World's Second-Largest Steelmaker Invests $120M in 'Green Steel' (apnews.com) 45
"The manufacture of 'green steel' moved one step closer to reality Friday," reports the Associated Press, "as Massachusetts-based Boston Metal announced a $120 million investment from the world's second-largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal."
Boston Metal will use the injection of funds to expand production at a pilot plant in Woburn, near Boston, and help launch commercial production in Brazil.
The company uses renewable electricity to convert iron ore into steel. Steel is one of the world's dirtiest heavy industries. Three-quarters of world production uses a traditional method that burns through train loads of coal to heat the furnaces and drive the reaction that releases pure iron from ore. Making steel releases more climate-warming carbon dioxide than any other industry, according to the International Energy Agency — about 8% of worldwide emissions. Many companies are working on alternatives.
The financial package by global steel giant ArcelorMittal is the biggest single investment made to date by the firm's carbon innovation fund. Microsoft is another investor. Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal, said its technology is "designed to decarbonize steel production at scale" and would "disrupt the industry." The company's technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore, experts in energy storage and metallurgy respectively, are the founders....
Boston Metal said it can eliminate all carbon dioxide from its steel production and hopes to ramp up production to millions of tons by 2026. As a bonus, it said, it is able to extract metals from slag normally considered waste.
Boston Metal will use the injection of funds to expand production at a pilot plant in Woburn, near Boston, and help launch commercial production in Brazil.
The company uses renewable electricity to convert iron ore into steel. Steel is one of the world's dirtiest heavy industries. Three-quarters of world production uses a traditional method that burns through train loads of coal to heat the furnaces and drive the reaction that releases pure iron from ore. Making steel releases more climate-warming carbon dioxide than any other industry, according to the International Energy Agency — about 8% of worldwide emissions. Many companies are working on alternatives.
The financial package by global steel giant ArcelorMittal is the biggest single investment made to date by the firm's carbon innovation fund. Microsoft is another investor. Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal, said its technology is "designed to decarbonize steel production at scale" and would "disrupt the industry." The company's technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore, experts in energy storage and metallurgy respectively, are the founders....
Boston Metal said it can eliminate all carbon dioxide from its steel production and hopes to ramp up production to millions of tons by 2026. As a bonus, it said, it is able to extract metals from slag normally considered waste.
Gee (Score:2)
Gee...a whole $120M!
Holy tiny investment, Batman!
Re:Gee (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee...a whole $120M!
Holy tiny investment, Batman!
It's almost like you invest small amounts in pilot plants before you blow billions of dollars onto something new. Amazing huh!
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Proposal rejected. We'll continue to use those phrases for a while longer.
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Can we collectively agree to abandon this phrase? At this point it's beyond overused and the snark is tiresome.
It's almost like no one cares what you think about the phrase.
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It's almost like ...
Can we collectively agree to abandon this phrase?
Dude, do you even humor?
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Humor me.
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Oh man, that's a +funny if I've ever seen one.
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I don't think finding solutions to containment and electrolyte with minimum process losses and highest efficiency depends on scale much for this process, 120 Million should be plenty to keep them going.
It's the hydrogen direct reduction route which has to go straight from modeling to huge, that's going to take a lot of money.
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One thing that's IMHO clear to me is that the advancement of technology is like a simulated annealing [wikipedia.org] algorithm. If you always go with "what variant on our best technology yields yet another cost improvement", you end up trapped in local minima. It's only periodic jolts that push an industry out of the "it's only cost improvement that matters", that force solutions that are initially not as cost efficient (for example, switching from standard BF-BOF for steel smelting, in order to reduce/eliminate carbon
Much too small (Score:1)
Yep. 120 M is too small to acieve enough.
Re: Gee (Score:2)
"Massachusetts-based Boston Metal announced a $120 million investment from the world's second-largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal."
The reason the investment "seems" small/tiny is that this is an actual investment by a for-profit company that has to answer to shareholders, they aren't politicians virtue signaling by pointlessly adding zeros to the cost of a bill to show just how much they care about something.
Vaclav Smil is your best read on climate (Score:5, Informative)
https://time.com/6175734/relia... [time.com]
Vaclav Smil writes huge long books about how energy and industry work, what they need, how important and huge they are; stuff people never see. We at least see farms as we drive by, have some sense that there's a huge industry behind your grocery store.
The link is about these "four pillars": concrete, steel, fertilizer, and heavy construction. Absolutely underpin modern civilization. Big emitters.
Getting the four pillars decarbonized is right up there with electrical generation and transport. And they are very tough problems.
This is a tiny start, but we need bigger ones, and fast progress.
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Gah, not "heavy construction", the his fourth was "plastics". He's written elsewhere about the difficulty of decarbonizing heavy construction (i.e. bulldozers, roadbuilding).
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He's written elsewhere about the difficulty of decarbonizing heavy construction (i.e. bulldozers, roadbuilding).
This may be true of things like road building. But a lot of construction can be electrified. Some of the largest open pit mining equipment is already electric. And a lot of building construction, where the job site is relatively small in comparison to roads, already has the power distribution infrastructure available. The tenants will be using more power than the construction does.
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When H2 takes off for trucking all heavy equipment can just follow along, with pressurised H2 they will just have to refuel a bit more, with LH2 not even that.
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When H2 takes off for trucking all heavy equipment can just follow along, with pressurised H2 they will just have to refuel a bit more, with LH2 not even that.
Depends on which method they use to utilize the H2's energy.
If it's a very efficient fuel cell (round-trip efficiency for the cycle comparable to lithium rechargeable cells), fine. They've made a battery that gets charged at one place and discharged at another, with only one light part of the charged chemistry transported only one way between the sit
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When H2 takes off for trucking
Do we have enough natural gas to support that?
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He's written elsewhere about the difficulty of decarbonizing heavy construction (i.e. bulldozers, roadbuilding).
That's pretty laughable considering heavy construction equipment is moving toward using electric motors because they are more reliable. Energy storage/generation is an issue currently but solid state batteries will be a game changer as they are lighter and more durable.
The bigger issue here might be the actual road that is being built. We need some chemical engineering and development in this area so that we can pave roads without massive emissions.
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Vaclav Smil is not even wrong [wikipedia.org] because his argument relies on a false premise: change absolutely nothing about what we use. He might as well say we can't replace steam engine boilers with electric boilers when it would more efficient to completely bypass the need for steam in the first place but his argument preempts such possibilities.
That is why space mining is so important (Score:1, Interesting)
Just one Psyche 16 planetoid got enough metal to cover whole planet needs for one MILION years, assuming current metal consumption.
I think that it could be possible to slowly change Psyche 16 orbit using nuclear powered kinetic launch systems like SpinLaunch mounted on its surface. Additionally, in such way initial metal payloads could be delivered near the Earth orbit and intercepted there. Finally, after long trip, Psyche could be moved to one of Earth-Sun or Earth-Moon Lagrangian points and parked there.
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If you play the long game. One will often waste a lot of money and fizzle out before any return can happen.
Space mining in theory, with space based factories, and equipment with mostly output going down to earth could be profitable. However, the generations of investments toward such a goal will probably not make it. It would be a high risk and high reward for your great grand kids. So you may not want to invest into something that you will not see fruition.
It is akin to the perfect software solution.
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That would take centuries.
Production Cost? (Score:2)
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Al+3 to Al metal is three electrons, and Fe+3 to Fe metal is also three electrons. So yes. Also aluminum smelters run continuously as do iron smelters, they are not at all suitable for Solar or wind power.
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Also aluminum smelters run continuously as do iron smelters, they are not at all suitable for Solar or wind power.
By that logic neither is hydro on account of droughts.
If only there was a way to mix and accumulate electricity from various sources... Ah well...
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https://www.nevadaheattreating... [nevadaheattreating.com]
My guess, without fully analyzing: the iron electrolysis would certainly be more expensive than coal refining, but probably nowhere near as expensive as aluminum. The electrical process might have other advantages as well. One that immediately comes to m
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Electrons aren’t all equal.
Sorry but electrons are most definitely all equal - I'm a particle physicist and we'd notice quite quickly if some electrons were different! I think what you meant to say was that not all atoms - or chemical bonds - are equal.
While there seems to be clear data on the energy required to electrolyte Aluminium (17MWh/ton) there seems to be nothing for iron electrolysis. However, given the amount of steel we use, any increase in production costs is going to affect a lot of the economy and the amount of elec
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Looking at the Ellington diagram in the link I posted, you’ll see that the standard Gibbs free energy required to fully reduce Al2O3 around 1000C is about 900 kJ/mol, while full reduction of Fe3O4 is approximately 300 kJ/mol. These are approximate numbers that I just read visuall
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If I remember the process tech correctly (expect at least some error, this isn't my field but I looked into similar processes when SSAB announced their big investments into "green(er)" steel in last couple of years), the main reason why we do what we do to aluminium is because bauxite is fucking horrible to smelt. It requires something like twice the temperature needed for recycling already refined aluminium.
But many developed nations already get a lot of their steel from recycled steel. Tear down old build
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You could extract metals from slag for a long time. Just like you can extract gold from salt water. Both have the same problem. It's too expensive to do so.
It's painted steel (Score:1)
Carbon Free Steel (Score:2)
Better than direct-reduction with hydrogen? (Score:2)
Does anyone know how this compares to direct reduction of iron using hydrogen? I see a lot of projects to produce hydrogen at scale, and they list steel-making as one of the big opportunities. Will those investments still make sense if this technology works as advertised?
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They have to solve the hydrogen embrittlement problem for the direct reduction of iron using hydrogen first.
Think I saw this recently... (Score:2)
Best I could find on Reddit was https://www.reddit.com/r/Innov... [reddit.com]
I thought there was something about reusing carbon monoxide instead of releasing so much carbon dioxide, which translates to less coal needed and less waste gas.
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https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
No idea which is the better route to go here, probably good to be exploring multiple options.
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We will soon have the option to harvest our farts, so we can post & comment on stats about them.