Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Justin Rowlat and today we'll be looking at whether there is an explosive answer to the challenge of decarbonising some of the industries we all depend on.

Around the world, people are already planning for a hydrogen economy.

So there's the potential for us to use all that solar and wind

to produce vast quantities of hydrogen. And I think it's quite possible that we can then export

around the world. But not everyone is so optimistic. It is inefficient to make and it is inefficient to use

and so you don't want to use it

unless you really have to.

So can hydrogen replace hydrocarbons?

Find out here on Business Daily

on the BBC World Service.

Can you responsibly feed the world and reduce CO2 emissions?

Without mineral fertilizer, the world could only feed 40% of its population.

But to make mineral fertilizer, you need to rely on fossil fuels to generate the required production energy, resulting in CO2 emissions.

That's an advert by the Norwegian Chemicals Company, Yarra.

We don't often talk about the carbon cost of fertilizer, but ammonia fertilizer production

is responsible for 1% of global emissions and consumes almost 2% of global energy.

Then there's steel, cement and glass.

All these materials require the intense heat produced by burning fossil fuels,

especially natural gas.

And they also need to be decarbonised over the next 30 years

if we're to avoid catastrophic climate change.

So what if there was a different gas we could burn that didn't contain carbon?

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