Mitsubishi Heavy To Build Biggest Zero-Carbon Steel Plant (nikkei.com) 135
Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will soon complete in Austria the world's largest steel plant capable of attaining net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Mitsubishi Heavy, through a British unit, is constructing the pilot plant at a complex of Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine. Trial operation is slated to begin in 2021. From a report: The plant will use hydrogen instead of coal in the reduction process for iron ore. The next-generation equipment will produce 250,000 tons of steel product a year. The global steel industry generated about 2 billion tons of CO2 in 2018, according to the International Energy Agency -- double the volume in 2000. The steel sector's share among all industries grew 5 percentage points to 25%. Iron ore reduction accounts for much of the CO2 emissions in steelmaking. Japanese steelmakers including Nippon Steel are developing hydrogen-consuming reduction processes based on the conventional blast furnace design. Mitsubishi Heavy's plant adopts a process called direct reduced iron, or DRI. New blast furnaces require trillions of yen (1 trillion yen equals $9.6 billion) in investment. Although DRI equipment produces less steel, the investment is estimated at less than half of blast furnaces. For DRI to attain the same level of cost-competitiveness as blast furnaces, low-cost hydrogen will be key. Market costs for hydrogen now stand at around 100 yen per normal cu. meter, estimates the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Hydrogen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Hydrogen (Score:1)
Re: Hydrogen (Score:4, Funny)
Austria Australia what's the difference?
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Re: Hydrogen (Score:2)
Georgia, Georgia, .... oh, wait!
George Eeyore LA Forge Washington state? Am I doing this right?
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There are lots of things that can terminate you that come from Australia.
Re: Hydrogen (Score:5, Funny)
There are lots of things that can terminate you that come from Australia.
The Terminator came from Austria.
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The real question is what is not different. Because pretty much everything is.
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Australia - Austria = Alabama
=> Australia = Austria + Alabama
hmm
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Australia - Austria = Alabama
=> Australia = Austria + Alabama
hmm
If you've ever seen the bogan country bums get dressed in dirndl and lederhosen and celebrate oktoberfest you'd realise you're not actually far off.
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Most of the time is not an answer to the "Dumb question, but where does the hydrogen come from?", which was asked in reference to the project being described in TFS & TFA.
In the proposed concept the hydrogen will come from splitting water molecules using renewably generated electricity.
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Even dumber question, but where does the carbon come from?
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Iron ore is various oxides of iron. To refine it, you want to convince the oxygen to leave the iron, but you have to give it a new friend. Traditionally you use carbon, in the form of coal. For example:
2Fe2O3 + 3C -> 4Fe + 3CO2
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They explicitly add carbon to the iron. That's what makes it steel. That's what makes it strong.
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Oh, was your post a silly play on the term "carbon free?"
Never mind then.
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They bought a hydrogen supply chain already. They see net zero carbon industry as the next big thing, the way they stay ahead and avoid the race to the bottom.
This could have been British, such a shame we sabotaged our country.
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This could have been British, such a shame we sabotaged our country.
Indeed. Nobody sane will invest in the UK for a long time.
Nuclear fission power (Re:Hydrogen) (Score:1)
Dumb question, but where does the hydrogen come from?
Nuclear fission power plants.
At least that's where the hydrogen will come from eventually if Australia wants hydrogen that's low carbon (because nothing is zero carbon), abundant, low in cost, and domestically produced. If it's not abundant and low cost (which is really two ways to describe the same economic phenomenon) then this carbon free steel will not be competitive with imported steel. If the hydrogen is imported, which will be expensive because hydrogen, then Australia may as well import the steel
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Electricity from wind and solar will not suffice because these are intermittent energy sources which means the electricity will be intermittent, which means it will not be abundant, which means it will not be low cost.
Intermittent and abundant and have nothing to do with each other.
You can have an intermittent source, which is abundant, like Germanien wind, or Saharas solar.
Sorry, no idea why anti change and pro nuke idiots still spread that stupid bullshit.
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The wind in Germany blows always. And gas prices are pretty normal.
Nothing changed, moron.
Half of Germanies nuclear plants are already shut down ... sigh. No idea why you take countries as arguments for your bullshit arguments where you have no clue about.
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You can have an intermittent source, which is abundant, like Germanien wind
Right, that abundant German wind. Would that be the same wind that didn't blow and left Germans with higher energy costs, higher CO2 emissions, and greater reliance on natural gas from Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sorry, no idea why anti change and pro nuke idiots still spread that stupid bullshit.
Bullshit? Okay, you call me when Germany closes their last nuclear power plant. I'll expect your call sometime around half past never. The German government has been two years from closing their nuclear power plants for 15 years now. They'll be building new nuclear power plants in 2025 at this rate.
The original law for ending nulcear power in Germany from 2002 specified 2021 as end date. There were some changes but the end date of the current law from 2011 states that the last plant has to be shut down by the end of 2022. In 2011 eight reactors were shut down, one in 2015, one in 2017, one in 2019, three will be shut down in 2021, and the remaining three in 2022. And no, this decline in production by nuclear (2010: 141 TWh vs. 2019: 75 TWh) was not replaced by gas which is more or less the same (201
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It looks like they will be aiming for green hydrogen (electrolysis) for this. This isn't actually as bad as it sounds. Normally when we say we create hydrogen as a fuel from green energy it means that somewhere else dirty energy continues to thrive. But in this case they are substituting coal firing for it so it actually has a huge benefit.
Honestly for this application though they should focus on blue hydrogen instead.
Competition with China? (Score:2)
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By governments regulating that steel used in new construction be "carbon neutral" and not from the environmentally abusing cheaper sources.
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The same way that any product is tracked back to manufacturer? Steel has to perform to a defined grade, have a certain tensile strength and all that.
I admit that with concrete, this actually IS tested on-site; they pull samples from every pour, make a 6" x 12" standard cylinder, and crush it 30 days later in a press...and the whole pour has to be torn out if the sample fails because the concrete chemistry is bad.
But that's because concrete is actually made on site.
Steel, they don't take it away and test
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Wow, that could be very expensive if there are multiple layers of concrete already poured.
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if there are multiple layers of concrete already poured
You won't be given a permit to pour until the local steel inspector comes out, takes a sample of the rebar, submits it to a lab and gets a report back in two weeks.
From the greenies point of view, this is success. No more construction and progress. We can all go back to a pastoral lifestyle as hunter-gatherers. Chasing and eating bugs.
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Don't know about that, I've seen them pour more frequently than every two weeks.
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And from the capitalist viewpoint it is a total failure. There's profit in rebuilding a building every few years. Fucking greenies trying to force buildings to last and not collapse and kill a bunch of people, some of who would only be injured and therefore creating more profit for someone deserving of having another yacht.
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So, you take the word of the seller that it's "carbon-neutral" steel, aye. About what I thought....
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Steel, they don't take it away and test it, the product is just tracked back to its manufacture, where samples were tested.
So, you take the word of the seller that it's "carbon-neutral" steel, aye. About what I thought....
I love how you completely ignored what the GP said to try to make a point. Instead you've managed to do something else entirely - make yourself look like a complete fucking idiot.
I know this is going to be hard to understand, but coal is kind-of obvious on the scale that we're talking about here. Are you unfamiliar with what a smelting operation looks like? Do you think everyone is going to miss the railroad built right up to the steel mill and the train cars filled with coal rolling in all of the time?
If y
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This is neat new technology, but how are they going to compete with Chinese steel that is made the conventional (and cheaper) way?
Better quality. Most Chinese steel is in the average range, which is fine for many things but not for all. Producing steel in Europe is only cost-effective if you aim at high to highest quality steels.
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By producing special steels, aka "alloys"?
Steel is not steel, there are probably more kinds of steels on the planet than all other alloys combined.
Bad Title (Score:4, Informative)
Won't Zero-Carbon Steel be too soft to build heavy, industrial equipment?
Re:Bad Title (Score:5, Informative)
However, "Zero Carbon" has a meaning outside of its individual words.
It means zero carbon emissions involved in the production of the product. This term is in use internationally, all the way up to the UN.
So the title may be bad, but only because of widespread ignorance.
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This term is in use internationally, all the way up to the UN.
So the title may be bad, but only because of widespread ignorance.
It's a terrible headline. It should have been "Mitsubishi Heavy to build biggest zero-carbon-emissions steel plant."
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Should the world stop using all terms you don't know?
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I'm with the GP on this. Just because we have an accepted use of a term when it crosses fields in a way that it could be ambiguous we should actually modify the terms appropriately. This is not so dissimilar to watercooling in PCs where all in one units are called "closed loop coolers" and some numpty decided that when you build your own it should be called "open loop cooler". It's also "widely accepted meaning" of the terms, but that doesn't change the fact that those people who are building "open loops" a
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Ambiguity in normal text, including headlines, is not abnormal for English.
You often have to use your brain to resolve the ambiguity.
As an example:
Mitusbishi Heavy To Build Biggest Zero-Carbon Steel Plant
Are we talking Zero-Carbon Steel? Or a Zero-Carbon Steel Plant?
Well, there is literally no such thing as zero-carbon steel, so that only leaves one possibility.
Your threshold for ambiguity is "partial knowledge of what steel is"; i.e., you know that steel has carbon, but you do not know that i
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Ambiguity in normal text, including headlines, is not abnormal for English.
You often have to use your brain to resolve the ambiguity.
But that's the point. If you are distracted while parsing a headline, it's a bad headline. If it were an intended double entendre, that would be acceptable, but the writer didn't address it in the article. This has the unfortunate effect of making the writer look unknowledgeable about the subject matter.
Well, there is literally no such thing as zero-carbon steel, so that only leaves one possibility.
That's what I had originally thought, but searching led me to this Quora response [quora.com], which sounds plausible to me. Top rated response is citing what appears to be an authoritative reference. I can't check it s
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We'll add chrome, nickel, and molybdenum and limit the carbon to less than 0.1% and, I don't know, call it "stainless".
Use nickel instead. Or uranium. (Re:Bad Title) (Score:1)
Won't Zero-Carbon Steel be too soft to build heavy, industrial equipment?
Just add nickel until it's strong enough. If that sounds expensive then there's a lot of other metals for trying to make strong and inexpensive alloys from.
Maybe Australia can use all that uranium they are mining to make structural iron alloys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They appear too stupid yet to realize that all that uranium they are exporting to China and Japan could be used domestically for energy production. It may in fact be how they end up making all this zero carbon hydrogen to make the
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Electricity production in Australia is cheaper with wind and solar. ...
And you do not make steel from iron oxide by using electric current. Everyone except you know that
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Yes, you wrote that running steel plant with nuclear power is cheaper ... so?
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You implied they should either make the hydrogen with nuclear power instead of solar or make the steel directly with nuclear power.
Perhaps you should reread your posts before clicking submit, that would at least reduce your nonsensical calling for names of countries you have no clue about.
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Nope, Australia won't do that.
You are simply a nuclear freak who has no idea about energy production.
Why would anyone build a nuke to produce electricity to produce hydrogen? When he would get the electricity from solar for close to nothing? Sorry, you are delusional.
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You do not need a battery to store energy to produce hydrogen at midnight.
You produce hydrogen during daylight.
That is the point.
Oh, right, the wind is always blowing somewhere and Australia will just make up the nightly demand with wind. You are hallucinating again. /.
Well, Mr. Dumbass. I suggest to open a map. And look where or what Australia is. Yes, there is always wind.
No idea how one who is obviously completely braindead, is able to type in his password to log on on
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Dude, it is not my job to educate you.
But I give you a small hint: south australia has not really any wind power. Oops
So they most certainly ot lose grid power because the wind is gone. Seriously?
Again: there is always wind in Australia, you googled nothing, moron.
Australia is 2500 miles wide, and depending where you look, about 2200 miles high.
The coastline is > 16,000 miles long.
It spans nearly 4 "physical" timezones -> it is physically impossible to have no wind all over Australia.
Hint: when you on
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Sorry, your IQ must be close to zero.
What has the installed wind power to do with: "there is no wind"?
Perhaps you should read the links you post first?
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Sure but if you have a bunch you don't need, I have to make a few thousand transformers by June and I'd be happy to evaluate it if you can provide a sample of thin sheets. ;)
Since it is called "steel," I'm assuming it has a bunch of Si and a little Ni, right?
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That's what you complain about when there's this train wreck?
"New blast furnaces require trillions of yen (1 trillion yen equals $9.6 billion) in investment. "
Do the substitution, that reads:
"New blast furnaces require $9.6 billions in investment."
That is complaint worthy.
Read the Article...Wow (Score:3)
This is pie in the sky. I started to laugh when I got to the part of hydrogen cost. It needs to drop the cost from 100 per normal cu meter to under 10 to make it feasible. Really? That's a factor of 10 reduction. The cost is not in the same ballpark. And to make hydrogen for fuel it takes.... energy. Wonder what will be powering that? There is no free lunch.
Well I hope they can, cause if they do, it will open up alot of other tech, like fuel cell cars and such.
Re:Read the Article...Wow (Score:5, Informative)
I saw the cost and did some conversions. This should be $0.97 / 0.082 = $11.83/kg.
The "retail" cost of hydrogen at a local fueling station is $13.05/kg. This is a high profit item for the vendor (at least after capital costs), so the supply cost at 100 yen/m3 must be an error. I have heard current values under $8/kg to produce the H2 and targets under $4/kg. These would make a lot more sense.
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The cost of photovoltaic modules has declined by 99% over the last 40 years. A significant part of that drop has occurred in the last decade.
https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-1120
The cost of lithium batteries has fallen nearly 90% in the last 10 years.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/battery-prices-have-fallen-88-percent-over-the-last-decade/
Anybody who thinks the current cost of hydrogen is predictive of the future cost is an idiot.
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The cost of Hydrogen is determined by the cost of either that of methane OR electricity.
Methane isn't going to come down in price so dramatically as Solar has, since it has had decades of cost reduction already.
If the cost of electricity reduces, then alternative technologies will also benefit.
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Renewables are good for the planet, but they don't drastically reduce the price of electricity. Integrating renewable sources into the grid, and figuring out and implementing storage options such as battery banks, doesn't come cheap. And of course solar cells, windmills, etc. aren't free.
Eventually we'll reap the benefit of "free" sunshine and wind, but it will take a while.
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Eventually we'll reap the benefit of "free" sunshine and wind, but it will take a while.
No, it doesn't work that way. The more wind and solar power added to the electrical grid the more variable the supply becomes. That comes with a cost. This means having to add more storage, or more dispatchable electricity sources. The most popular choices for dispatchable power are hydro and natural gas, because they are cheap in many places around the world. When a nation is short on both then power from wind and sun isn't so cheap because the backup to them isn't so cheap. Germany found this out.
El
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The price of Methane is mostly determined the resource it is competing with, and not its "cost".
And that resources are: oil.
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Again, the resource it is competing with is oi..
If you do not grasp that then feel free to google how gas pricing works.
So, if solar power gets cheaper then so does natural gas? That sounds about right.
No, it does not. This two energy sources are no competition to each other, how stupid are you?
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If there was a strategically critical industry that required a bunch of hydrogen, perhaps some smart cookie would start producing it using all this negative priced renewable energy we keep hearing about.
Re:Read the Article...Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen electrolysis is about 80% efficient.
It takes about 35 kwh of electrical energy to generate one kg of H2.
A cubic meter of H2 weighs about 0.082 kg.
So about 3 kwh is needed to generate one cubic meter of H2.
At 10 cents per cubic meter, that is 3 cents per kwh, which is super cheap. Perhaps they can use off-peak renewables and store the hydrogen. But H2 isn't easy or cheap to store. Compression uses a lot of power.
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Looks like it's in the ballpark for onshore wind or solar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The waste product is steam (instead of hot CO2), so you could generate back some electricity on the other end. You could also site the whole thing on a coast and sell desalinated water as a byproduct.
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Wow, we were so distracted in 2020 that I forgot how stupid nuclear boosters are.
You didn't even attempt to include externalities. It turns out, the externalities for nuclear cost more than wind or solar. By themselves, without even looking at the operational costs.
In the modern energy market, nobody is going to listen to nuclear bullshit anymore unless it includes externalities in the analysis. Because the wind is always blowing somewhere, grids are being upgraded anyway, and battery grid storage is a thin
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nobody should listen to the solar bullshit until they are willing to talk about it's externalities, such as what happens to all those PV cells when they reach end of life?
They will last 20-30 years or longer, and that is only counting their primary role. Even then they will still have 70-80% output, and they will be sold into secondary markets where they will be used for another 20-30 years. At that point they will probably be below 50% output, and meanwhile new panels will have driven the cost per watt down still further so that it finally makes sense to eliminate them.
At that point, they can simply be stacked up according to size until they aggregate sufficiently to be wor
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Wait, wait... you thought that maybe photovoltaic had higher externalities than nuclear?
No. You didn't think that. You're just not intellectually honest. It is a necessary trait to still be supporting nuclear at this point.
I used to support nuclear as part of a balanced approach, because at the time it was less-bad than the alternatives that were capable of producing the amounts of energy currently in use. But that isn't the case anymore; hasn't been for a long time; and it has been completely proven by the
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You didn't even attempt to include externalities.
I'm posting a comment to an internet forum, not submitting a doctoral thesis. I left out a lot of things, as did you.
I didn't ask for something stupid and out of context like citations, I merely asked that your analysis include the necessary variables.
Otherwise it is just incorrect, and not being a doctoral thesis does not in any way make it less incorrect.
Laws of physics (Score:2)
"A cubic meter of H2 weighs about 0.082 kg."
Hydrogen is a gas. The density is dependent on the pressure.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
0.08988 g/L at STP or 0.0898kg
So, "about."
You thought you were being smart, but since you didn't look anything up, and aren't even educated, you were full of shit as always.
(I'm not edumacated either, but I do look shit up.)
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But H2 isn't easy or cheap to store. Compression uses a lot of power.
You don't need to store it under high pressure for industrial use. So containers don't have to be super-strong. Diffusion rate is also likely to not be a serious issue if the typical storage time is within the "several hours to a day" range.
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Or increase the cost of the CO2 emissions. However might one do that, I wonder?
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This is pie in the sky. I started to laugh when I got to the part of hydrogen cost.
Did you miss the part where they bought up a hydrogen supply chain?
Owning that means they get their hydrogen at cost. I doubt we really know how much that is. Hydrogen is not something we tend to have an excess of, so it's quite likely got a very good profit margin. Also keep in mind that they may be selling it to other refineries doing the same thing, so now their efficiency of scale goes up, with a profit attached to those sales of hydrogen.
It would be pie-in-the-sky if they were just buying hydrogen on t
The article is missing an important detail. (Score:1)
From your linked article...
In parallel with initiatives promoting green hydrogen, MHI will explore the feasibility of hydrogen derived from fossil fuel in combination with CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage) - blue hydrogen - as another approach to decarbonize industries.
This is going to fail as a source of low carbon hydrogen without nuclear fission power. It's not politically correct to point this out yet. They just need to give everyone enough time and room to conclude that on their own.
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And to make hydrogen for fuel it takes.... energy. Wonder what will be powering that? There is no free lunch.
Nuclear fission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Producing hydrogen gets cheap when the process is very hot. The kind of heat that only fossil fuels and nuclear fission can produce at any price that is close to affordable today. Combine this hydrogen production with a plant that produces fresh water, municipal or industrial heat, electricity, and medical isotopes, and the hydrogen will get cheap enough. Put it close to the sea for an effectively unlimited source of water and a heat sink. The sea water i
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This is pie in the sky. I started to laugh when I got to the part of hydrogen cost.
Mitsubishi Heavy is a real company. That really builds the factories they announce.
You're... of an exceptional nature if you think you're better at counting Mitsubishi's beans than Mitsubishi's own bean counters.
I wish I'd learned about this before the markets closed today, by Monday everybody will know about it and have time to do the math that you pretended to do and got wrong.
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The beans were in the article, and they came from Mitsubishi...
Hydrogen vs Iron powder (Score:3, Informative)
Direct electrolysis of iron oxide? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just speculating, but if the hydrogen were to come from electrolysis of water then wouldn't it make more sense to just electrolyse the iron ore directly? It turns out the idea is not new https://patents.google.com/pat... [google.com].
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See also https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com], which partly answers the question.
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I believe this is what the Gates funded Boston Metal company is trying to commercialize.
Making global warming worse (Score:1)
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Besides that, excess water vapor in air will rain out, returning the atmosphere to the previous equilibrium in about two weeks, compared to the hundreds of years for carbon dioxide to do the same.
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We are replacing CO2 emissions with H2O emissions. Water vapor traps much more heat than CO2. So we are going to make global warming worse through this. Instead plant some trees. CO2 is plant food.
Planting trees doesn't get us more steel.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Oh. Okay then. Never mind.
Whoa, carbon-free steel isnt steel at all... (Score:2)
..since steel alloy requires something around 2% (or at least some) carbon.
Re: Whoa, carbon-free steel isnt steel at all... (Score:2)
Okay, autist.
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It can be. With the correct alloy. You can add other stuff to iron to increase it's strength and change other properties. Just have your checkbook ready.
TFS talks about low cost hydrogen. That's nothing compared to the cost of the additives.
"cost-competitiveness" (Score:2)
Do you guys also not save your grandma from the oncoming truck because it's not 'cost-competitive', or what?
Geez, ... some people ...
Fuji Heavy Industries, Ltd (Score:1)
Now you've got to build a dog-friendly zero-carbon steel plant . . . that works well in the snow.
Zero Carbon Steel (Score:3)
At least transparent aluminum doesn't contradict itself.
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It would seem rather pointless to have a so-called carbon-free steel plant if the planned source of the materials to feed the plant emitted more carbon than a conventional steel plant.
It would. That's probably why they're not doing that, right?
That's why it's important to know where the hydrogen comes from, how the ore is coming in, and how the steel is going out.
The article already mentions the recent acquisition of a Norwegian electrolyzer manufacturer, so it's quite clear where the hydrogen is going to come from.