Carbon capture is a relatively new technology that scientists around the world hope will help fight the climate crisis. It involves capturing and storing excess carbon from the environment.

However, many carbon capture plants and machines require massive amounts of energy and have large carbon footprints in and of themselves.

The new solution from the Queen’s team involves a liquid that can remove up to 30% of carbon from natural gas fuels.

Professor Stuart James of Queen's School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering told Buzz: "We are currently partnering with a company that produces these units to do the gas purification.”

He said the team hoped to have a unit operating that can carry out the gas purification within the next two years and were working with a third party company to do so.

"We have been working on it for a little while and it can save energy in a number of processes.

"Biogas, which is produced from farm waste, comes with a mixture of methane mixed up with carbon dioxide.

"You really want to be able to separate those two because then you can pump the methane to people’s homes and they can use it as a renewable fuel.

"If you produce the methane from farm waste then it is not a fossil fuel and is just coming from our waste.”

James said that methane “is cleaner if you can capture the C02 from it.

"You pump the gas through a cyclic flow system, the gas mixes with the solvent [the team’s new development].

"Then you can pump that from the gas and it takes away the carbon dioxide with it and just leaves the methane.

"The solvent that contains the carbon dioxide gets pumped to another part where it’s heated and you put it in a vacuum and remove the C02 from it.

"Then you have to think of what to do with that - but there are ideas that you can pump that underground or try to turn it into something useful.

"The solvent, which becomes regenerated, goes back to pick up more C02.

"Compared to one of the standard solvents which is used, we can save up to about 30 per cent of the energy.

"We don’t know exactly what the final solutions to this [climate crisis] are going to look like but it could well be an important step."