How to Escape from the Iron Age?
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
Despite being very inefficient, it feels like this is the option we’re going to go with anyway, because the suggested alternative of reducing material consumption seems completely out of reach of human behavior as we know it. Sadly.
At their list towards the end, I felt like I had heard of online communities in favor of all of them, for more reasons than just the climate impact that they have.
There will always be a mismatch between steel demand for current projects, and steel scrap 'returning' from past projects. Trying to match those up short-term, is a futile effort that makes no sense. Especially with the raw material -iron ore- being as abundant as it is (as article points out).
Long-term: fine. See "circular economy".
Energy infrastructure like wind turbines are long-term investments. With energy & material cost embedded in that equipment.
As long as -over full lifetime of the equipment- overall resource use is lower than alternative options, it's worth doing. Even if it involves big, upfront GHG emissions.
Lower GHG footprint steelmaking (like, using H2) will only improve that equation further.
Also note that if building a wind turbine costs a lot of steel, then @ the end of that turbine's life, it will 'release' a lot of steel (reducing demand for steel made from ore).
First, it’s difficult to predict the actual effective useful life or economic value of a piece of infrastructure - let’s just take the most absolutely optimistic case and say that, 10 years from now, we crack nuclear fusion and energy is now totally free (it’s a thought experiment, please don’t throw rocks at this part), and that completely changes the economics of the wind turbine - it’s not even worth the marginal cost of running the turbine and shipping the energy somewhere. Suddenly, all our long term payoff calculations go to hell. Similarly, say a hurricane comes through and rips down the wind farm - same deal. Long-term value prediction is very hard, and modern American society in particular seems to be especially bad at predicting, and then building and maintaining to that prediction.
Second, there’s an assumption that 100Gt of carbon today is cheaper than 10Gt of carbon over 20 years - that assumes a linear response to carbon, that time of emission doesn’t matter, and that our ability to draw down carbon remains constant. If any of those don’t hold true (and I’d at least strongly suspect 1 and probably 2 don’t), the equation changes unfavorably.
Finally, and drawing on the second point, it assumes that we have a carbon budget at all - that the allowable amount of carbon emissions is anything over zero at all at this point. There’s a lot of talk about “lowering” carbon emissions - this is why natural gas keeps getting brought up as an improvement (well, that, and the trillion-dollar industry built on top of hydrocarbons), while it’s pretty clear that can’t be a long term answer because our target emissions rate for the next century effectively needs to be negative. In other words, if this is one of those “horseshoes and hand grenades” situations where close enough doesn’t really cut it, the math on “eat carbon today, save it tomorrow” doesn’t really pen out.
I don’t know how the trade on any particular piece of energy infrastructure works out, and I don’t know what the answers to the above questions are, but I see a lot of people treating this like a minimization problem, where the thing we’re actually doing is perturbing a complex chaotic system, and the math here may not play like our engineering minds want it to.
Obviously, this would dramatically increase the price of steel but this would now be more realistic price after accounting for how damaging it is to the environment and how costly it is to make that steel carbon neutral.
Or another point of view, the current price of steel is extremely cheap because people who benefit from it do not have to pay for the environmental cost of it.
We’re making experiments with ceramics, with interesting results[0]. Different forms different demands, different textures.
(*)This links to my blog, so I’m breaking the url so as not to be accused of spamming the board.
[0]h\\ps://voxleone.com/2024/03/05/3d-printing-im-making-a-500c-ceramic-hot-end/
Edited for clarity
I decided on this process becuase I can pair almost any material with the resin. I can also select resin for particular properties.
Are new materials, such as ceramics, recyclable?
Anyway, I’m not really sure what they mean, I’d assume steel was invented in a bunch of places. Is getting carbon into your iron a rare accident to make? I’d both be shocked if European steel makers didn’t integrate information from around the world, and if they didn’t integrate information from local sources. (like the Celts, famously fans of the stuff, right?)
“That is a little-known fact in the Western world, where steel production only took off in the nineteenth century with fossil fuels”
Was the sentence immediately prior.
Regardless, making a claim and citing an article you haven’t written/published is essentially very weak.
Found it, this blog is great if you're interested in the history of blacksmithing: https://acoup.blog/tag/blacksmithing/
https://www.thoughtco.com/wootz-steel-raw-material-damascus-...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-rise-of-steel-par...
https://www.sanskritimagazine.com/tale-crucible-wootz-steel-...
"That is a little-known fact in the Western world, where steel production only took off in the nineteenth century with fossil fuels. However, Asian and African metallurgists developed high-quality steels much earlier, and this knowledge eventually allowed Europeans to do the same – on a much larger scale."
Did it "take off" elsewhere? What does take off mean? Oh, is the topic high-quality? What is that? What defines high-quality? Try to be a little precise rather than throw things out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery#Sub-Saharan_Africa
More in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_metallurgy_in_Africa
They mention inhomogenous steel there though, it sounds like the Tanzanian one was more purely directed at making steel instead of iron.
It seems particularly odd as a first citation too.
I assume the article is written, but is unpublished. Better, but less than ideal.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/06/science/ancient-smelter-u...
If they are sloppy about the history, I have to wonder what else they are sloppy about.
> 2. Forthcoming article, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine.
The veracity of their claim is still in question, but based on that I'm going to assume good faith that they have facts to back up their claim. I haven't checked the rest of their citations yet, but based on their quantity I'm going to assume the rest of the article isn't sloppy either.
For the claim about African metallurgists I suppose I'll have to wait to see what kind of evidence they provide before deciding if they are being "sloppy".
In Antiquity, this division would be unnatural. Asia Minor was an integral constituent part of the Mediterranean civilization, unlike, say, contemporary Germany. The ancients would be fairly confused if we told them that we now put dividing lines between North Africa, Asia Minor+Levant and so-called Europe. For them, it was a bigger civilizational unit, a maritime continent so to say. And the idea that Asia Minor somehow belongs to the same unit as India or China would feel positively weird.
The general note about blast furnaces using more energy in the form of coal and gas is probably still relevant.
- A strong “degrowth” orientation based on a reduction of the demand, because steel production emits CO2. It seems to be the core message. It doesn’t address the issue the author himself raise that most steel is used for machinery or buildings
- A digression which tries to find an additional reason to reduce steel production: reducing potential war output. If someone needs two reasons for something it usually smells fishy, plus I would love to hear what the Ukrainians and NATO members have to say about reducing the already failing western arm production.