Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

If I told you I got excited by a piece of news from the steel industry last week, you’ll probably stop reading this. Please don’t. 

Steel is present in some form or the other pretty much everywhere in our daily life. But it is a metal that is taken for granted. Except when it comes to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. 

The steel industry is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, accounting for nearly 7% of all CO2 emissions on the planet. And much of the ~2 billion metric tonnes of steel produced by the industry for the trillion-dollar global market comes out of blast furnaces—a technology that steelmakers across the world have been optimising for over two centuries now. 

As climate concerns loom, though, they have only a fraction of that time to make major changes to that process, if not abandon it altogether. I mean, you only have to look at a typical blast furnace to realise it’s not exactly the most climate-friendly tech in the world:

So last week, Tata Steel, India’s largest steel producers by volume—and one of the top 15 in the world—said it conducted a trial where it injected hydrogen gas into the furnace to reduce the use of fossil fuel as injectants.