Around 37 billion tonnes of CO2 is released globally each year, mostly from burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil.

About 40pc is soaked up by oceans but the rest stays in the earth’s atmosphere.

Removing it is a huge challenge because overall concentrations remain tiny at around 426 parts per million, or 0.04pc.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is already spending £100m of taxpayers money on experimental projects to capture CO2 from the air, with plans to turn any successful ones into full-scale industries by 2040.

One idea is to grind up rocks that absorb CO2 such as basalt and spread the tiny particles across fields and other land. The particles would then convert atmospheric CO2 into minerals, locking them into the earth.

Another idea would use low carbon energy to pump air through reactive minerals, converting it into a construction material.

The problem with such schemes is that they are all energy intensive and so would need to be powered by wind, nuclear or solar energy so as not to generate as much CO2 as they save.

The study warned that aviation would always generate greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that every plane flying into or out of the UK will undermine its net zero targets. The only solution was to deploy direct air capture to remove CO2 at the same rate as it was emitted by aircraft, it said. 

“It is not possible to replace the entire fleet of fossil fuelled aircraft before 2050… direct air capture will be required to abate aviation emissions,” said the report.

The UK’s carbon footprint currently stands at about 750-800m tonnes of CO2, half of which is emitted within its borders while the rest comes from goods produced abroad and then imported.