Hanno's blog

Noticing that my old blog still gets considerable traffic and has a substantial number of people accessing its feeds, I thought I should announce a project I recently started.

When discussing climate change and solutions, we often consider actions like replacing coal power plants with clean energy sources. But while these are important, they are the easy part. There is a whole range of emission sources that are much harder to avoid.

Over a decade ago, I covered climate change for a German online publication. Due to the carbon capture and storage debate, I learned that some industrial processes have emissions that cannot be easily avoided. The largest and most well-known examples are steelmaking, where coal chemically reduces iron oxide to iron, and cement production, which uses carbon-containing minerals as an input material.

But while these are the most well-known and emission-wise most significant examples, they are not the only ones.

I eventually found this so interesting that I started my own publication about it in the form of a newsletter. Several things contributed to this: I wanted to discuss topics like these more in-depth and publish more in English, and I saw that multiple other journalists in the field of energy and climate started running their own newsletters, podcasts, or other publications.

If this sounds interesting to you, check the stories I already published. Some topics I have already covered include easily avoidable N₂O emissions in the chemical industry, an overview of CCS, issues with green electricity certificates from Iceland and Norway (another update on that one will come soon), an experimental, fully electrified steelmaking process, and most recently about methanol as an electricity storage technology. And if you find them interesting, please subscribe. If you prefer that, an RSS feed is also available.