorbed into a liquid solution and then separated again, enabling it to be pumped away and stored harmlessly beneath the ground.

Imperial’s carbon-capture pilot plant is a training and research facility designed to create a model on which big industry can build. This £10 million project trains