JoyV wrote:
If cost were not a factor, what carbon source would work better than coal to make high quality steel? It must be in quantities large enough to run steel mills across the nation.
Industrie has been working on the process for a long time..
this is a good article on the effort, but a bit long to post.. follow the link for a better explanation..
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaner-cheaper-way-to-make-steel-uses-electricity/Cleaner, Cheaper Way to Make Steel Uses Electricity
Making steel in a similar way to aluminum is cheaper and reduces greenhouse gas emissions
The fires that smelt iron also heat up the planet, but researchers are working on ways to produce higher-quality metals with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, potentially giving U.S. steelmakers an edge in a competitive global market.
A report released yesterday in the journal Nature highlights a step in this direction that uses electricity instead of heat to extract iron.
With thousands of years of development and two centuries of industrialization, making iron and steel is a mature process around the world. In 2011, manufacturers produced around 100 billion metric tons of iron globally.
From mining ores to smelting to tempering alloys, the process is energy intensive, and engineers have chased improvements about as long as steel has topped axes, formed armor and driven machinery.
"What that means is that the majority of low-hanging fruit have been picked and the processes we have to make [metals] are nearing the limits of what is physically possible," explained Lawrence Kavanagh, president of the Steel Market Development Institute.
Though iron is the most common element in the Earth's crust, it is usually in the form of an ore. Conventional processing methods use a high-temperature blast furnace to heat the iron ore and other compounds to remove oxygen and yield a desired alloy, a method that creates a lot of carbon dioxide, according to a report last year from U.S. EPA on greenhouse gas emissions from the iron and steel sector.
Discovery of an inexpensive anode
"For Integrated steelmaking, the primary sources of GHG emissions are blast furnace stoves (43 percent), miscellaneous combustion sources burning natural gas and process gases (30 percent), other process units (15 percent) and indirect emissions from electricity usage (12 percent)," the report said, estimating that the U.S. steel industry produced 117 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2010.