UK has great opportunity to lead on carbon imprisonment

Britain is ideally placed geographically, scientifically and politically to lead the world in the theory and practice of capturing and storing unwanted carbon dioxide, says the Royal Society of Chemistry.

"We can and should take international pole position in this vital task," said the RSC energy manager Dr Jeff Hardy after the Queen's Speech today which committed the government to climate change legislation.

"We have access to undersea storage locations in the form of depleted gas and oil fields just off our coastline. Furthermore there is a tremendous science base in the UK, so long as we keep it strong; there also appears to be a political will to be in the vanguard of efforts to address climate change and global warming."

He added: "Additionally we will be able to retrofit old power plants to become part of the carbon capture process. And we should plan to build hyper efficient clean coal power stations. There are few countries in the world that have this valuable set of cards in their hands and if we were not to play them well the country would squander a major opportunity."

However, he warned: "We must move quickly so that we can employ the existing pipelines now used to bring ashore oil and gas from declining North seas fields to ship out carbon dioxide to those same depleted fields."