It’s here! The first hydrogen journal for the Rhenish mining area: H2Revier. Printed copies (on recycled paper) of H2Revier are available in the towns, cities, and municipalities surrounding the Inden, Hambach, and Garzweiler open-cast mines as a supplement in the Sunday newspaper. H2Revier can also be read worldwide on our homepage or as a download.

We at the Helmholtz Cluster for a Sustainable and Infrastructure-Compatible Hydrogen Economy (HC-H2) have an exciting mission. We want to be part of the energy supply of the future while also helping to drive the creation of new jobs to replace those that will be lost in the lignite mining industry.

There are no simple answers to the questions regarding an environmentally friendly energy supply of the future. But we are sure that hydrogen will be a good solution to a number of these problems. With this journal, we hope to give you an idea of the direction in which the hydrogen economy might develop in future. We also want to highlight that the issue of an environmentally friendly energy supply concerns us all – on a global level, but also here in the Rhenish mining area in particular, where people have made a good living from lignite for a long time. We have an edge in terms of knowledge here thanks to the work of Forschungszentrum Jülich, the surrounding universities, and innovative enterprises. We want to utilize this strength and turn the Rhenish mining area into a region that will in future export energy technologies to the whole world and not just produce energy for Germany.

The H2Revier editorial team – coordinator Dr. Susanne Spörler (left), designer Clarissa Reisen (right, pictured at the printing of the journal), and science journalist Guido Jansen – hope you have as much fun reading the journal as they had putting together the first issue.