London | For more than 40 years, pipelines from the depths of the North Sea to Scotland’s St Fergus gas terminal have brought up to a quarter of Britain’s natural gas ashore. Now, a Macquarie-backed project plans to send a slew of carbon back the other way.

Macquarie has upped its backing for British carbon-fighting start-up Storegga, which is developing one of the world’s first projects to hoover carbon dioxide directly from the air, before pumping it out to sea and burying it forever.