Making Steel with Electricity
industrydecarbonization.com
industrydecarbonization.com
[1] http://www.eurofer.org/201605-ESF.pdf?wtd=YC9cwLHyOWxX6JJD&r...
[2] https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace?la...
This lets them do things like claim "steel made in USA" when in fact the steel was made in China, then brought to the USA, melted in an arc furnace, and suddenly it's "made in USA"!
I suspect there are people chucking brand new steel into an arc furnace simply to change its origin country, and to take government subsidies for setting up new 'steel factories'. It also conveniently works around steel import tariffs - because you actually import 'scrap' steel, tariff free.
I don't think this assertion makes sense. Making steel is way more than getting iron and mixing it up with some carbon. You need special manufacturing processes to get specific alloys and treatments to get the properties and reliability you expect. Recycling and importing steel is like importing a raw material.
Your comment reads like "This let's them do things like claim burger made in USA when in fact the burger buns were made with corn from Ukraine and meat from Argentina".
If you take "raw" steel and process it, you can look green from your operations...
... just ignore the upstream producers using the lowest-cost but carbon-dirty processes.
Even the cheapest, dirtiest iron ore from Brazil or Australia can't compete with steel scrap in the US or EU because recycling uses less than quarter of the total power and produces a fifth of the emissions that producing virgin steel does. You can't greenwash something when the green version costs way less than the polluting one. It'll be written on the price tag!
You seem to be confused. Using steel as a raw material is not "scrapping and recycling". The value of steel in engineering applications is that you can trust that the properties of a particular alloy used to make a particular part will comply with the specs. Steel from China is renowned for being unreliable and failing to comply with standardized properties.
https://www.cdmg.com/building-faqs/why-using-cheap-steel-is-...
You avoid that risk by importing steel as a raw material and use that to actually produce reliable steel. If low-quality steel is cheap enough so that after recycling it you can still make a profit then it's a sound business decision and the whole economy benefits.
My impression was most of the recycling energy inputs were in collection, sorting, and shipping.
The table on page 15 lists the megajoules per ton required to produce steel with various amounts of scrap content. When made with 100% recycled scrap, steel requires "only" 1,289 megajoules per ton. Based on that wiki page rail requires 150 kilojoules per metric ton kilometer so a ton of steel costs only about 75 megajoules to transport a thousand km.
Large container ships use half that much energy so even if the steel scrap must be shipped overseas and back ten thousand km, it'd still be under 400 megajoules for transportation versus over 1,200 megajoules for recycling. The rest of the costs like sorting are negligible.
In practice it takes at least 2,500-3,000 megajoules per ton of steel since the scrap has to be mixed with other sources of iron when there's not enough scrap to go around. The number for aluminum are a lot worse, on the order of ten times more megajoules per ton to extract alumina from ore via electrolysis versus smelting aluminum scrap, which already requires 10x the energy of steel.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-theoretic...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
I'm not sure the people complaining about Chinese steel imports are thinking about environmental footprint. It's all a chain of simplistic economic reasoning to complain that they import a product instead of producing it.
https://www.steel.org/steel-technology/steel-production/
It's iron ore -> direct reduction (iron) -> electric arc (steel) with carbon being added to the iron in the furnace. This is a replacement for the older pipeline of iron ore -> blast furnace -> basic oxygen furnace.
https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Electric_Blast_Furnace_(GregTech...
https://technicpack.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Equivalent_Exch...
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sadoway...
I could be wrong, but couldn’t this be counted as one of the benefits for NASA and research into space?
The thing that doesn't add up is the price... While coal is still usable as an energy source for making steel, it doesn't make sense to use electricity.
And if one country outlaws using coal for steelmaking, then steelmakers will just move to another country - steelmaking is ferociously competitive, and lots of countries subsidise steelmaking because it is strategically important.
This tech will remain on the sidelines for 'green' projects only until there is some kind of worldwide carbon tax/cap/quota system.
It's easy to dismiss anything out of ignorance, but it only amounts to misinformation
That means you take scrap steel, put it in an electric arc furnace, and power that furnace with matching wind/solar contracts.
So far, carmaking uses less steel than comes into recycling plants, so it hasn't really caused any change in the market.
My understanding, from when I lightly researched Japan Steel as a stock, was that car makers want fresh steel with higher guaranteed performance. Thus they can use less steel and reduce weight.
Since vehicles are mobile the reduced weight will have a much bigger carbon reduction than from using recycled steel.
But they just anounced, our factory will be closed by end of 2023.
It would likely kill the export market for basic steel from the EU, as well as raise steel prices across the continent. Long term benefit might be that the EU could position itself as a technological leader on coal-free steel.
No easy options I suppose.
Given how cheap steel appears to be, would it cause any significant damage to the rest of the economy if steel prices went up because of this?
If steel is more expensive, then the quality of life of most people will go down, even if people don't walk into walmart and think "today I'll buy some steel".
(Even as a vague number; economics is never going to be my job).
This is one of the major second order effects that always springs to mind when people just float the idea of increasing the cost of some material that produces CO2 as a byproduct as if just pulling a lever or adding a tax will solve the problem. The economy is a giant Jenga tower where all of the lower blocks are fossil fuel based processes. We sit way up on top where we can't see the bottom of the tower and we think "wow look at all this new stuff we've made, we sure are great! We should get rid of all that old junk so we can build more new stuff up here!" and maybe you can knock out a few of the pieces on the bottom without causing a disaster but eventually if you take out enough of them the whole thing will come crashing down.
If you want to build a carbon free economy then you need to start a new tower and you need to solve all of the fundamental problems in a new way with new technology that doesn't use fossil fuels and it needs to be as cheap or cheaper than what we can do now. That's a monumental task. And no, you can't knock over the first tower before starting the new one unless you want billions of people to die, most likely including you as well.
A Jenga tower is in unstable equilibrium. Push it a little bit away from its resting configuration and it collapses.
The economy is in stable equilibrium, mostly, more or less. Push it by increasing the price of some commodity, which happens all the time, and buyers look for alternatives and efficiencies, which dampens the effect of the push. In all likelihood things settle in a new equilibrium not far at all from the first.
It’s a much more resilient system than you’re giving it credit for. Totally different dynamics than the party game.
Rising global temperatures will also mean melting ice and rising sea levels. Low level agricultural areas, such as those in Southeast Asia will, will see the ocean encroach 30-40 kilometers onto productive rice paddies with just a few feet of sea level rise [2].
It might be fine if these people just move, but we’re talking about displacing hundreds of millions to billions. Migrations like those of Syrians moving into Europe will seem small by comparison.
I’m not going to mention the retarding economic effects of more stable regions having many more hotter days, or the impacts of more erratic weather due to arctic amplification and a more erratic jet stream. We may have to move or build new equipment someplace else.
All of this means that we will have to build a new tower anyways, but we’ll have to do it with less resources, less time, and on a table that’s shaking constantly.
Perhaps putting a tax or price on carbon will retard economic advancement, but so will unchecked climate change. The benefit of taxing carbon is that we don’t have governments directing how to decarbonize. Businesses can still innovate to be competitive, we will be pricing in an externality that we’ll just pay for in other ways, at a higher price, later on.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/0...
[2] https://vlscop.vermontlaw.edu/2019/11/07/sea-level-rise-food...
The places that require the highest investment, could completely ruin the life of most people, and add up to a single digit percentage of the problem (or less) are better left to research.
Carbon taxes would indeed help. More because it will let people do the calculation above than for any other reason. But trying to hijack a discussion about carbon substitution in steel making into a "we must act because the sky is falling" is in very bad taste.
Yes but most likely way less than the damage of climate change.
We should be thinking more about next gen nuclear and mitigation strategies.
Doesn't need to be worldwide. The EU and US are large enough markets that can put up import tariffs on carbon.
In any case, the production of coal is going to go down rather sooner than later... steelmaking should prepare for this.
Meanwhile electricity prices are not a constant and trending down. It might be too expensive now but at some point it might actually become the cheaper option if cost continues to drop. Also, large energy users, like steel plants, would probably end up investing in their own energy generation. Wind, solar, maybe even nuclear. That turns electricity from a variable cost into a fixed cost for them. So, it's not as clear cut that electrifying their processes is long term more expensive. It might actually turn around and become the cheaper option. Carbon taxes of course might make this attractive sooner.
But even if it were more expensive, another reason for investing in de-carbonizing steel would be that there is actually a growing demand for companies to source their materials from companies that have lower carbon emissions. Steel is used by a lot of companies and those companies too are looking to clean up their supply lines.
And of course because some companies are researching and trying different options here, other companies now need to worry about having a plan when their competitors start producing cleaner and cheaper steel.
All good reasons for companies to be investing in this now rather than in 30 years.
I.e. moving from a "we want to run the plant at optimal efficiency, damn the load pattern" to "we want to be able to optimize by following energy costs, even if that means we need to idle sometimes"
Processes were very well optimized for the former, hence the greenfield for research into the latter.
Is that even possible? For a huge industrial process like a steel mill, I think the capital and operational costs are so massive you want to run them continuously. Even "turning the plant on" could take many hours to get everything to temperature and stable.
A couple of other side features to raise the feasibility: using waste as input "the most promising material tested was mill scale, a waste product from steel processing" and "Part of the Siderwin concept is the idea that the technology can be used as a flexibility option in the electricity market."
(i.e. get demand-flexibility payments from being able to turn off a large electricity sink easily)
Pure oxygen is dangerous stuff.
Otherwise, cool. Of course, whenever we electrify something, we're just kicking the "carbon cost" down the road, and the means of electrical production become a focus.
That said, if we can distill energy to centralized electrical plants, we can apply fairly massive carbon mitigation, at a single point.
It is a concern, exactly because there are so many other hot and dangerous things around in steel production. Blow some oxygen on a fire and see what happens...
(They do this in order to reduce the carbon content. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_oxygen_steelmaking for details if you want to know more, it has a fascinating history)
But molten steel is not a fire. But you know what will be a fire, at certain oxygen levels? The human body for example, despite that it is made of 80% water.
So sure, the steel makers will be able to handle it. But only because they take this stuff seriously.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/MA2020-02191562mt...
The more well-known approach, performed by Boston Metal which the article mentions, was to use molten iron oxide.
I would figure the major question is whether the cost and handling difficulties of NaOH can be overcome. Google shows a bulk price of around $500/ton for NaOH, though its price has spiked recently. This is roughly double the price of pig iron (the first reduction product). So to make this process economical, you need to do a good job of not contaminating (hence replacing) your electrolyte. That's probably why they needed to work with particular grades of iron oxide. NaOH is contaminated by such mundane things as carbon dioxide, silicates, alumina, etc. Hopefully they can figure this out.
.. all of which you might find in iron ore, unfortunately. I guess that's why they're using it to recycle rather than from ores.
https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-path-to-green-s...
> ...the iron oxide is dissolved in a solution between a nickel anode and a carbon cathode. ...
> ...operates on relatively low temperatures of around 110 °C. ...
IANACE (Not A Chemical Engineer), but dissolving iron oxide at 110 °C sounds to me like they'll be using some fairly nasty chemicals, at scale. Which chemicals will have their own environmental & safety issues, etc.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240565611...
The rest of the waste stream is just slag. That's just dumped in big piles in the open air https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/slag-what-it-good , although occasionally someone proposes going through it again for different minerals such as rare earths.
Dissolved in what solution? That's got to be an aggressive solvent, so what is the waste this process produces?
But once you have to create your wind turbine, solar panels and battery with electricity from wind turbines and solar panels, the price gets very different.
Won't that get more expensive too?
He's a weird one, as he's generally on board with consensus climate change, but he's always had a bee in his bonnet about renewables, making lots of claims that haven't came true.
Could we live as today with just renewable energy? (2005)
https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/could-...
> Won't that get more expensive too?
Yes, that's the whole point of the conference. Fossil fuels are magical. And at some point, we won't have them anymore.
> He's a weird one, as he's generally on board with consensus climate change, but he's always had a bee in his bonnet about renewables, making lots of claims that haven't came true.
Jancovici doens't make timed predictions, so I can't see how this can be true. A makes statements about how things are, starting from first principles.
The only thing he did insist on some time period was the fact we will cross the +2C°, at some point in the next decades.
We are well on track for that.
How much of the steel industry is in China? My impression was a very large percentage of it. I wonder if this process would be utilized there. The game there seems to be the cheapest possible steel… not sure this fits into that.
China in particular depends on long fragile trade routes from the Middle East for crude oil, and is already the world’s largest producer of solar panels.
Technology like this will get to enjoy the plunging cost of solar and wind power.
You can definitely see a divergence between countries that have made it a priority and those that haven't, even per capita.
Now that we've had larger deployments for awhile, are there any good number on capacity deterioration over time?
Curious what the effective install longevity is.
The compounding effects on this are going to be dramatic. Everyone who borrowed money at sub-5% rates and then saw retail electricity going up by 50% made a great decision.
Previously, worldwide supply expansion = increasing fuel costs in the global market
In a post-fuel / solar world, you can keep increasing supply capacity as long as you want. Which would upend a lot of assumptions about power. E.g. free or negative power cost at peak supply times, simply because people keep building capacity
The electricity price already turns negative in quite a few countries with larger shares of renewables at peak times, but isn't really being exploited right now due to the high capital cost and low usage for most things that need electricity.
Which is another way of asking "When will people stop consuming more power?"
Previously, we had finite energy resources that were limited by the fuel (oil, coal, gas) or regulation (nuclear).
Suddenly, there is no limit. You could build as much solar as you had panels + installers for.
Which really turns future energy on its head. Why not build more forever? And if there's excess, build more energy consumptive industry...
I used the lower 7% number in that article, because that's the emissions one talks about when tackling process / blast furnace emissions, so I thought using the higher number would be misleading in that context. (I have mentioned both numbers in an earlier text that is also linked: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/the-path-to-green-s... )
You know Australia is the biggest lithium exporter? You know Australia has copper, rare earths, all required for renewable energy?
You know Australia also exports the most IRON, a necessary ingredient for steel, right?
Where does this delusion that Australia isn't lucky come from?
Bit of a "resource curse" thing at the moment, where you can dig up the wealth and ship it out the country without necessarily enriching the wider population as much as you'd think.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/02/23/australias-...
It's an opportunity for Australia. We have the iron ore and we have the solar energy to make electricity and hydrogen. If the world is going have to rebuild its steel making capacity it's a chance to capture some of that.