Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Steel makers are eager to keep us informed of their efforts to find less carbon intensive ways to produce steel, though they worry production costs will have to rise.
Cleaning up steel is key to tackling climate change
Technology to make grey metal green will not be rolled out commercially until 2030s
Michael Pooler in London 6 HOURS AGO
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Globally, steel is responsible for 7 per cent to 9 per cent of all direct emissions from fossil fuels, with each tonne produced resulting in an average 1.83 tonnes of CO2, according to the World Steel Association.
And as the world’s population grows, demand is only predicted to increase.
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“In principle there are technology routes to lower emissions from steelmaking,” said David Clarke, head of strategy and chief technology officer at ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest producer by tonnage. The catch, he added, was that “society would have to accept higher costs of steel production”.
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A well-established alternative to blast furnaces are electric arc furnaces (EAFs) that melt down scrap, instead of using raw materials. EAFs are smaller, less expensive and, because they do not consume coke, pump out less CO2 than blast furnaces. They already account for about one-quarter of global steel output.
However, renewable energy sources alone cannot meet their enormous electricity demands — enough to power a town of 100,000 people. Another limitation is the supply of scrap, while the grades produced in EAFs are often not the right quality for certain applications, like automotive.
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Swedish steel group SSAB is building a €150m pilot facility, scheduled for 2020, that would make the Nordic country the first to manufacture the metal without fossil fuels.
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis from Sweden’s abundant renewable energy resources will be used to reduce ore into a product called sponge iron, which can be converted into steel through arc furnaces.
But clean hydrogen production is expensive and would require a huge expansion of renewable energy generation capacity. South Korea’s Posco and Voestalpine of Austria are pursuing similar projects, although the latter said it could take two decades to become reality.
Until then, steelmakers are taking intermediary steps. Tata’s system removes several stages of pre-processing raw materials and, if combined with the capture and storage of waste gases, the company said it could lower CO2 emissions by 80 per cent.
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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/3bcbcb60-037f-11e9-99df-6183d3002ee1
Renewables rapidly fall down when you consider industrial use. If you focus on domestic use, if you squint hard enough you can produce impressive seeming numbers – “this new solar facility produces enough power for 10,000 homes!”. But when you consider that greening one large factory in Holland (or steel mill in this case) would require the same amount of electricity as 100,000 people consume, and that electricity would have to be reliable, so we are also talking about backup storage, there are a lot of factories in the world.
Perhaps some reality should be added to that euphoric news bulletin.
Yes, there is a project to develop a direct-reduction hydrogen-based steelmaking process in Sweden. It has been underway as a “pre-feasability study” for a few years. It is being financed half by the steel industry and power companies and half by tax money. This spring they started design of a pilot plant at a cost of €2 million. So, no they are not building any pilot plant yet, and no, it sure as hell won’t be producing steel in 2020. The (rather optimistic) target is to have a feasible industrial process by 2035, and be able to replace existing (almost new) blast furnaces when they are decommissioned in the 2040’s.
One point that is not emphasized in the press releases is that a second stage will be needed after the direct reduction where the sponge iron is remelted and mixed with coal to actually make steel. This will still require coke and emit CO2, though in much smaller quantities. The loss of combustible gases from the furnaces will also mean a significant loss of area heating and electricity production while a vast amount of electical power will be needed for hydrogen production. And incidentally Sweden’s once exceptionally reliable high-voltage network is already under severe strain due to unpredictable wind and solar.
The technical and economic challenges are therefore formidable. And the last paragraph of the Steel Industry press release announcing the start of the construction phase is worth including:
“To be able to carry out this project, however, significant national contributions are still required from the
state, research institutions and universities. There has to be good access to fossil-free electricity,
improved infrastructure and rapid expansion of high voltage networks, research initiatives, faster permit
processes and the government’s active support for pilot and demonstration facilities and long term
support at EU level.”
In short, without regulatory reform, plenty of tax money and plenty of cheap electricity, no go.
Want to bet on it?
Correction
For “start of the construction phase” read “start of the design phase”
As someone who has personally used steel (in minor agricultural repairs & fabrications) but having had a family friend who uses the stuff to professionally do agricultural fabs & repairs (following from his father)..
Modern steel is junk.
Total C R A P = spell that with a capital CR4P
Modern steel that you get from stockholders in the UK comes from Cheap And Nasty Chinese recycled stuff.
It won’t cut (Attach a cutting disc to it and it behaves like cast iron and is a pig to drill)
It won’t weld properly – it doesn’t run or flux like it should (used to)- again just like cast iron.
It’s not especially malleable – where a steel bar would bend into shape, modern stuff cracks, fractures and breaks. It is ‘hard’
Worst of all it has ZERO, NIL, ZILCH, NADA corrosion resistance.
Especially noticeable in agricultural usage – wet, damp and corrosive ‘chemicals’ such as fertiliser and animal manure.
e.g. On the small farm where I was born, in the hedge along the public road on its southern side are 2 identical wrought iron steel gates. So they are hit only by agricultural chemicals but by road de-icing salt.
They will be 70 years old at least and to my knowledge and are still standing with perfect functionality.
Do we give them 100 years of possible life?
From actual experience, a modern steel farmyard gate crumbles inside 10 years -EVEN after being galvanised to try and protect them. My friend with the saws, discs, drills and welders asserts that its only the galvanising that actually holds them together.
So Mister Carbon Clever Clogs – what cost 10 of your galvanised Chinese junk gates versus just 1 ‘proper’ gate?
Well done Mr Trump for realising as much and slapping a tariff on that junk.
Apart from that one shining beacon, we truly are in an age of the lazy, dumb and buck-passing stupid.
Recycled steel is unpredictable since you have limited control over the composition. I had a friend who was an engineer in a Swedish steelwork, and his opinion was that recycled steel was only good enough for the least demanding applications like reinforcing rods for concrete.
And Peta, good quality wrought iron is remarkably corrosion resistant, actually much better than any ordinary steel and almost up to stainless steel quality. There are 200 year old wrought iron bridges that are still in use.
The extreme case is of course the 1600 year old Qutub Minar iron pillar:
This proves that as long as a writer sticks to the right narrative, with good intentions, he can say things that are absolutely idiotic and none of the cool kids will call him out on it.
And even if this pipe dream were successful, it would lead to higher net emissions as anything that increases the price of non-Chinese steel will increase the demand for Chinese steel, made from coal-powered energy.
The solution already is in place. European steel has been deliberately made so expensive that it can no longer compete with Indian and Chinese production, two countries which do not give a monkey’s chuff about HS&E and emissions of any kind. We are being deliberately dismantled as a scociety by the marxists and the useful idiots who flock to their cause.
The alternative would be to revert to charcoal based reductant as deployed before Abraham Darby first used coke – inspired by beer brewers! With all the extra CO2 boosting tree growth this might be an option for the future – but I have not run the numbers.
A hydrogen steel plant is already under construction in Linz, Austria
http://www.voestalpine.com/group/en/media/press-releases/2018-04-16-H2FUTURE-on-track-construction-starts-at-the-worlds-largest-hydrogen-pilot-facility/
There is no problem finding enough renewable energy for electric scrap furnaces…
Perhaps you should try to understand what you are reading Griff before sailing off into your green dreamland.
It isn’t a hydrogen steel plant. It is a hydrogen plant. “The worlds largest pilot plant”. Well, pilot plants usually aren’t very big, and neither is this one. 1200 cubic meters of H2 per hour (which sounds a lot more than 240 pounds) which means it is quite a small plant compared to conventional “non-green” hydrogen plants. It will need a lot of up-scaling before it can be used for steelmaking.
By the way, this is the simple part. Making hydrogen by electrolysis of water is high school chemistry. The difficult thing is doing it economically and safely on a large scale.
virtue signalers don’t need to understand, it’s enough just to signal their virtue.
Good one!
+1
Hi Griff:
Didn’t we have this discussion before? You posted a link to a claim that Britain could become a “major” producer of recycled steel using renewable energy from tidal basins. I dug up the numbers to refute that.
In any case, scrap steel only meets a small percentage of the annual demand — the vast majority of steel production is new (primary) steel made from iron ore using coked coal.
Steel is almost 100% recyclable, but because it is so durable it takes decades before steel in typical uses becomes available again as scrap. In the case of structural steel it is somewhere between 40 and 70 years before you get 50% of it back (from memory; I haven’t verified this figure).
In the meantime, world demand for steel increases each year.
Now if you can find a more efficient process to make steel than the nearly universal Basic Oxygen Furnace method used today, you could be the next Andrew Carnegie.
Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7
Griff, churning out regurgitated tripe? Never……….
I though he had written to Anthony in a hissy fit telling him he was never contributing to this blog again because he was disrespected.
I wonder why.
Griff, as tty pointed out, that article doesn’t say what you claim it says. They’re building a pilot hydrogen plant, not a “hydrogen steel” plant. They plan to use it to “to research into future breakthrough technologies” while that includes testing “the potential applications for green hydrogen in the various process stages of steel production” that’s not it’s only purpose and that suggests that such application and technologies are “still to come” (potential, not actual) IE they haven’t yet been invented/worked out (in short, we are talking *vaporware* at this moment in time). Don’t count your green chickens before they hatch.
But, they used steel to build the plant.
Steel? Let’s worry about cement as well…
Next up, “green glass”. Oh wait, they already make that, in Mexico. Lovely green tint, lots of bubbles. If you like that sort of thing. Oh wait, they do use fossil fuels to make it. Never mind.
A blast furnace is used to take raw ore and convert it to steel. An arc furnace can only melt scrap, and scrap is very scarce right now. I live in a steel town and the glow of the blast furnaces Turning mountains of coal and ore into steel is a very good sight. I spent many a night sitting around the mill waiting for the power company to give us the go ahead to bring an arc furnace online once the days load shrunk enough to allow us to do a melt.
When nothing works to solve a problem, the rational thing to do is to question the the problem.
Funny how in solving this global non problem, its always the people who can least afford it who have to accept the additional costs. Meanwhile the astronomically wealthy push down wages, and fly around the world telling people how to live, while taking their % from the AGW scam at every turn.
Its gets more like Elysium every day. I guess that whole France thing never made it to the Elite News Network?
Green steel? Great! That was Reardon’s advanced steel product in Atlas Shrugged.
Just for scale reference….
WSJ
“Mr. Deng, who died in 1997, never got to see how big. At the time of his visit to Japan, China produced 4% of the world’s steel. This year, China is on track to produce more than half, a record 923 million metric tons, according to government estimates. It overtook the U.S. in steel production in 1993, sped past Japan in 1996 and last year produced three times as much steel as the U.S., Russia and Japan combined. Steel made its shipbuilding and auto-making industries into the world’s largest.”
“Globally, steel is responsible for 7 per cent to 9 per cent of all direct emissions from fossil fuels”
The most important piece of information we need to consider here is that fossil fuel CO2 is not controlling atmospheric CO2 and our emissions are a tiny part of the whole. This fact has been before the public and climate communities for years but is completely ignored by the IPCC to accept the indefensible assumption that all recent growth in atmospheric CO2 is due to human activities. This article would be rightly recognized as moot if the facts were widely known. Start here (https://edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/contradictions-to-ipccs-climate-change-theory/) for an easy introduction to the physics involved. Then study Harde 2017 and the laughable treatment he got at (https://hhgpc0.wixsite.com/harde-2017-censored). Then consider the several video lectures by Murry Salby. Go on to see the statistical analysis at (https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/19/co2responsiveness/) that is entirely consistent with Salby’s work and directly contradictory to to the IPCC assumption mentioned earlier.
This line of evidence should be at the forefront of any study of how to decrease CO2 emissions until it has bee clearly falsified.
I wouldn’t worry. China and India, with there “carbon” exemptions, will be able to supply the rest of the world with plenty of cheap high quality steel. It’s just part of the de-industrialisation of the west.
The “carbon cap and trade” schemes are literally trade with thin air.
every one of this trades have one winner: the stock market.
While the real economy tries to achieve a realistic price at auctions, the stock market earns with electronic speed banking
betting against your bids
every second during the trading cycle.
This electronic money is stored electronically and thus withdrawn from the real economy.
All that is achieved is currency devaluation, inflation.