The Race to Remake the $2.5T Steel Industry with Green Steel
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
Consumers might like to buy their metal drinking straws knowing they were made with green steel.
But the vast majority of steel is used for unseen things... Like building the piling machine that built the flood defences for your city. There is no consumer pressure to go green there. Just commercial pressure to be cheap.
Companies are investigating so they are ready incase such an incentive appears. But I see nothing on the horizon.
Note that this is pretty much out of the hands of government too - if any government mandated that all steel produced in the country was green, then all steel would just be imported and local industry would die. If the government put an import tariff on non-green steel, then makers of steel products like cars would become uncompetitive and close down. If the government gave those steel users a subsidy, it would be against WTO anti-dumping rules.
There is no good solution.
Somebody has worked out a way to get electrolysers well over 90% energy-efficient. We will need a hell of a lot of those.
The incentive will be that hydrogen will have become vastly cheaper than coal, and nobody still using coal will be able to compete. Until then, using coal is no worse than using grey hydrogen. But those already using grey hydrogen will be in a better position to switch to the cheaper alternative. And grey hydrogen could anyway become cheaper to use than coal.
It will be hard to find investment for tooling up to make gargantuan amounts of grey hydrogen, because the market will vanish in a few years and the equipment will be worthless.
Aviation, with LH2 vs kerosene fuel, will have a similar dynamic. That case is particularly slanted, because a given amount of hydrogen enthalpy is much lighter than of kerosene, and the difference is saleable cargo capacity. So, if liquified grey hydrogen is not very much more expensive than kerosene, it might be a win already. It is not clear whether airframes can be retrofitted; with long under-wing nacelle tanks, it might be possible.
Not enough of something will always be fixed relatively quickly by markets. If you went out and purchased all the hydrogen you could buy from your local bottled gas supplier, then tomorrow they'd be out of stock. If you did it every month, they'd soon be producing more gas each month.
Right now, there is plenty of green and grey hydrogen available to buy, but nobody wants to pay the (high) price of it.
Meanwhile, green depends on supply of electrolysers, whose factories are still under construction, a process hard to rush. Its supply can ramp up only as fast as electrolysers can be obtained. Efficiency is still improving fast, so buying too many of the old, inefficient ones may also seem unwise. And, the cost of power to operate them is falling as solar and wind get cheaper.
At each of various production-cost points on the way down, more people will find it practical for them to use hydrogen at that price.
Also, at a large enough scale, your concerns about makers steel products going out of business if they can't use high-emission steel go away. If the entire EU mandated it, or the US, it would still work.
I don't see how the numbers work out for a steel plant using this "green" process.. that hydrogen has to come from somewhere, and odds are it'll involve fossil fuel as a source.
Enforcement will be needed. Fortunately you can tell isotopically, and probably by trace amounts of methane and carbon monoxide, green from grey. Unfortunately there is no administrative infrastructure in place for enforcement.
We have had that problem with organic certifiers, at least in the US, and probably elsewhere: "certified organic" corn is very often not. If it is the certified who pay for a certificate, they become the customers.