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A New Method To Produce Steel Could Cut 5 Percent of CO2 Emissions (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via MIT Technology Review: A lumpy disc of dark-gray steel covers a bench in the lab space of Boston Metal, an MIT spinout located a half-hour north of its namesake city. It's the company's first batch of the high-strength alloy, created using a novel approach to metal processing. Instead of the blast furnace employed in steelmaking for centuries, Boston Metal has developed something closer to a battery. Specifically, it's what's known as an electrolytic cell, which uses electricity -- rather than carbon -- to process raw iron ore.
If the technology works at scale as cheaply as the founders hope, it could offer a clear path to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from one of the hardest-to-clean sectors of the global economy, and the single biggest industrial source of climate pollution. After working on the idea for the last six years, the nine-person company is shifting into its next phase. If it closes a pending funding round, the startup plans to build a large demonstration facility and develop an industrial-scale cell for steel production. The process to produce steel results in around 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere annually, "adding up to around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent paper in Science," MIT Technology Review reports.
The electrolytic cell that Boston Metal developed was realized after it was proposed to be used to extract oxygen from the moon's surface. "The by-product was molten metal," the report says. "But producing something like steel would require an anode made from cheap materials that wouldn't corrode under high temperatures or readily react with iron oxide. In 2013, [MIT chemist] Sadoway and MIT metallurgy researcher Antoine Allanore published a paper in Nature concluding that anodes made from chromium-based alloys might check all those boxes."
If the technology works at scale as cheaply as the founders hope, it could offer a clear path to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from one of the hardest-to-clean sectors of the global economy, and the single biggest industrial source of climate pollution. After working on the idea for the last six years, the nine-person company is shifting into its next phase. If it closes a pending funding round, the startup plans to build a large demonstration facility and develop an industrial-scale cell for steel production. The process to produce steel results in around 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere annually, "adding up to around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent paper in Science," MIT Technology Review reports.
The electrolytic cell that Boston Metal developed was realized after it was proposed to be used to extract oxygen from the moon's surface. "The by-product was molten metal," the report says. "But producing something like steel would require an anode made from cheap materials that wouldn't corrode under high temperatures or readily react with iron oxide. In 2013, [MIT chemist] Sadoway and MIT metallurgy researcher Antoine Allanore published a paper in Nature concluding that anodes made from chromium-based alloys might check all those boxes."
I thought that the carbon in steel making was charcoal deriving from trees?
i.e. it's CO2 neutral.
Or does it come from some other source?
The process sounds a lot like how aluminum gets refined. Aluminum doesn't exist in nature as a pure metal - the ores (primarily bauxite) are mostly aluminum oxides. To break apart (reduce) the oxides, huge electric currents are used: a battery in reverse. (This is why a lot of aluminum refining happens in places with lots of cheap electricity - Canada, Iceland, etc.)
In traditional iron smelting, the oxides are reduced by the addition of carbon in a blast furnace, producing CO and CO2 as a waste product. Replacing the chemical, carbon-based process with an electrical process would indeed be beneficial.
Assuming everything works out, can it produce iron from ore cheaper than existing carbon oxidation based processes? (Probably not.)
Very little raw iron is made in the U.S. now. The iron production industry has moved to China and India, or Europe (including Russia). If it is a more expensive process then governmental action of various forms will be needed to achieve adoption in the places were pig iron is still being produced in quantity.
BTW, most of U.S. coal export is metallurgical for making iron overseas. Adoption of this process will accelerate the decline of the U.S. coal industry.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Another huge contributor of CO2 is the production of Portland cement for concrete: the current method produces about 10% of global CO2 emissions.
(this is not a
Did w not hear only last week that bitcoin production alone is creating more CO2 than anything and is sufficient to boil us all?
Why is EVERYTHING someone finds a way to shave off some CO2 suddenly become The Largest Source Of CO2?
This reeks of bullshit and faked up Grant Money Science.
Bring steel production back to US. An environmental plan that works.
http://www.hybritdevelopment.com/
Sweden and Finlands effort to replce coking coal used in steel production.
I'm a Republican and I don't believe in CO2 - only in Jesus! Of course with the DUmocrats in charge of the House, we're going to be seeing plenty of stupid shit about the envorment. ANd all these nancy pancy liburl nonsense issues being brought up when or leader Donald J Trump is trying to save the country from caravans!
Those people are gonna come up here, storm the border, rape our jobs, kill our women, and mow our lawns if they ain't stopped at the border!!
So let's stop with this envorment nonsense and let's concentrate on reel issues!!
-Billy Bob
Will this result in hexavalent chromium as a byproduct? How would cost compare to the current method? Seems like this will require legislation to become useful.
This is great. Lets get CO2 under control, so that we can continue in safety to ravage, plunder, expropriate, exploit and destroy Nature in all the other ways we are doing. Onwards to 10 billion !! (but carbon-netural).
So, if you switched to a renewable source of carbon, e.g. charcoal from renewable sources, that would cut 100% of the new CO2 emitted, whereas this only cuts 5%.
Erm.... if you're going to make a major change to steel production, IMHO, it would be better to do it by switching the carbon source.
"adding up to around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions"
Don't get me wrong, reducing this is a good thing.
But consider the fact that half of all the CO2 comes from cars. So in other words, improving fuel economy of cars by 10%, which we can do trivially, would have the same effect of reducing emissions in the steel industry by 100%, which is impossible.
When solving a problem, you start with the biggest bang. That's cars.
Also, cold periods are far more deadly than warm periods.
[citation needed]
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why AREN'T environmentalists screaming about CARBONATED soft drinks?
Sugar water is pumped with ***Carbon Dioxide*** gas to make it bubbly. Perhaps nobody realizes the major ingredient in fizzy drinks is the whole point of what causes climate change. Everyone is preoccupied with getting rid of plastic bags and straws.
We will never reach zero carbon energy without nuclear power. At least not any time soon. There will not be any steel industry without large amounts of reliable energy, and if that's going to be zero carbon then it must be nuclear. Since this process requires lots of electricity to function, and consistent enough to keep everything hot, then it will need nuclear power.
We need nuclear, wind, and hydro power for electricity. Solar power is shit, it costs too much, it's unreliable, and takes sunlit land that would be far better used for growing food. (Don't tell me you'll put it on rooftops so it doesn't take valuable land, that only doubles the cost and we can put plants on rooftops too.)
Transportation energy needs to be from synthesized hydrocarbons primarily. The densest form of hydrogen storage is attaching it to a carbon, and it makes it an easily transported liquid that can be burned in our current vehicles without modification. Hydrogen as a fuel is useful only for rockets while cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes need gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene. While trains can be electrified there's practical limits on that which diesel trains do not have. Nuclear powered ships should not be only for the world's navies, make those large cargo ships nuclear powered too.
Industrial processes like cement and steel production are minor compared to the CO2 from electricity and transportation. It's nice to think about such things but even the article mentions it will be decades to get this technology to the market. Nuclear power can displace large amounts of coal and natural gas very quickly and needs no new technology. Any claims of problems on deploying nuclear power is either a lie, mere politics, or far more easily solved compared to global warming.
This steel making technology is worthless unless it has electricity from nuclear power. Let's get some nuclear power now.
All you people who whine "solve problems on earth before spending on space" note that this came out of research for space (moon) exploration.
This conspiratorial, counterfactual nonsense should be looked down upon at least as harshly as holocaust denial. It's just as clearly counterfactual and almost as clearly denying past deaths, and is more immediately and effectively paving the way for future ones. It isn't merely anti-semitic but anti-human (the latter being a superset of the former), and the scale and immediacy of the harm it threatens and has successfully brought about is far greater.
Holocaust denial aims to bring genocide against Jews, but climate conspiracism/denial aims to bring ruin to all of human civilization, causing far more death and suffering, stunting humanity's future permanently. So why does society treat climate denial with kid gloves compared to holocaust denial? My guess is that it comes down to emotional reasons. It doesn't feel as personally cruel to target all of humanity as it does to target a minority.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Where does the electricity come from?
Probably coal.
Here you go:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weather-deaths/27657269/
It took me a few seconds on Google to find.
I've made that point as well, and I ask why aren't the soda companies being shutdown by the federal government for injecting pollution into a product consumed by so many people?
Someone forgot to mention in the lede, any electrolytic process is going to use scads of electricity, just like aluminum refining, and places with iron ore are like down by the seashore, where there is little or no cheap hydro power available. So you're going to have to build HUGE solar or middling nuke plants to refine steel this way. And price is still going to be an issue, as steel at aluminum prices isn't going to fly, not by a factor of 5 or worse,
So even if CO2 caused warming, for which there's no evidence, it wouldn't be bad.
Clearly you've been inspired by the denialist staircase.
Ezekiel 23:20
1) Where do you think the carbon dioxide is sourced from?
2) What do you think would have happened to it if it wasn't put into drinks?
Ezekiel 23:20
same shit different decade
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
Elemental metal via electrolysis requires a hellish amount of electrical power, that's why aluminum is the easy win for recycling since 90% the energy saved.
They could well up carbon emissions if China uses this method with all the lovely new coal plants they're building globally to fuel their offshore manufacturing.
Remember kiddies, it doesn't really matter what the USA does any more for global carbon emissions, it matters a great deal what China's policies and methods are, and what India's will be in about 3 decades. Every time I post this truth some idiots here start whining about "per capita"...which is bullshit when the planet's carbon making "capita" are under Chinese policy.
Exactly. Every decade someone comes up with this same idea. If this idea worked and was viable it wouldn't need investor funding.
Kennicott mines in SLC burn CO2 albeit for copper. Inherently the incentive beyond copper is in gold. The slurry transport system deposits gold in the linings of its tubes which systematically are taken out of production to be processed for their value in gold.
Find the incentive and the electric production method gets adopted FAST
Behold! The most stupid comment on the Internet (at least for the next five minutes)
Do you even know what "Investor funding" is?
You could have changed "investor funding" to "money" or "employees" and it would still have been just as stupid.
And on that note, aren't you the idiot that claims that it's hard to move from coal to cleaner forms of electricity above?
Are you just throwing out random trolls to see how quickly mods can pick up on it?
You millenials are funny. Every time you read something you think it is new and novel. It isn't. People have been talking about changing steel production for decades. In fact, some of it is electrified. And it didn't require a "start up" and millions in VC funding to do it. You guys also think that switching out from coal/gas/etc is easy, because you haven't actually lived in reality yet.
1) Where do you think the carbon dioxide is sourced from?
2) What do you think would have happened to it if it wasn't put into drinks?
1) Dead dinosaurs?
2) Explode?
He knows he's in deep fucking shit now. Hence all that stuff with Acosta yesterday. Trump thinks posting pipe bombs to CNN is OK because they asked him difficult questions and they're very rude. What a pathetic cunt that man is. Looking forward to seeing him and his whole fucking family rounded up and arrested. Traitors, along with the russiapublicans shielding them from justice.
a third of the USA's energy comes from coal, it will be hard and expensive and a long haul to change that.
yes, it should be done
but people like you are clueless about engineering and power infrastructure, you know nothing and believe social media hype