Open thread: steel without coal

The most pressing challenge for bringing climate change under control is replacing the world’s energy sources for electricity production, building heating and cooling, and transport. At the same time, humanity needs to learn how to do everything necessary to maintain a technological civilization without fossil fuels. That includes agriculture, as well as the production of crucial raw materials including steel.

This may be one area where hydrogen is a real solution:

[O]ne of the biggest industrial sources of carbon dioxide is not directly energy-related at all.

This is the reduction of iron ore (usually an oxide of iron) to the metal itself by reacting the ore with carbon monoxide made from coke. That produces iron and carbon dioxide. React the ore with hydrogen instead, and the waste product is water. Several firms—including ArcelorMittal, a multinational steelmaker, and a conglomerate of SSAB, a Finnish-Swedish steelmaker, LKAB, a Swedish iron-ore producer, and Vattenfall, an energy company, also Swedish—are examining this possibility.

Climate-safe sources of raw materials are necessary both practically and politically, since people point to the use of fossil fuels in their production as reasons why they cannot be abandoned.

13 thoughts on “Open thread: steel without coal”

  3. Low-carbon production of iron and steel: Technology options, economic assessment, and policy

    This paper explores existing approaches and potential decarbonization paths of the global iron and steel industry: fuel switching to low-C hydrogen, solid biomass, zero-carbon electricity substitution, and retrofit with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Achieving net-zero primary production with current available technologies faces many challenges from plant design fundamentals (BF or DRI), resource availability, carbon footprint uncertainty, and cost. Long-term opportunities to reach net-zero require asset replacement, combining approaches, or both. Short-term opportunities lie in CCS retrofit and fuel substitution, particularly blue hydrogen, carbon-neutral biomass, and zero-carbon electricity but only provide low or partial GHG reductions. For individual plants, the optimal local solution depends on geography, natural resources, infrastructure, and economies. Large-scale deployment is limited by resource availability, infrastructure, and policy incentives.

  6. And yet Japan does have a shot at hydrogen-superpowerdom. Behind the scenes its firms are pursuing unglamorous applications in heavy industry and other hard-to-decarbonise sectors. The government is egging them on.

    In June, for example, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (meti) laid out a plan to slash carbon emissions from steelmaking by shifting to “direct-reduction iron” (dri). This process both uses considerably less energy and can replace some climate-unfriendly ingredients of the requisite industrial chemistry (such as carbon monoxide). meti is lavishing billions of dollars on the industry to commercialise the use of hydrogen in blast furnaces by 2030. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a conglomerate, is building a zero-carbon steel mill in Austria. Nippon Steel wants its dri technology to be in commercial use by 2030.

    https://www.economist.com/business/2021/07/24/japan-inc-wants-to-become-a-hydrogen-superpower

  9. Phasing out the blast furnace to meet global climate targets

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435121004359

    • First estimation of committed emissions based on actual industry equipment data

    • The median historic blast furnace campaign length is 17 years

    • CO2 emissions of 21 Gt to be expected for immediate blast furnace phase-out case

    • 10 years of inaction and steel consumes 12% of the remaining 1.5°C carbon budget

  10. While green steel is still a dream in Boden, 20 miles to the southwest in the old steelworks in the city of Lulea, plans are underway at Hybrit — a different firm helmed by a private steel company together with state-run utility and mining companies Vattenfall and LKAB. The surrounding site is darkened by ashes from the old blast furnace, where iron ore was reduced into pure, molten iron using vast amounts of coking coal. Going forward, the aim is for iron to be produced using hydrogen made from wind power, smelted and refined using even more clean energy.

    “The fact that hydrogen can be used for iron ore reduction is old knowledge,” says Martin Pei, chief technical officer at SSAB, the steel company that co-owns the operation. “What’s new is testing it at commercial scale.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2022/sweden-green-revolution-steel-climate-change/

  11. The steel industry is the furthest along. h2gs’s mill in Boden is cleverly combining proven technologies at a big scale. The firm is building one of the world’s largest electrolysis plants to produce hydrogen. The gas is then pumped into a reactor, where it powers a process called “direct reduction”: under great heat, it snatches oxygen from iron ore, producing nothing but water and sponge iron. This material, so called because its surface is riddled with holes, is then refined into steel using an electric-arc furnace, which dispenses with coking coal.

    A half-hour drive south of Boden, hybrit—a joint venture between ssab, a steelmaker, Vattenfall, a power utility, and lkab, an iron-ore producer—is piloting a similar process. In July the board of Salzgitter, a German steel company, gave the nod to a €723m project called salcos that will swap its conventional blast furnaces for direct-reduction plants by 2033 (it will use some natural gas until it can secure enough hydrogen). Other big European steel producers, including ArcelorMittal and Thyssenkrupp, have similar plans.

    https://www.economist.com/business/2022/09/19/can-europe-decarbonise-its-heavy-industry

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