At a networking event🕸 at a conf a while ago, the person next to me said she's working on emission reduction for the production of "Salpetersäure"⚗️.

[hanno@mastodon.social]

At a networking event at a conf a while ago, the person next to me said she's working on emission reduction for the production of "Salpetersäure"️. (Nitric Acid)
I barely knew what that is, but I got interested. And, you know how it goes, soon afterwards I ended up sending FOIA requests about the production of a Vitamin to Swiss authorities & was asking myself how many Caprolactam factories there are in Europe, and why, on earth, they aren't covered by the Emissison Trading System
🧵

[hanno@mastodon.social]

(Ok, not sure that's how it goes for other people, but if I get interested in something, that's how it goes.)
Why should you care? Well, you should care if you care about super-cheap options to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions. The production of Nitric Acid and a few other chemicals🧪 causes N₂O, which is the third-most important Greenhouse Gas, and has a warming effect 273 times larger than CO₂.

[hanno@mastodon.social]

And here's the good news: N2O is composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen, so one can turn it into Nitrogen and Oxygen. And that's really cheap compared to almost anything else you could do to reduce emissions.

After having covered this already twice in my newsletter, I made a short video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RByupbPSGd0

[hanno@mastodon.social]

Here's what I wrote about N₂O emissions in 2023: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-avoidable-super-greenhouse-gas-from-fertilizer-nylon-and-vitamin-b3-production.html
And here more recently about the situation of European Caprolactam producers, and how, unfortunately, many low-emitting factories in the EU are shutting down: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/some-of-the-cleanest-polyamide-and-nylon-precursor-factories-are-shutting-down.html