An industrial scale Venturi scrubber pilot plant has been used to provide detailed measurements of pressure drop as a function of a broad range of operating conditions. Modelling approaches suitable for design predictions of ΔP have been examined. While numerical models provide clearer understanding of the phenomena occurring in scrubbers, analytical models offer the most promise of improving industrial design practice. These models concentrate on the work done on the liquid phase and ignore turbulence-induced gas phase accelerational (dry pressure drop) losses. However, the experiments show that the latter are important even in well-designed, classical Venturi shapes. Available models are compared, for the first time, with actual wet pressure drop data and agreement is shown to be good. By isolating the dry pressure drop effect, design models can be applied to a wider range of Venturi geometries.