Summary draft 2

 The article “How green steel made with electricity could clean up dirty industry”, written by Crownhart (2022), explores an alternative steel manufacturing method called green steel and its functions. With the steel industry producing 10% of the world’s carbon emission, major changes are needed to lower down the numbers, hence the invention of green steel. What is green steel? It is known as “carbon-free” steel. The manufacturing process need not require fossil fuel unlike regular steel, instead hydrogen as replacement (Borkar, 2022).

The main function of green steel is to reduce carbon emissions. This can be seen in the d the manufacturing process between regular steel and green steel to remove oxygen differs. With regular steel, a blast furnace is required to react coal-derived materials, like coke and iron ore together, leaving behind liquid iron to form the steel rod we all know (Crownheart, 2022). However, through this process, carbon and oxygen would reacting hence emitting cardon dioxide to the atmosphere. When compared to green steel, it utilizes electricity and hydrogen instead of coke to heat up the material forming a hot oxide “soup”, and hence allowing molten iron to gather at the bottom and in return emitting oxygen (Crownheart, 2022).

Currently, with a demand for steel, this could potentially increase the world’s carbon emission overtime, hence green steel is beneficial in terms of achieving the global efforts of “meeting net zero emissions by 2050” (Borkar, 2022). As well as utilizing a “constant source of renewable energy” (Borkar, 2022) like hydrogen as an option for manufacturing steel, compared to usage of coke/coal which is a non-renewable resource.  

Despite all the benefits, the reality is manufacturing green steel is expensive, through rough estimation, cost of production for hydrogen-based steel is about 20% to 30% higher than steel. With production cost corresponding to carbon prices, carbon steel roughly costing $70 to $100/tCO₂ we can estimate the cost for hydrogen-based steel to be at $91 to $130 (RMI, 2019).

We also need to consider the cost-completive market, right now the cost of renewable hydrogen is $3.70/kg in order to compete with the present steel making price, the cost needs to be around $1/kg (Lea, 2022). Hence, in order for green steel to compete in the steel industry, the cost needs to drop by more than 50% in order to compete with regular steel (Wood Mackenzie, 2022).