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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."
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
"Sweden and Finlands effort to replce coking coal used in steel production."
Here in Luxembourg, the site of Arcelor-Mittal, the biggest steel producer of the world they have been using only electricity to make steel out of scrap metal and this for decades.
Using iron ore is so passé apparently.
Not sure what you are talking about. They are one of the biggest consumers of iron-ore on the planet and is a huge polluter.
> I thought that the carbon in steel making was charcoal deriving from trees?
Yikes, dude, they stopped doing that 200 years ago.
They used to use charcoal because it contains very few contaminates. The process of making it, which is lengthy and energy intensive, burns off many of the remaining nasties. However, the cost of making it, and the amount of wood it required, was astonishing, and was the primary reason steel was so expensive.
Everyone knew that coal was cheap and plentiful, but when you tried to use it for steel production the results were useless. Today we know that the problem is the sulphur content, which at the time was simply it's "offensive odour". The solution was found, IIRC, the beer breweries, who were going out of business because they couldn't afford wood to burn because the steel makers were using it all up (one of the reasons lager/pilsner became so popular). They found that if you heated the coal it would off-gas, and when that stopped the result is "coke" and burns clean. This had been known since the 1500s, but never became popular until there was a need for it.
Adopting coke for steel production was one of the great advances of the 18th century.
"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.'"
I don't think they're talking about the intentional carbon impurities, but the fossil fuel currently used to generate the heat in the furnace. I rather doubt all that energy comes from bio-charcoal.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Coke is made from coal.
Making it from oil would be idiotic ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Where do you see anything about "the largest source of CO2"? Nowhere in the summary or article. They mention "one of the hardest to clean", and that's not surprising, since the burning of carbon is actually used as part of the chemical reaction in the traditional process, and 5% is a massive percentage for a single narrow industry.
As I recall the Bitcoin stuff is all based on projected trend lines, which are poor predictors when looking at infant technologies, but does serve as a cautionary note as to potential real cost of trying to scale bitcoin up to common currency levels.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
The above recollection is not correct. Coke was considered an improvement in quality, and brought about an "alteration which all England admired"—the coke process allowed for a lighter roast of the malt, leading to the creation of what by the end of the 17th century was called pale ale. The coke production process was not known since the 1500s. A more primitive process existed and was the reason why it was not popular for use in the production of iron. "In 1709, Abraham Darby I established a coke-fired blast furnace to produce cast iron. Coke's superior crushing strength allowed blast furnaces to become taller and larger. The ensuing availability of inexpensive iron was one of the factors leading to the Industrial Revolution." Additionally, "in 1768 John Wilkinson built a more practical oven for converting coal into coke. Wilkinson improved the process by building the coal heaps around a low central chimney built of loose bricks and with openings for the combustion gases to enter, resulting in a higher yield of better coke. With greater skill in the firing, covering and quenching of the heaps, yields were increased from about 33% to 65% by the middle of the 19th century. The Scottish iron industry expanded rapidly in the second quarter of the 19th century, through the adoption of the hot-blast process in its coalfields."
Nearly all coke used in steel production is made from low sulfur metallurgical coal.
The American steel industry was located in Pennsylvania because of the quality of the coal there. It is cheaper to bring the iron ore to the coal than the other way around.
Today, the biggest producers of metallurgical coal and coke are Dongbei (Manchuria) and Neimenggu (Inner Mongolia).
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
"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."
Abandoning nuclear is the stupidest thing ever. Modern reactors can be made effectively totally safe.
Most of the high-level waste is gone after a few years and the volume of low-level waste is far less than the mountains of (also toxic) waste from other processes. 1 cubic kilometre would hold it all.
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.
Wrong. Most coke is made from synthetic sources and is a byproduct of refining. It is called petcoke. But I guess you are the expert. I'm not sure why I get modded down, but you guys seem to not like the truth.
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
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.
That is what makes it suspicious. Sounds like the hype machine is in full effect and they are trying to attract investors.
> We will never reach zero carbon energy without nuclear power
False dichotomy: *zero* carbon is not a goal nor should it be. No one is proposing this except people pushing some sort of political agenda, typically to tell us why its impossible, like here. So, as is typical, let's start the stream of completely incorrect BS... 3...2...1...
> Solar power is shit, it costs too much,
Solar power is among the least expensive forms of electrical energy ever introduced by humanity.
In CAPEX terms, it is the cheapest, ever. Utility-scale PV plants in the US currently cost around $1/Wp, whereas wind is about 1.50, gas about 1.25, coal ~3 and nuclear ~10.
https://www.lazard.com/media/450337/lazard-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-110.pdf
In LCOE terms, it is among the cheapest, along with wind and gas. PV 20 year PPAs are currently being signed at price points under 5 cents/kWh, and the last record I saw was a plant in Arizona at 2.49 cents:
http://www.cap-az.com/documents/meetings/2018-06-07/1704-8b-Action-Brief-Power-Portfolio---060718--solar--rev.pdf
In contrast, nuclear PPAs are around 12 cents/kWh.
> doubles the cost and we can put plants on rooftops too
Well, I've seen lots and lots of PV on rooftops (including my own), but I have yet to see a nuclear reactor on someone's roof. So BS on that.
> Transportation energy needs to be from synthesized hydrocarbons primarily
Which is funny reading on /., where we are all aware of Tesla (which propelled EVs to become 8% of the Canadian market *in total*) and outselling the Corolla. And in contrast, we have ethanol?
> make those large cargo ships nuclear powered too
This has, of course, been tried and repeatedly abandoned. It's hopelessly expensive.
> There will not be any steel industry without large amounts of reliable energy
There's a very large concrete plant up the road (St. Mary's), and a very large steel plant (Arcelor). They spool up and down based on the spot price.
So it's clear you know nothing about any of these topics. I suspect you have not actually worked in any of these industries.
> Modern reactors can be made effectively totally safe
Unfortunately, they cannot be made economic.
That's all anyone really cares about.
Making coke from oil does not make any sense at all, unless as in petcoke it is the remaining waste product. ... not even mentioning how much coke is coming form other sources)
https://www.worldcoal.org/file... (70% of all COAL used in steel production
Why you get modded down, I don't know. There is a second /. account mimicing a binary number. One of them (you) is only making fun posts which are a so sarcastic it is difficult to grasp them as fun ... most of the time he (you?) gets modded up and down ... :P
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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