Critical Mass On Greener Steel

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Greening the production of steel has been the topic of exactly one previous post, which linked to an article by Matthew Hutson from last September that made passing reference to the company featured in the article below. Maybe we are getting closer to critical mass:

Roughly a tenth of global carbon emissions comes from the steel industry. Doing something about that is easier said than done.

In the city of Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Boston, a cadre of engineers and scientists in white coats inspected an orderly stack of brick-size, gunmetal-gray steel ingots on a desk inside a neon-illuminated lab space.

What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way the alloy has been made for centuries. By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, the firm claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse-gas emissions.

What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way the alloy has been made for centuries. By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, the firm claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse-gas emissions.

An essential input for engineering and construction, steel is one of the most popular industrial materials in the world, with roughly 2 billion tons produced annually. This abundance, however, comes at a steep price for the environment. Steelmaking accounts for 7 to 11 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, making it one of the largest industrial sources of atmospheric pollution. And because production could rise by a third by 2050, this environmental burden could grow.

That poses a significant challenge for tackling the climate crisis. The United Nations says that significantly cutting industrial carbon emissions is essential to keeping global warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark set under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. To do so, emissions from steel and other heavy industries will have to fall by 93 percent by 2050, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.

Facing escalating pressure from governments and investors to reduce emissions, a number of steelmakers—including both major producers and start-ups—are experimenting with low-carbon technologies that use hydrogen or electricity instead of traditional carbon-intensive manufacturing. Some of these efforts are nearing commercial reality.

“What we are talking about is a capital-intensive, risk-averse industry where disruption is extremely rare,” says Chris Bataille, an energy economist at IDDRI, a Paris-based research think tank. Therefore, he adds, “it’s exciting” that there’s so much going on all at once…

 

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