The full interview (40 minutes) is available here: th-cam.com/video/PHTRzeb6nMM/w-d-xo.html We talked in more depth about the steel making process, aboutcement, and other applications of hydrogen and electrification.
@@richardcowley4087 hehehe that's telling . Every one knows if good steel is to be made , the process required is using coking coal.. It doesn't hurt to look at other ideas or processes.
@@mrman1536 hilarious ! other ideas and processes that are manipulated and lied about so much that those who have no idea think that because low or no CO2 (carbon) is mentioned then it fits the bill for the man made climate brigade fantasists like rosie should shut up you are wrong, "everyone" does not know and that "everyone" are people who think that mankind can control nature and CO2 is pollution Although, "everyone who knows about how steel is made" is a very different "everyone" to the agw lot ! There is no such thing as clean, green, dirty or renewable energy, or green hydrogen all a fantasy
I'd just like to raise a note of caution in regards to low-temperature processes - that is, anything that doesn't have molten iron (at 1600ºC or hotter) as its output. Common steelmaking alloys - carbon, manganese, silicon, chromium - need to be dissolved into stirred liquid steel in order to produce a homogeneous batch (called a 'heat' in steelmaking jargon) as diffusion in the solid state would take too long and would not give a fully homogenous material. Also, dephosphorisation of steel requires the steel to be liquid as well, along with the application of molten quicklime and oxygen (I'm assuming that desulphurisation may be less of a requirement due to the absence of coal, but as phosphorous comes from ores, dephosphorisation would still be required). This means that any cold metal would then have to be melted in order to carry out these processes, followed by casting to shape. Further shaping by hot-rolling requires steel to be austenitic, which means a minimum temperature of 900ºC - most hot-rolling processes have furnace exit temperatures of 1200ºC.
I always love it when every one who has less than zero understanding of steelmaking instantly becomes an expert after 2 minutes on Face Book or You Tube . It has always been possible to make Iron & Steel by direct reduction and we have been doing this for nearly a century . Down side it is very expensive so only gets used for very exotic alloys & uses , mostly by research institutions . Again Rosie needs to spend 10 minutes in a foundry melting with an arc furnace and her absurd statement about arc furnaces being lower emissions would never have been made . She might have slightly different ideas when she can not see her hand on the end of her arm through the dense brown smoke . And of course simple minded people can only see the one problem being CO2 . Nitrogen compounds of course do not exist and do not cause any problems in the atmosphere . People have no idea about volumes 2,000,000 tons ( metric) a day is never be going to be made using any of the outlined processes . The volume of hydrogen needed to be produced is astronomical and would require solar cells covering a land mass near that of Belgium and the electricity needed to melt the steel , even if it was all done with VIP Induction furnaces would be an equally gargantuan task . In fact just melting 2,000,000 tons of iron is a big ask The accepted norm is 400 KwH for a ton of iron , now am an old fart so I am used to BTU's so I hope this KwH stuff ends up being correct . An arc melt would generally go of no longer than 15 minutes or you burn out the carbon electrodes and melt the substation An induction melt will generally run for a few hours because the current draw is substantially less Please feel free to correct me if this is wrong So 400 Kwh x 2,000,000 tons = 800,000,000 KwH = 800 GwH Now Australia's total generation capacity is 96 Gw ( rounded ) x 2 hours ( for an induction melt ) = 192 GwH so we would need 4 x the entire generation capacity of Australia just to melt the iron ore to make pig iron each & every day with 1 melt per day . Using arc furnaces we would need to output 800 Gwh in .25 of an hour so we would need to have the capacity to generate 3,200 GW so you would need 33 Australias or 29 UK's or 2 Japans or I know that production is spread all over the planet but it is hard to put the supply demands in context any other way And remember this is just to replace the pig iron produced daily , we produce almost the same amount of steel daily but a lot of that is remelt . Every one is racing around trying to find some one else to do the heavy lifting when in fact the problem is being generated by OURSELVES because we are the end consumers who are driving the demand for this production. If we , yes you and me reduced our consumption of single use items or stuff we buy on impulse ( treadmills , Ab-busters, exercise bikes , baby prams , food in cans , more christmass light than Disneyland ) and even worse all the junk consumer durables that are neither durable nor repairable then a massive slice of this pollution would never be generated . Even just the simple act of repairing your car & running it for an extra 10 years will make a massive difference to world pollution.
The point about the electro chemical steel making process needing a consistent electrical supply, I wonder if it would be a good move to build an array of molten metal batteries into your steel mill when you're constructing it. You're already building a structure designed to contain molten metal so you're already sited in a place that's suitable for that kind of industrial process and you have high capacity power lines coming into your facility, it would make sense to add some backup power that you're uniquely suited to handle.
Great idea on utilizing liquid metal batteries (Ambri?). Utilizing a big buffer of LMB's...(tied into a large solar farm+off-shore wind farm) it could be possible for sustained steel production.
@@michelem.6104 You wouldn't even have to use Ambris, those are designed to be transported and installed somewhere. If you're already building heat proof structures you can make giant liquid metal batteries in place. I remember some of the early research about liquid metal batteries was basically repurposing aluminum smelters, because the electrochemical process for refining aluminum is effectively a battery.
@@AlRoderick there is a very big difference between aluminium plants and Steel mills - about 500 °C. Molten steel eats any refractory it is contained in, and a steel plant does not have the capacity to indefinitely store it in a molten state. Many steel making steps actually produce heat, which reduces the need for constant reheating, but the thermal loss is constant. A decomissioned plant may have materials useful for constructing lower temperature molten metal storage, but I can't see that there would be pbvious synergies at an active plant
Excellent episode on clean steel Rosie... Bart Kolodziejczyk was a great choice of interviewee.. Factual, knowledgeable and experienced... straight to the point. Thanks for a very educational walk to the shops and back!
I was really excited to score Bart as an interviewee! I learned so much from him, before this I had thought green steel was one of the (few) big roles that green hydrogen would play in the energy transition so it was interesting to learn that it's likely to be a transition technology on the way to electrification.
You glossed over the electricity and natural gas required for the EAF operation. I worked at one which had a 120 MVA transformer that consumed as much electricity as a large city, and ours was by no means the largest EAF in operation. Since it operates 24/7 and green sources of electricity need wind and sunshine it is clear that a stable base of power from a fossil fuel generating station is required. An alternative of a massive battery facility on site is not economically viable, which then requires an even larger green supply of power during the wind and solar generation hours. Sure, given an unlimited money supply it could be accomplished, but what would it do to the cost of the steel and is it then a viable proposition? What would it do to the cost of the ultimate steel products (autos, structures, consumer goods, and wind turbines and solar farms?)
There is a whole class of high temperature nuclear reactors that could decarbonise steel much more cost effectively. Not only can they provide direct process heat, but they can also provide electricity and green hydrogen production at the same time. They also work 24/7 so they make much more efficient use of the capital expenditure.
One thing that would reduce demand for steel is protecting it in some applications like automobiles, so that end of useful life is no longer determined by when the bodywork rusts away ! I had a SAAB for example with galvanised bodywork panels where life could easily exceed over 20 years.
yeah, none of the "Green" automobile-haters discuss this aspect! btw. University Professors making steel will be a disaster. They know nothing. Those, proposing Green Steelmaking, are not experts on metallurgy, they haven't worked in steel production or anything close. Companies are doing research because of political pressure. Steel which contains residual hydrogen is brittle! Zinc galvanized steel is fun: in warm humid conditions, with some ammonia present it corrodes. A 2mm thick galvanized frame will corrode away within less than two years if someone has peed on it several times! ( I can't tell who did it.) Hydrogen and/or Phosphoros ("Rot-Bruch", red cracks) make iron brittle. There is one exception in India: They have a 2000-year-old steel column that doesn't rust in wind and weather! it was found to be "Goethit-alloy", which contains phosphorous. How was that column made? I suspect the Goethit-alloy is only a surface treatment. Imagine, the ancient Indians, (after casting that column), ordered 1000 men to pee on the red hot piece, to make it stronger. Phosphoros has a bad rap in steel technology, but I think it's value as surface treatment is not well researched.
Galvanised steel is a great way to prolong the life of steel products used outside, that is a no brainer to help reduce steel use. The scientists won't be making steel, they are researching new methods/technologies of making it. It will be then up to engineers to make the technology work in the real world. That's generally how new technologies are brought to market, from research first. As for phosphorus as a steel surface treatment being not well researched, I have some rust converter in my shed which I use for surface treating rusty steel. It contains phosphoric acid. You are welcome to have some for your research, but I think someone has beat you to it. (Probably by some scientist who knows nothing about steel!) 😂
@@robcaseyire I think I've used rust inhibitors in the past containing phosphoric acid. They turn the rust to phosphate which then protects the steel underneath.
Spent some of design and engineering life in the steel machinery industry for mostly electric arc operators. In N America we have been using natural gas in our blast furnaces for quit a number of years to reduce the need for coking coal. Coking coal has created a problem with a significant rise in the number of people downwind from the coking plants developing cancer. While natural gas does produce a greener steel and less cancer cases as mentioned it should also allow an easy conversion to hydrogen reduction of iron with little modification. Steel companies in N America have also employed very powerful magnets at the mining pits to concentrated the iron into an electric arc grade iron that reduces the need for massive amounts of carbon added into the electric arc furnaces and shipping costs and the amount of fuel needed in the shipping process. With carefully placed oxygen lances in the electric arc furnaces, impressively large electric arc furnaces can be built that can match the output of blast furnaces or basic oxygen furnaces. All of this was developed to reduce either cancer cases or the need to run your furnaces at full tilt during poor markets of the product. Just thought that it is ironic that these technologies could also usher in green steel.
One of the major conventional uses for hydrogen is in the production of ammonia. Even decarbonizing ammonia for conventional uses would take quite a bit of doing.
Yes I agree. We are starting to see a few green ammonia/fertiliser projects being announced but not as many as projects creating new uses for hydrogen. I'm hopeful that'll change over the next couple of years because replacing existing fossil hydrogen with green is a no- regrets action.
@@gregbailey45 Should have been more clear. What I meant to say is that the quantity of green hydrogen needed just to decarbonize ammonia is nothing to sneeze at.
An interesting video, thank you. Dr Bart K's statement near the end about using, wherever possible, electricity for such processes, instead of hydrogen sums it up nicely; efficiency. Making, storing and burning hydrogen is not an efficient process, despite its advantages, when looking at CO2 production.
Yes only makes sense if you use green hydrogen from electrolysis, not as most hydrogen is produced from methane and produces its own CO2. Hydrogen from electrolysis is not very efficient so using the electrons directly in electrolysis steel production would seem like the most efficient use of energy.
on the low temp electrolysis - you can select out specific metals... but can you use the exact same process tanks, pull the iron and then maybe pull some set of other metals sequentially to save setup times etc ? I realize you'd have to do some work on the aqueous mix to get the right salts etc in place... surely some of the ores out there contain multiple metals that could be extracted, where today maybe they're bypassed... Short note otherwise, it is so awesome to see bright young women like yourself in the engineering spaces - wasn't enough of y'all during my career...
With the advent of not being able to produce enough steel to meet future demand, hopefully they start to develop other products to replace steel (that are recyclable) in vanity projects and just leave steel to be used in structural projects
I would love to do a trip to Sweden to make some videos! They have the green steel, also green batteries and some very interesting energy intensive industry up north taking advantage of the cheap green energy up there. I used to go there a couple of times a year for work, but I don't know when I'll be able to get up there again now that I live in Australia!
About the Boston method: 1. We should not assume an intermittent power supply. The grid of the future will need to have balancing features. 2. The high temperature is not necessarily a problem. Once you have your steel, at high temperature, you need to cool it off, right? Well, instead of just releasing the heat you could trap it and reuse it either to heat more feed, to heat some buildings or to convert it back to electricity. In fact, combining both points, there are energy grid thermal storage solutions using molten salts - your steel factory could serve as such solution, with feed and steel instead of the molten salts, and then your energy cost (and footprint) will be minimal while your impact on the grid would be beneficial (balancing the grid).
1. Flexible demand (also called "demand-side management") is an integral part to the grid of the future. Why have huge battery banks that can supply MW's of power whenever the factory decides to flip the switch and make steel, when the factory could instead soak up peaks in energy production (noon, windy days) and quickly shut off if demand increased or production decreased? It's less costly to shift energy demand than to artificially shift demand with batteries
@@ThomasBomb45 Interesting idea. I'm sure that in countries (like UK, I believe) where the cost of electricity varies a lot with demand, hourly even, business have adapted to benefit from lower rates. Residential consumption has also adapted, people program the laundry to be done at night, top up the boiler with heat when the energy is cheaper etc. It would be interesting to do a study of how much the peaks of demand/supply can be smoothed out by such actions, or have been already.
Professor Sadaway of MIT? The same man involved with the Ambri liquid metal battery I presume 🤔 That is a very interesting process that I haven't look back into for a while
Great vid, Rosie! Australian recycled water engineer in France currently researching water use in steel manufacturing and other heavy industry. Would be interesting to know whether any of these processes may also change water demand significantly. If anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears
I've actually been looking into using a heat pump for high temperature smelting. it should be much more efficient, if I can find a material that can take the strain at such high temperatures. Which to say the least is proving challenging.
@@roguedogx Thermodynamics is against you in this. Heat pumps are great when you don't have to raise the absolute temperature much - say from 273 K to 303 K (0 °C to 30 °C), maybe to heat your house. The coefficient of performance (COP) is Thot/ (Thot - Tcold). For the houshold heating it would be 303/(303 - 273) = 10.1 this is the theoretic maximum, you will have other losses so might get 5 ish. For heating to 1200 °C from a heat source at 25 °C the COP would be (1200 + 273)/(1200-25) = 1.25. This again is the theoretical maximum and there will be losses. It's not worth the effort, sorry. So don't bother looking for a working fluid. :(
I worked at th BHP dri plant in Port Hedland. Very scary process, the H2 will auto ignite anywhere it leaks. They shut it down soon after a fatal accident. I used to have nightmares about it burning down😬
Indeed, good safety practice is the key. Refineries have been using hydrogen for a long time, and of course there have been bad accidents, but there are many more dangerous product and by-products to be scared of, like the alkylation unit...
@@merchantoo Yeah, the trouble at HBI was the interaction of H2 and the iron oxide powder. The solids would clag the valve between vessels and need to be purged through with HP Nitrogen bottles Only once someone used an oxygen bottle😬 They all look the same with the grey iron dust all over them
I agree with others who say that you are often somewhat negative and rates of progress we have become used to perhaps account for your caution. However, the times we have entered now remind me so much of the 1950s and '60s in Britain when innovation was astonishing and it is pleasing to see Asian states such as Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia coming up with vital solutions sort of 'glueing' major nation developments together. South America is given too little credit for innovation, notably in green fuels which have been priority for decades and hydrogen cell aircraft. Sadly, the over cautious USA and EU are failing to take developments further and these areas of the globe are in stasis as blocs but progress in Poland, Czech Rep, Hungary and Nordic countries will shock the EU big boys out of bureaucratic sclerosis or the EU will split apart. No loss IMHO. The impact of small company innovation is breathtaking and even Mr Musk was a small player from S.Africa before Tesla and the massive achievement of SpaceX. For pure cheap hydrogen I have a feeling that your native Australia (with Japanese experience over 30 years) will become the leader sooner than many think.
Just about the best Rosie Engineering, relevant technology information video. The "Greening of Australia" has come around again in the Mineralogical sense of what matters most to Citizens. And the production of Reducer Gas type Hydrogen made with Wind and Solar for reducing oxides to metals is to be a top priority? Haven't seen any convincing science plus economics to recommend Hydrogen for other uses..
The electrolysis method to produce iron is intriguing. But I'm I right in saying it's only compatible with iron/sulphur compounds (a waste by-product from SA's Olympic Dam mine and others), rather than the Haematite or Magnetite we currently dig out the ground for steel production?
So for each ton of steel, what is the time to produce? You still have mining to contend with. Whether it's mining for Iron ore or materials to make the infrastructure to create steel with alternative energy. It's still replacing one non-renewable resource for another.
It seems way easier just to spray-paint the steel after producing it if all you want is green steel. ... Joking aside, next up I want to see low-carbon cement production, and aluminium too. Both of those can easily switch to low-carbon energy but still release carbon intrinsically from the main processes we use for them today.
Where can i find the data about the emissions per ton of steel? In Holland (Tata Steel) steel is made with coal (cokes) which generates CO2 and gas, then we have emissions from the Blast Furnace, and emissions from (re)heating of steel before rolling, and emissions from electricity use. They say it is a very efficient proces but it is a non substantiated claim.
A comment from ForzaJersey who made an interesting suggestion about "methane microwave assisted pyrolysis", got me wondering when such a technology could be implemented industrially. My quick google foray into this technology seems to indicate to me that this is very much in the lab stage and hasn't commenced its journey in development, let alone large scale implementation. Timeliness is rather important in relation to Climate Change, so I was wondering if this could be a worthwhile part 2 video, that adds to your excellent coverage of emerging and established technology for making steel with potential for de-carbonisation of the current steel making practises. Such a part 2 video could add some detail to this video with info about the likely scale of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and realistic timeline to implementation of the selected approaches. Just a thought bubble, but perhaps you already have most of this information and contacts and so not such a Herculian task? Your down to earth reporting and discussions of technology and engineering is very valuable and, I think, well respected. I imagine quite influential too, perhaps not so much with those that "don't hold a hose", but certainly with switched on political and industrial leaders that take their roles seriously, as well as us common folk that are interested in such topics.
Not a solution for cutting back the CO2 emissions directly, but still: wouldn’t it make a big difference if we’d reuse the heat coming from the steel mill for heating homes and offices? This would also work after the steel making process would change to a hydrogen-based one (the heat is always a ‘by-product’).
If you mean literally heat homes with the same heat that is coming off the furnaces, that's a tad silly. ( I'm assuming that you are young, though) The problem is that you need to get the heat to the home, but heat unfortunately spreads out/ disapates (entropy). What you could do is, with enouph heat, operate a boiler + steam turbine to generate electricity, then use that clean energy to heat homes. It's worth noting that when you transfer between types of energy, like from heat to chemical, kinetic, or electric, you lose some energy along the way. But, it would end up being a lot more efficient than trying to pipe heat to the suburbs. You could also recycle heat at the steel factory for other processes done at the facility, as well as using low power thermo electric generators to passively convert whatever is still leftover. (These can only operate for a little while without overheating since they run off heat energy differences between materials to create charge.) But are good to pipe excess heat through to if heat starts to reach use/ storage capacity. All in all, it's not a terrible idea. Heat is a form of waste, too often left on the table, when there are fairly simple ways to recycle it.
3:52 I don't really think biogas is very green - my problem being fossil CH₄ is used to make the fertiliser to help grow the plants. We need to decarbonise NH₃ production before we can say biogas is green!
Rosi, there is one topic aside hydrogen, that I never hear about, but is perhaps concerning not me: For me hydrogen may be a nice energy transporter - but physically it's more than annoying: - super small, need special containers - steel tubes and containers will be spoiled over time in contact with hydrogen - you have to compress it with much energy to transport - when transporting, most assume liquid - which is extremely cold - other technical challenges will arise. - any leakage in the transportation and storage will be extremely dangerous. So - as I heard, some Arabian states already test solar power to produce hydrogen for future markets (make sense due to their sun exposure). It would be interesting how production ready transportation exists.
Hmm the Sadoway molten metal reductions sounds like it would work really well with a molten salt reactor. Then just use a non fossil carbon source, and you can make steel production carbon negative.
You missed steel plants are integrated sites with attached mills, the works arising gasses are captured for their reheat furnaces. Every mills reheat furnace will also need converting too. Integrated steel works are massive, and those in the EU pale to those in China, the blue circles on the map just don't convey the enormity of the issue here..
Wind and solar electricity does not have to be intermittent, because if one uses them to produce Hydrogen then the Hydrogen will stabilize the intermittency. So if you have Hydrogen for that then unit for making steel.
Hi Is there not a risk of hydrogen enbrittelment using hydrogen or amonia and if there is what might the solution be. I'm no chemist but am fully aware of the risk of enbrittelment when stripping and replating hydraulic rams which from my worms eye view is that electro plating would only at worst case be a skin effect but bulk reduction may effect the whole ingot Please correct me and tell me why Regards Zed Keep up the good work
I wasn't going to comment on the CO2 production being required, I was going to suggest that I'm pretty sure I can run a cupola furnace to create carbon monoxide instead. Not entirely convinced that's going to help things.
People are over focused on the CO2 and ignoring the much larger mining waste problem. The CO2 is like looking at a creek next to the Mississippi River.
Lots of steel will be needed for all the wind farms now if they can stop it from rusting. Are wind turbine towers steel or aluminum? They use dehumidifiers in some of them to stop rust so steel I'm guessing.
Yes Rosie it is Very Very Disappointing that BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortisque etc are Not Producing Green Iron Ore. Which is Needed to Produce "Green Steel". Thankyou Rosie and Bart for Sharing Your Knowledge.
As nuclear reactors retire and become replaced by larger scale renewables with storage, couldn’t they keep going making hydrogen with a steel plant right beside the reactor?
Coal is heated to make coke. This releases a lot of methane. However, tnis methane is burnt to heat the coal. This releases co2. As you mention, there are greaner sources of carbon.
Great video! You inspire the industry and decision makers to take bold decisions! With our invention of the HYBRIT Technology and production of fossil-free steel since August 18, 2021, we hope to do the same. / Johan Anderson, SSAB
Hi Rosie, when you visit you can dig a little deeper and ask them how they plan to decarbonise the EAF. As you say, the carbon footprint of most EAFs today is as you rightly say mostly due to scope 2 emissions, i.e. electricity production. When electricity is decarbonised there will still be a substantial footprint, 10x smaller than blast furnace route but still significant, and brushed under the carpet by all the big steel companies that have announced following these brave fellows at hybrit. Pedantics aside it's not so easy to take iron and add carbon to it to produce steel without losing loads of the carbon you add. The biggest user of cement in Sweden is the iron ore mine. The biggest users of lime in Sweden are the steel companies. Technologies do not live on islands and true decarbonisation requires a lot more thought. Great video, I would say that you characterisation of the state of CCS in the steel industry falls short, there are more initiatives at many steel companies.
@@gregbailey45 yes, that's right. Direct Reduce Iron (with Hydrogen) doesn't contain carbon, so it needs to be added. One of the problems is that you add more carbon than you need because it burns of very quickly, so it's not a question of adding just the right amount. The type of DRI that already exists, from natural gas as opposed to hydrogen does have some carbon in it, so similar to the pig iron case you reduce the amount of carbon to the required level, just you start 3-4 times lower.
Biogas can replace natural gas quite easily. Any organic waste product can be used to produce biogas. Trash, agricultural waste, and even raw sewage are all perfect feed stock for biogas production. Biogas is one of the most underutilized products in the world.
If we use captured CO2 to make steel, it is carbon negative steel. Probably still counts if we use biomass derived carbon too. EDIT: interested in how they dissolve the iron ore into the electrolyte for the low temperature electrolysis process. Mineral acid? Something else?
But you can't use CO2 to make iron from iron ore, as it already has oxygen atoms bound to the carbon. Rather, you create CO2 if you use carbon to reduce the iron ore. If you really want to use captured CO2 you'd first need to get rid of the oxygen (e.g. as a plant does) before you could use it. And then you'd end up with CO2 again at the end, so only neutral at best, not negative.
@@EngineeringwithRosie I wasn't suggesting that. I was suggesting using captured carbon in the form of CO2 to provide the carbon to the pure iron made from hydrogen reduction. That is carbon negative as the carbon is only used in alloying the steel, and is fixed in the alloy until it rusts.
@@SocialDownclimber The Carbon in CO2 is not available to react with the steel - it wants to stay bonded to the O2 more than bonding to the Fe. You would need to create C and O2 first and then use the C to alloy with the steel. :)
Intermittent power gives you intermittent product. Not great for predictable high volume manufacturing. BMW is betting on the Boston Metal process for their future car manufacturing, so that will be happening for sure. Somewhere between 2025 and 2030.
I imagined that solar arrays that concentrate sunlight on to a tower would be a good green way to go for smelting and steel making. Maybe even shipping ore and scrap to southern desert areas to do this.
In Australia‘s case Northern Deserts … their Iron ore comes from a line close to the Capricorn Meridian … hey how about induction melting utilising the solar energy from an Array of electric Solar panels close to the Ore Deposits ??? Hydrogen is very dangerous compared to Solar Electricity … imagine an induction blast furnace !
DRI is not disappearing at all, this is inaccurate! is absolutely true vicecersa. DRI can be produced using 100% H2 and this is what many steelmakers are actually doing including Salcos , ArcelorMIttal and many others. Electrolysis for steel ?? nice idea but did you calculate the HUGE amount of energy you need??
Add this parameter into your equation. C02 is heavier than air….. This can be seen particularly in valleys which we identify as smog. CO2 is on the ground not in the atmosphere.
Steel used to be made with biomass carbon. It was utterly unsustainable and led to the broad scale deforestation of Europe, you can trace the economic power of European regions through the Middle Ages based on where the steel making occurred, and when a region ran out of biomass, the manufacturing, and economic power moved elsewhere. It wasn’t until the discovery of coal in the UK, that the forests of Europe were able to recover, and Britain’s economic might took off. We use MASSIVELY more steel today than we did in the early 19th century, so no, biomass is not a sustainable alternative, as you couldn’t even grow it fast enough to meet demand 400 years ago.
The other thing often overlooked in biomass schemes is you need to leave biomass behind to continue the carbon cycle and maintain organic matter in the soil. Remove too much biomass from the growing site and you end up depleting all your topsoil leaving a barren wasteland.
I am all for converting my foundry to hydrogen, but I'm not sure where I would get the hydrogen. It's obviously a transfer of energy not a source of energy.
As far as I know, if you are just melting ingots and casting them an electric furnace would be better than using hydrogen - fewer losses (as mentioned in the video - use electricity directly if you can)... If you were to use hydrogen for the heating you would need an electrolyser to make the hydrogen and that would be a lossy process (waste heat, mostly due to overpotential).
The war on carbon is what I call ridiculous. The world has lots of carbon as it’s all around us. What’s really looney is when they pump carbon into the earth.
@@jimlofts5433 premium of hydrogen-based steel production is eliminated at electricity prices of $15-$20/MWh or lower. Solar is almost there. And that's without a price for the carbon impact.
Remember it is called carbon steel! Now you can melt scrap steel in electric ark furnaces but it requires vast amounts of electricity and it depletes the carbon and makes the steel subject to work hardening and cracking! Hydrogen just destroys steel!
Well, at least hydrogen is good for use as a propellant in nuclear rockets. I don't see the fossil fuel industry selling as much volume as they would like for that though.
Check out Greenpeace AU and Moonie AU are in the same block in Sydney (826 George St, Haymarket NSW). That leads to European Renewable Energy Council in the same way, least a case for concern. I highly doubt the Green series are originally from a legitimate science, rather than an awkward counterfeit pseudo-business.
Have3 we looked at using something other than carbon to strength iron? Maybe we have been doing something so long we need to look at how it all started. Maybe we were wrong. Heck we spent billions for dark matter and that was completely wrong on that.
I'll start believing in using green steel after ammonia-based fertilizer production is no longer dependent on natural gas. If you can't make ammonia without steam reforming of fossil fuels, I can't see it as being practical engineering to use hydrogen or electricity for reduction of iron ore.
Actually, you can make hydrogen without CO2 via methane microwave assisted pyrolysis. This process produces high purity hydrogen and carbon black powder. The carbon can be sequestered underground or utilized for other uses. Like true green steel, this version of blue hydrogen or turquoise hydrogen pyrolysis is not done at scale today but can be in the near future.
You need 1.2 tonnes of hydrogen to produce 1 tonne of DRI. The UK produces 7.9 million tonnes. Germany (largest steel maker in Europe) produces nearly 50million tonnes. A wind Turbine has a tower weighing 150 tonnes. So you wil need 900000 tonnes of Hydrogen in the UK alone… UK imports 875000 tonnes of iron concentrates each year. That is without fertiliser and cement. Presently an electrolyzer uses 50 KW hrs to produce 1Kg of Hydrogen. The best Chemically is 39KWhrs to produce 1Kg of Hydrogen. The UK will require at least 160 GW installed capacity, just to keep the lights on. To produce the hydrogen required would need 16.7 TeraWatth of spare renewable generation. For the UK, would be better to let Australia make pig iron for transport to the UK. PS, did I mention sponge iron and electrolysis iron is pyrophoric
@@ForzaJersey Interesting idea. When I first worked in an oil refinery, it had a carbon black plant. Seems like carbon black might be incorporated into roadways to sequester it.
Thank you Rosie for telling the You Tube community about cutting the CO2 released by steelmaking. I was granted US patent 3890161, DIODE ARRAY for a method of upcycling energy as electrical energy from the ambient heat of our planet. This upcycled energy ia entirely clean so.it can decarbonize everything. I need a crowdfunding grant management team not including me to pay for nan8fabricating proof of concept prototyping.
Hydrogen yeah ammonia probably will become more and more common vs hydrogen as time passes in terms of energy storage aside from obviously purely electric stuff however defined… clearly lots of investment now in aviation could be a huge future market for hydrogen IF battery/capacitor etc research isn’t as fruitful as hoped wow electricity steel stuff interesting🤯♾♾♾♾♾🌈☮️💟😍🥰😘🤩🚀🌌🗽🎬🎬🎬
So what you still have not understood is that Hydrogen can come from water and when used it goes back to water. That make an energy carrier that is limitless for ever. Try to make a video about another fuel that does that. Good luck.
Perhaps read Wikipedia under biomass to see we are producing 8 gigatons in carbon from fossil fuels of which only 4 gigatons is converted to biomass or buffered in the oceans. So your comment does not make any sense to me.
The full interview (40 minutes) is available here: th-cam.com/video/PHTRzeb6nMM/w-d-xo.html
We talked in more depth about the steel making process, aboutcement, and other applications of hydrogen and electrification.
yet more man made climate bullshit
if that process were possible and affordable then why is it not adopted ?
go back to washing the dishes
steel cannot be made without or with so called low carbon
why do you lie so much ?
@@richardcowley4087 hehehe that's telling . Every one knows if good steel is to be made , the process required is using coking coal..
It doesn't hurt to look at other ideas or processes.
@@mrman1536 hilarious !
other ideas and processes that are manipulated and lied about so much that those who have no idea think that because low or no CO2 (carbon) is mentioned then it fits the bill for the man made climate brigade
fantasists like rosie should shut up
you are wrong, "everyone" does not know and that "everyone" are people who think that mankind can control nature and CO2 is pollution
Although, "everyone who knows about how steel is made" is a very different "everyone" to the agw lot !
There is no such thing as clean, green, dirty or renewable energy, or green hydrogen all a fantasy
Or you could react the co2 with hydrogen and heat from the furnace to creat methanol in a sort of sebatier process. Rocket fuel but in a green way.
I'd just like to raise a note of caution in regards to low-temperature processes - that is, anything that doesn't have molten iron (at 1600ºC or hotter) as its output. Common steelmaking alloys - carbon, manganese, silicon, chromium - need to be dissolved into stirred liquid steel in order to produce a homogeneous batch (called a 'heat' in steelmaking jargon) as diffusion in the solid state would take too long and would not give a fully homogenous material. Also, dephosphorisation of steel requires the steel to be liquid as well, along with the application of molten quicklime and oxygen (I'm assuming that desulphurisation may be less of a requirement due to the absence of coal, but as phosphorous comes from ores, dephosphorisation would still be required). This means that any cold metal would then have to be melted in order to carry out these processes, followed by casting to shape. Further shaping by hot-rolling requires steel to be austenitic, which means a minimum temperature of 900ºC - most hot-rolling processes have furnace exit temperatures of 1200ºC.
I always love it when every one who has less than zero understanding of steelmaking instantly becomes an expert after 2 minutes on Face Book or You Tube .
It has always been possible to make Iron & Steel by direct reduction and we have been doing this for nearly a century .
Down side it is very expensive so only gets used for very exotic alloys & uses , mostly by research institutions .
Again Rosie needs to spend 10 minutes in a foundry melting with an arc furnace and her absurd statement about arc furnaces being lower emissions would never have been made . She might have slightly different ideas when she can not see her hand on the end of her arm through the dense brown smoke .
And of course simple minded people can only see the one problem being CO2 . Nitrogen compounds of course do not exist and do not cause any problems in the atmosphere .
People have no idea about volumes 2,000,000 tons ( metric) a day is never be going to be made using any of the outlined processes . The volume of hydrogen needed to be produced is astronomical and would require solar cells covering a land mass near that of Belgium and the electricity needed to melt the steel , even if it was all done with VIP Induction furnaces would be an equally gargantuan task . In fact just melting 2,000,000 tons of iron is a big ask
The accepted norm is 400 KwH for a ton of iron , now am an old fart so I am used to BTU's so I hope this KwH stuff ends up being correct .
An arc melt would generally go of no longer than 15 minutes or you burn out the carbon electrodes and melt the substation
An induction melt will generally run for a few hours because the current draw is substantially less
Please feel free to correct me if this is wrong
So 400 Kwh x 2,000,000 tons = 800,000,000 KwH = 800 GwH
Now Australia's total generation capacity is 96 Gw ( rounded ) x 2 hours ( for an induction melt ) = 192 GwH so we would need 4 x the entire generation capacity of Australia just to melt the iron ore to make pig iron each & every day with 1 melt per day .
Using arc furnaces we would need to output 800 Gwh in .25 of an hour so we would need to have the capacity to generate 3,200 GW so you would need 33 Australias or 29 UK's or 2 Japans or
I know that production is spread all over the planet but it is hard to put the supply demands in context any other way
And remember this is just to replace the pig iron produced daily , we produce almost the same amount of steel daily but a lot of that is remelt .
Every one is racing around trying to find some one else to do the heavy lifting when in fact the problem is being generated by OURSELVES because we are the end consumers who are driving the demand for this production.
If we , yes you and me reduced our consumption of single use items or stuff we buy on impulse ( treadmills , Ab-busters, exercise bikes , baby prams , food in cans , more christmass light than Disneyland ) and even worse all the junk consumer durables that are neither durable nor repairable then a massive slice of this pollution would never be generated . Even just the simple act of repairing your car & running it for an extra 10 years will make a massive difference to world pollution.
Rosie, you're the bomb. Thank you for all your content :)
Aw that's so nice of you 😊
The point about the electro chemical steel making process needing a consistent electrical supply, I wonder if it would be a good move to build an array of molten metal batteries into your steel mill when you're constructing it. You're already building a structure designed to contain molten metal so you're already sited in a place that's suitable for that kind of industrial process and you have high capacity power lines coming into your facility, it would make sense to add some backup power that you're uniquely suited to handle.
Interesting idea. I am hoping to do a video on molten metal batteries soon, I am just trying to arrange a company to let me film some of their work.
Great idea on utilizing liquid metal batteries (Ambri?). Utilizing a big buffer of LMB's...(tied into a large solar farm+off-shore wind farm) it could be possible for sustained steel production.
@@michelem.6104 You wouldn't even have to use Ambris, those are designed to be transported and installed somewhere. If you're already building heat proof structures you can make giant liquid metal batteries in place. I remember some of the early research about liquid metal batteries was basically repurposing aluminum smelters, because the electrochemical process for refining aluminum is effectively a battery.
@@AlRoderick there is a very big difference between aluminium plants and Steel mills - about 500 °C. Molten steel eats any refractory it is contained in, and a steel plant does not have the capacity to indefinitely store it in a molten state. Many steel making steps actually produce heat, which reduces the need for constant reheating, but the thermal loss is constant. A decomissioned plant may have materials useful for constructing lower temperature molten metal storage, but I can't see that there would be pbvious synergies at an active plant
AMBRI.
Thanks!
Excellent episode on clean steel Rosie... Bart Kolodziejczyk was a great choice of interviewee.. Factual, knowledgeable and experienced... straight to the point. Thanks for a very educational walk to the shops and back!
I was really excited to score Bart as an interviewee! I learned so much from him, before this I had thought green steel was one of the (few) big roles that green hydrogen would play in the energy transition so it was interesting to learn that it's likely to be a transition technology on the way to electrification.
You glossed over the electricity and natural gas required for the EAF operation. I worked at one which had a 120 MVA transformer that consumed as much electricity as a large city, and ours was by no means the largest EAF in operation. Since it operates 24/7 and green sources of electricity need wind and sunshine it is clear that a stable base of power from a fossil fuel generating station is required. An alternative of a massive battery facility on site is not economically viable, which then requires an even larger green supply of power during the wind and solar generation hours. Sure, given an unlimited money supply it could be accomplished, but what would it do to the cost of the steel and is it then a viable proposition? What would it do to the cost of the ultimate steel products (autos, structures, consumer goods, and wind turbines and solar farms?)
There is a whole class of high temperature nuclear reactors that could decarbonise steel much more cost effectively. Not only can they provide direct process heat, but they can also provide electricity and green hydrogen production at the same time. They also work 24/7 so they make much more efficient use of the capital expenditure.
And, if you use the heat directly to produce hydrogen in a (V)HTR the effiiency could be a lot better than with e.g. electrolysis.
One thing that would reduce demand for steel is protecting it in some applications like automobiles, so that end of useful life is no longer determined by when the bodywork rusts away ! I had a SAAB for example with galvanised bodywork panels where life could easily exceed over 20 years.
yeah, none of the "Green" automobile-haters discuss this aspect!
btw. University Professors making steel will be a disaster. They know nothing. Those, proposing Green Steelmaking, are not experts on metallurgy, they haven't worked in steel production or anything close. Companies are doing research because of political pressure. Steel which contains residual hydrogen is brittle!
Zinc galvanized steel is fun: in warm humid conditions, with some ammonia present it corrodes. A 2mm thick galvanized frame will corrode away within less than two years if someone has peed on it several times! ( I can't tell who did it.)
Hydrogen and/or Phosphoros ("Rot-Bruch", red cracks) make iron brittle.
There is one exception in India: They have a 2000-year-old steel column that doesn't rust in wind and weather! it was found to be "Goethit-alloy", which contains phosphorous. How was that column made? I suspect the Goethit-alloy is only a surface treatment. Imagine, the ancient Indians, (after casting that column), ordered 1000 men to pee on the red hot piece, to make it stronger.
Phosphoros has a bad rap in steel technology, but I think it's value as surface treatment is not well researched.
Galvanised steel is a great way to prolong the life of steel products used outside, that is a no brainer to help reduce steel use.
The scientists won't be making steel, they are researching new methods/technologies of making it. It will be then up to engineers to make the technology work in the real world. That's generally how new technologies are brought to market, from research first.
As for phosphorus as a steel surface treatment being not well researched, I have some rust converter in my shed which I use for surface treating rusty steel. It contains phosphoric acid. You are welcome to have some for your research, but I think someone has beat you to it. (Probably by some scientist who knows nothing about steel!) 😂
@@robcaseyire I think I've used rust inhibitors in the past containing phosphoric acid. They turn the rust to phosphate which then protects the steel underneath.
Spent some of design and engineering life in the steel machinery industry for mostly electric arc operators. In N America we have been using natural gas in our blast furnaces for quit a number of years to reduce the need for coking coal. Coking coal has created a problem with a significant rise in the number of people downwind from the coking plants developing cancer. While natural gas does produce a greener steel and less cancer cases as mentioned it should also allow an easy conversion to hydrogen reduction of iron with little modification. Steel companies in N America have also employed very powerful magnets at the mining pits to concentrated the iron into an electric arc grade iron that reduces the need for massive amounts of carbon added into the electric arc furnaces and shipping costs and the amount of fuel needed in the shipping process. With carefully placed oxygen lances in the electric arc furnaces, impressively large electric arc furnaces can be built that can match the output of blast furnaces or basic oxygen furnaces. All of this was developed to reduce either cancer cases or the need to run your furnaces at full tilt during poor markets of the product. Just thought that it is ironic that these technologies could also usher in green steel.
One of the major conventional uses for hydrogen is in the production of ammonia. Even decarbonizing ammonia for conventional uses would take quite a bit of doing.
Yes I agree. We are starting to see a few green ammonia/fertiliser projects being announced but not as many as projects creating new uses for hydrogen. I'm hopeful that'll change over the next couple of years because replacing existing fossil hydrogen with green is a no- regrets action.
Green ammonia could easily be made from green hydrogen. Not sure why you say it's difficult.
@@gregbailey45 Should have been more clear. What I meant to say is that the quantity of green hydrogen needed just to decarbonize ammonia is nothing to sneeze at.
An interesting video, thank you. Dr Bart K's statement near the end about using, wherever possible, electricity for such processes, instead of hydrogen sums it up nicely; efficiency. Making, storing and burning hydrogen is not an efficient process, despite its advantages, when looking at CO2 production.
Yes only makes sense if you use green hydrogen from electrolysis, not as most hydrogen is produced from methane and produces its own CO2. Hydrogen from electrolysis is not very efficient so using the electrons directly in electrolysis steel production would seem like the most efficient use of energy.
Hydrogen is a bad idea for making steel. It will never be economical or competitive with natural gas or even coal. Man-made climate change is a lie.
Why would you need to tell a business to do things more economically? That's their whole job
fantasist
@@anonymousAJ businesses doing things cheaply is not usually good for our environment even if it benefits share holders.
Electric Arc Furnaces have electrodes, made of Graphite, a highly refined form of Carbon, which has its own carbon footprint!
on the low temp electrolysis - you can select out specific metals... but can you use the exact same process tanks, pull the iron and then maybe pull some set of other metals sequentially to save setup times etc ? I realize you'd have to do some work on the aqueous mix to get the right salts etc in place... surely some of the ores out there contain multiple metals that could be extracted, where today maybe they're bypassed... Short note otherwise, it is so awesome to see bright young women like yourself in the engineering spaces - wasn't enough of y'all during my career...
With the advent of not being able to produce enough steel to meet future demand, hopefully they start to develop other products to replace steel (that are recyclable) in vanity projects and just leave steel to be used in structural projects
This is a very good video and this week Volvo trucks said are now using green steel to make their lorries now
I would love to do a trip to Sweden to make some videos! They have the green steel, also green batteries and some very interesting energy intensive industry up north taking advantage of the cheap green energy up there. I used to go there a couple of times a year for work, but I don't know when I'll be able to get up there again now that I live in Australia!
@@EngineeringwithRosie will you be part of fullycharge live Australia?
Always wonderful and interesting
Great video Rosie! Thanks for sharing :)
About the Boston method:
1. We should not assume an intermittent power supply. The grid of the future will need to have balancing features.
2. The high temperature is not necessarily a problem. Once you have your steel, at high temperature, you need to cool it off, right? Well, instead of just releasing the heat you could trap it and reuse it either to heat more feed, to heat some buildings or to convert it back to electricity.
In fact, combining both points, there are energy grid thermal storage solutions using molten salts - your steel factory could serve as such solution, with feed and steel instead of the molten salts, and then your energy cost (and footprint) will be minimal while your impact on the grid would be beneficial (balancing the grid).
1. Flexible demand (also called "demand-side management") is an integral part to the grid of the future. Why have huge battery banks that can supply MW's of power whenever the factory decides to flip the switch and make steel, when the factory could instead soak up peaks in energy production (noon, windy days) and quickly shut off if demand increased or production decreased? It's less costly to shift energy demand than to artificially shift demand with batteries
@@ThomasBomb45 Interesting idea. I'm sure that in countries (like UK, I believe) where the cost of electricity varies a lot with demand, hourly even, business have adapted to benefit from lower rates. Residential consumption has also adapted, people program the laundry to be done at night, top up the boiler with heat when the energy is cheaper etc. It would be interesting to do a study of how much the peaks of demand/supply can be smoothed out by such actions, or have been already.
@@ThomasBomb45 Using power supply arbitrage batteries become very cost effective.
Professor Sadaway of MIT? The same man involved with the Ambri liquid metal battery I presume 🤔
That is a very interesting process that I haven't look back into for a while
Superb education, superb information. Subscribed!
Woah, are you a fellow metallurgist, fellow iron ore enthusiast and fellow Montrealer? Or did you just stumble upon Décarie Boulevard @6:50?
Great vid, Rosie! Australian recycled water engineer in France currently researching water use in steel manufacturing and other heavy industry. Would be interesting to know whether any of these processes may also change water demand significantly. If anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears
Great question ☺️ I'm actually headed to Boston Metal tomorrow for a tour and an interview, so that would be a good place to ask!
@@EngineeringwithRosie stop these manipulative lies !
absolutely fascinating, but I just don't think it will be as easy as the doctor thinks.
I've actually been looking into using a heat pump for high temperature smelting. it should be much more efficient, if I can find a material that can take the strain at such high temperatures. Which to say the least is proving challenging.
@@roguedogx Thermodynamics is against you in this. Heat pumps are great when you don't have to raise the absolute temperature much - say from 273 K to 303 K (0 °C to 30 °C), maybe to heat your house. The coefficient of performance (COP) is Thot/ (Thot - Tcold). For the houshold heating it would be 303/(303 - 273) = 10.1 this is the theoretic maximum, you will have other losses so might get 5 ish. For heating to 1200 °C from a heat source at 25 °C the COP would be (1200 + 273)/(1200-25) = 1.25. This again is the theoretical maximum and there will be losses. It's not worth the effort, sorry. So don't bother looking for a working fluid. :(
@@HughCStevenson1 dang.
I must have dropped a zero someplace, because I swore the numbers came out better than that.
I worked at th BHP dri plant in Port Hedland. Very scary process, the H2 will auto ignite anywhere it leaks. They shut it down soon after a fatal accident. I used to have nightmares about it burning down😬
Ah interesting, I've been wondering about how they prevent explosions!.
@@guringai As long as the H2 stays in the vessels and the O2 stays on the outside, all is good.
Until there is a leak...
Indeed, good safety practice is the key. Refineries have been using hydrogen for a long time, and of course there have been bad accidents, but there are many more dangerous product and by-products to be scared of, like the alkylation unit...
@@merchantoo Yeah, the trouble at HBI was the interaction of H2 and the iron oxide powder. The solids would clag the valve between vessels and need to be purged through with HP Nitrogen bottles
Only once someone used an oxygen bottle😬
They all look the same with the grey iron dust all over them
I agree with others who say that you are often somewhat negative and rates of progress we have become used to perhaps account for your caution.
However, the times we have entered now remind me so much of the 1950s and '60s in Britain when innovation was astonishing and it is pleasing to see Asian states such as Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia coming up with vital solutions sort of 'glueing' major nation developments together. South America is given too little credit for innovation, notably in green fuels which have been priority for decades and hydrogen cell aircraft.
Sadly, the over cautious USA and EU are failing to take developments further and these areas of the globe are in stasis as blocs but progress in Poland, Czech Rep, Hungary and Nordic countries will shock the EU big boys out of bureaucratic sclerosis or the EU will split apart. No loss IMHO.
The impact of small company innovation is breathtaking and even Mr Musk was a small player from S.Africa before Tesla and the massive achievement of SpaceX.
For pure cheap hydrogen I have a feeling that your native Australia (with Japanese experience over 30 years) will become the leader sooner than many think.
Just about the best Rosie Engineering, relevant technology information video.
The "Greening of Australia" has come around again in the Mineralogical sense of what matters most to Citizens.
And the production of Reducer Gas type Hydrogen made with Wind and Solar for reducing oxides to metals is to be a top priority?
Haven't seen any convincing science plus economics to recommend Hydrogen for other uses..
The electrolysis method to produce iron is intriguing. But I'm I right in saying it's only compatible with iron/sulphur compounds (a waste by-product from SA's Olympic Dam mine and others), rather than the Haematite or Magnetite we currently dig out the ground for steel production?
I don't think so
Not related with this...could you please make video on Magnus Effect Wind power technologies ? Looks very promising but not picked up. Thank you!
How does one tackle the impurity buildup in the molten oxide bath ,coming from the iron ore? How much energy is consumed in this step?
So for each ton of steel, what is the time to produce? You still have mining to contend with. Whether it's mining for Iron ore or materials to make the infrastructure to create steel with alternative energy. It's still replacing one non-renewable resource for another.
Metal is easy to recycle in a closed loop, especially iron/steel
You know I was just thinking this the other day , and was wondering how we could tackle this issue .
It seems way easier just to spray-paint the steel after producing it if all you want is green steel.
...
Joking aside, next up I want to see low-carbon cement production, and aluminium too. Both of those can easily switch to low-carbon energy but still release carbon intrinsically from the main processes we use for them today.
Both are on my list!
And by the way nice joke ☺️
if you're in that mode of thinking, why produce it ? Just steal the steel.
Where can i find the data about the emissions per ton of steel? In Holland (Tata Steel) steel is made with coal (cokes) which generates CO2 and gas, then we have emissions from the Blast Furnace, and emissions from (re)heating of steel before rolling, and emissions from electricity use. They say it is a very efficient proces but it is a non substantiated claim.
The Dutch Blast Furances in IJmuiden are amongst the most efficient in the world. They produce iron at a rate of 1.88T CO2 / T Hot Metal.
A comment from ForzaJersey who made an interesting suggestion about "methane microwave assisted pyrolysis", got me wondering when such a technology could be implemented industrially. My quick google foray into this technology seems to indicate to me that this is very much in the lab stage and hasn't commenced its journey in development, let alone large scale implementation.
Timeliness is rather important in relation to Climate Change, so I was wondering if this could be a worthwhile part 2 video, that adds to your excellent coverage of emerging and established technology for making steel with potential for de-carbonisation of the current steel making practises.
Such a part 2 video could add some detail to this video with info about the likely scale of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and realistic timeline to implementation of the selected approaches.
Just a thought bubble, but perhaps you already have most of this information and contacts and so not such a Herculian task?
Your down to earth reporting and discussions of technology and engineering is very valuable and, I think, well respected. I imagine quite influential too, perhaps not so much with those that "don't hold a hose", but certainly with switched on political and industrial leaders that take their roles seriously, as well as us common folk that are interested in such topics.
Not a solution for cutting back the CO2 emissions directly, but still: wouldn’t it make a big difference if we’d reuse the heat coming from the steel mill for heating homes and offices? This would also work after the steel making process would change to a hydrogen-based one (the heat is always a ‘by-product’).
If you mean literally heat homes with the same heat that is coming off the furnaces, that's a tad silly. ( I'm assuming that you are young, though)
The problem is that you need to get the heat to the home, but heat unfortunately spreads out/ disapates (entropy). What you could do is, with enouph heat, operate a boiler + steam turbine to generate electricity, then use that clean energy to heat homes. It's worth noting that when you transfer between types of energy, like from heat to chemical, kinetic, or electric, you lose some energy along the way. But, it would end up being a lot more efficient than trying to pipe heat to the suburbs.
You could also recycle heat at the steel factory for other processes done at the facility, as well as using low power thermo electric generators to passively convert whatever is still leftover. (These can only operate for a little while without overheating since they run off heat energy differences between materials to create charge.) But are good to pipe excess heat through to if heat starts to reach use/ storage capacity.
All in all, it's not a terrible idea. Heat is a form of waste, too often left on the table, when there are fairly simple ways to recycle it.
3:52 I don't really think biogas is very green - my problem being fossil CH₄ is used to make the fertiliser to help grow the plants. We need to decarbonise NH₃ production before we can say biogas is green!
Rosi, there is one topic aside hydrogen, that I never hear about, but is perhaps concerning not me:
For me hydrogen may be a nice energy transporter - but physically it's more than annoying:
- super small, need special containers
- steel tubes and containers will be spoiled over time in contact with hydrogen
- you have to compress it with much energy to transport
- when transporting, most assume liquid - which is extremely cold - other technical challenges will arise.
- any leakage in the transportation and storage will be extremely dangerous.
So - as I heard, some Arabian states already test solar power to produce hydrogen for future markets (make sense due to their sun exposure).
It would be interesting how production ready transportation exists.
Highly volatile too!
Where is steel used win solar PV modules?
To my understanding, the carbon dioxide need not be released but could be used in ureaproduction with atmospheric nitrogen?
Great video.
Hmm the Sadoway molten metal reductions sounds like it would work really well with a molten salt reactor.
Then just use a non fossil carbon source, and you can make steel production carbon negative.
You missed steel plants are integrated sites with attached mills, the works arising gasses are captured for their reheat furnaces. Every mills reheat furnace will also need converting too.
Integrated steel works are massive, and those in the EU pale to those in China, the blue circles on the map just don't convey the enormity of the issue here..
Wind and solar electricity does not have to be intermittent, because if one uses them to produce Hydrogen then the Hydrogen will stabilize the intermittency. So if you have Hydrogen for that then unit for making steel.
Hi
Is there not a risk of hydrogen enbrittelment using hydrogen or amonia and if there is what might the solution be. I'm no chemist but am fully aware of the risk of enbrittelment when stripping and replating hydraulic rams which from my worms eye view is that electro plating would only at worst case be a skin effect but bulk reduction may effect the whole ingot
Please correct me and tell me why
Regards
Zed
Keep up the good work
Unprocessed iron is the most basic form of iron, also known as "brown iron" or "Bumcivilian".
I wasn't going to comment on the CO2 production being required, I was going to suggest that I'm pretty sure I can run a cupola furnace to create carbon monoxide instead. Not entirely convinced that's going to help things.
People are over focused on the CO2 and ignoring the much larger mining waste problem. The CO2 is like looking at a creek next to the Mississippi River.
Lots of steel will be needed for all the wind farms now if they can stop it from rusting. Are wind turbine towers steel or aluminum? They use dehumidifiers in some of them to stop rust so steel I'm guessing.
They're steel
One of the Nordic countries have some wind towers & blades made of massive plywood sections under trial ATM
Yes Rosie it is Very Very Disappointing that BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortisque etc are Not Producing Green Iron Ore.
Which is Needed to Produce "Green Steel".
Thankyou Rosie and Bart for Sharing Your Knowledge.
As nuclear reactors retire and become replaced by larger scale renewables with storage, couldn’t they keep going making hydrogen with a steel plant right beside the reactor?
Storage what storage?
Coal is heated to make coke. This releases a lot of methane. However, tnis methane is burnt to heat the coal. This releases co2. As you mention, there are greaner sources of carbon.
I wonder how we should address hydrogen embrittlement in the future.
The only real project right now in green steel is HYBRIT in Sweden.
HIsarna in The Netherlands is also promising.
Rosie, please read physicist Freeman Dyson on CO2.
Great video! You inspire the industry and decision makers to take bold decisions! With our invention of the HYBRIT Technology and production of fossil-free steel since August 18, 2021, we hope to do the same. / Johan Anderson, SSAB
Thanks Johan! Next time I'm in Sweden it would be so cool if I could do a tour of the HYBRIT project for a video, if you're keen to share?
@@EngineeringwithRosie Sure!
Hi Rosie, when you visit you can dig a little deeper and ask them how they plan to decarbonise the EAF. As you say, the carbon footprint of most EAFs today is as you rightly say mostly due to scope 2 emissions, i.e. electricity production. When electricity is decarbonised there will still be a substantial footprint, 10x smaller than blast furnace route but still significant, and brushed under the carpet by all the big steel companies that have announced following these brave fellows at hybrit. Pedantics aside it's not so easy to take iron and add carbon to it to produce steel without losing loads of the carbon you add. The biggest user of cement in Sweden is the iron ore mine. The biggest users of lime in Sweden are the steel companies. Technologies do not live on islands and true decarbonisation requires a lot more thought. Great video, I would say that you characterisation of the state of CCS in the steel industry falls short, there are more initiatives at many steel companies.
@@merchantoo hmm, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought you had to take the excess carbon OUT OF pig-iron to make it into steel!
@@gregbailey45 yes, that's right. Direct Reduce Iron (with Hydrogen) doesn't contain carbon, so it needs to be added. One of the problems is that you add more carbon than you need because it burns of very quickly, so it's not a question of adding just the right amount. The type of DRI that already exists, from natural gas as opposed to hydrogen does have some carbon in it, so similar to the pig iron case you reduce the amount of carbon to the required level, just you start 3-4 times lower.
Biogas can replace natural gas quite easily. Any organic waste product can be used to produce biogas. Trash, agricultural waste, and even raw sewage are all perfect feed stock for biogas production. Biogas is one of the most underutilized products in the world.
What about STEP Iron?
I actually don't know what that is. Does it have another name?
If we use captured CO2 to make steel, it is carbon negative steel. Probably still counts if we use biomass derived carbon too.
EDIT: interested in how they dissolve the iron ore into the electrolyte for the low temperature electrolysis process. Mineral acid? Something else?
But you can't use CO2 to make iron from iron ore, as it already has oxygen atoms bound to the carbon. Rather, you create CO2 if you use carbon to reduce the iron ore. If you really want to use captured CO2 you'd first need to get rid of the oxygen (e.g. as a plant does) before you could use it. And then you'd end up with CO2 again at the end, so only neutral at best, not negative.
@@EngineeringwithRosie I wasn't suggesting that. I was suggesting using captured carbon in the form of CO2 to provide the carbon to the pure iron made from hydrogen reduction. That is carbon negative as the carbon is only used in alloying the steel, and is fixed in the alloy until it rusts.
@@SocialDownclimber The Carbon in CO2 is not available to react with the steel - it wants to stay bonded to the O2 more than bonding to the Fe. You would need to create C and O2 first and then use the C to alloy with the steel. :)
@@SocialDownclimber Ah ok! Makes more sense than what I thought you were saying. Sorry!
@@EngineeringwithRosie I really wasn't very clear in my original post, sorry
You are Super.
Intermittent power gives you intermittent product. Not great for predictable high volume manufacturing. BMW is betting on the Boston Metal process for their future car manufacturing, so that will be happening for sure. Somewhere between 2025 and 2030.
I imagined that solar arrays that concentrate sunlight on to a tower would be a good green way to go for smelting and steel making. Maybe even shipping ore and scrap to southern desert areas to do this.
I'm thinking about making a video on renewable industrial heat. I'll make sure to include that option if/when I do!
In Australia‘s case Northern Deserts … their Iron ore comes from a line close to the Capricorn Meridian … hey how about induction melting utilising the solar energy from an Array of electric Solar panels close to the Ore Deposits ??? Hydrogen is very dangerous compared to Solar Electricity … imagine an induction blast furnace !
Large PV arrays are more cost effective than reflective.
DRI is not disappearing at all, this is inaccurate! is absolutely true vicecersa. DRI can be produced using 100% H2 and this is what many steelmakers are actually doing including Salcos , ArcelorMIttal and many others. Electrolysis for steel ?? nice idea but did you calculate the HUGE amount of energy you need??
High tempature nuclear reactors would work very well to make green steel.
Add this parameter into your equation.
C02 is heavier than air…..
This can be seen particularly in valleys which we identify as smog. CO2 is on the ground not in the atmosphere.
Steel used to be made with biomass carbon. It was utterly unsustainable and led to the broad scale deforestation of Europe, you can trace the economic power of European regions through the Middle Ages based on where the steel making occurred, and when a region ran out of biomass, the manufacturing, and economic power moved elsewhere. It wasn’t until the discovery of coal in the UK, that the forests of Europe were able to recover, and Britain’s economic might took off. We use MASSIVELY more steel today than we did in the early 19th century, so no, biomass is not a sustainable alternative, as you couldn’t even grow it fast enough to meet demand 400 years ago.
The other thing often overlooked in biomass schemes is you need to leave biomass behind to continue the carbon cycle and maintain organic matter in the soil. Remove too much biomass from the growing site and you end up depleting all your topsoil leaving a barren wasteland.
Aren't Humans also Biomass? Seems like an awful lot of Humans on the planet..plenty of Biomass IMO. XP
I am all for converting my foundry to hydrogen, but I'm not sure where I would get the hydrogen. It's obviously a transfer of energy not a source of energy.
As far as I know, if you are just melting ingots and casting them an electric furnace would be better than using hydrogen - fewer losses (as mentioned in the video - use electricity directly if you can)... If you were to use hydrogen for the heating you would need an electrolyser to make the hydrogen and that would be a lossy process (waste heat, mostly due to overpotential).
The war on carbon is what I call ridiculous. The world has lots of carbon as it’s all around us. What’s really looney is when they pump carbon into the earth.
Zero carbon dioxide steel?
Blue steel! That was funny
Just mining it is a massive problem ,
Ummmmmmmmmmmmm
Isn’t CO2 plant food?¿?¿?¿?¿
Try bricks, cement and ammonia (feedstock for many industrial chemicals, fertilizers, explosives etc). Hydrogen probably better fit there.
Green steel is the future of Australia's economy. Iron ore and sunshine in abundance. Get on with it Oz!
I agree!
cost per tonne ????
@@jimlofts5433 premium of
hydrogen-based steel production is eliminated at electricity prices of $15-$20/MWh or lower. Solar is almost there. And that's without a price for the carbon impact.
I don't get why people have to be so all or nothing about things. Even if we can reduce the impact from steel manufacture that's a good thing.
Remember it is called carbon steel! Now you can melt scrap steel in electric ark furnaces but it requires vast amounts of electricity and it depletes the carbon and makes the steel subject to work hardening and cracking! Hydrogen just destroys steel!
Well, at least hydrogen is good for use as a propellant in nuclear rockets. I don't see the fossil fuel industry selling as much volume as they would like for that though.
Surely a nuclear rocket uses nuclear fuel?? As in radioactive...
Yes it's called environmental and mineworx
Check out Greenpeace AU and Moonie AU are in the same block in Sydney (826 George St, Haymarket NSW).
That leads to European Renewable Energy Council in the same way, least a case for concern.
I highly doubt the Green series are originally from a legitimate science, rather than an awkward counterfeit pseudo-business.
Have3 we looked at using something other than carbon to strength iron? Maybe we have been doing something so long we need to look at how it all started. Maybe we were wrong. Heck we spent billions for dark matter and that was completely wrong on that.
I'll start believing in using green steel after ammonia-based fertilizer production is no longer dependent on natural gas. If you can't make ammonia without steam reforming of fossil fuels, I can't see it as being practical engineering to use hydrogen or electricity for reduction of iron ore.
I think it's better we work on both geen steel and green ammonia simultaneously. And people are working on both, so that's good.
Actually, you can make hydrogen without CO2 via methane microwave assisted pyrolysis. This process produces high purity hydrogen and carbon black powder. The carbon can be sequestered underground or utilized for other uses.
Like true green steel, this version of blue hydrogen or turquoise hydrogen pyrolysis is not done at scale today but can be in the near future.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Agreed, let's not wait for pure processes to exist before we get to true green steel or ammonia.
You need 1.2 tonnes of hydrogen to produce 1 tonne of DRI. The UK produces 7.9 million tonnes. Germany (largest steel maker in Europe) produces nearly 50million tonnes. A wind Turbine has a tower weighing 150 tonnes. So you wil need 900000 tonnes of Hydrogen in the UK alone… UK imports 875000 tonnes of iron concentrates each year. That is without fertiliser and cement. Presently an electrolyzer uses 50 KW hrs to produce 1Kg of Hydrogen. The best Chemically is 39KWhrs to produce 1Kg of Hydrogen. The UK will require at least 160 GW installed capacity, just to keep the lights on. To produce the hydrogen required would need 16.7 TeraWatth of spare renewable generation. For the UK, would be better to let Australia make pig iron for transport to the UK.
PS, did I mention sponge iron and electrolysis iron is pyrophoric
@@ForzaJersey Interesting idea. When I first worked in an oil refinery, it had a carbon black plant. Seems like carbon black might be incorporated into roadways to sequester it.
Solar induction coils.
Nuclear plasma capacitors?
I just want them to make Blue Steel now😂
Now do concrete! 🤞🤓💜
Thank you Rosie for telling the You Tube community about cutting the CO2 released by steelmaking. I was granted US patent 3890161, DIODE ARRAY for a method of upcycling energy as electrical energy from the ambient heat of our planet. This upcycled energy ia entirely clean so.it can decarbonize everything. I need a crowdfunding grant management team not including me to pay for nan8fabricating proof of concept prototyping.
Check out what Pyrogenesis Canada Inc is doing to decarbonize Iron Ore Process.
Personal preference: provide speakers credentials before he/she speaks.
Noted, thanks for commenting!
Hydrogen yeah ammonia probably will become more and more common vs hydrogen as time passes in terms of energy storage aside from obviously purely electric stuff however defined… clearly lots of investment now in aviation could be a huge future market for hydrogen IF battery/capacitor etc research isn’t as fruitful as hoped wow electricity steel stuff interesting🤯♾♾♾♾♾🌈☮️💟😍🥰😘🤩🚀🌌🗽🎬🎬🎬
Yeah steel is magic were that exist from nothing right👽
CO2 is not bad life would not exist without it
Awesome. Now do aluminum. While you're at it, come up with a climate model that ACTUALLY works with green house gas forcing.
You can not do anything with out making CO2, WE are Ftd.
❤️🙏🏼
can we make CHEAP steel from hydrogen ??? I don't think so
So what you still have not understood is that Hydrogen can come from water and when used it goes back to water. That make an energy carrier that is limitless for ever. Try to make a video about another fuel that does that. Good luck.
By not generating CO2 we will be decreasing our planets biomass production.
#Aloha
Perhaps read Wikipedia under biomass to see we are producing 8 gigatons in carbon from fossil fuels of which only 4 gigatons is converted to biomass or buffered in the oceans. So your comment does not make any sense to me.
No.
Delusional
Who really cares? CO2 is good for the plants. You're wasting your time here. You could just use nuclear powered furnaces.
nuclear reactor, molten salt version, will produce the electricity, the heat, and the nitrogen. what a great resource!
I did it, I turned left
😂