Summary reader response draft #1

 

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. This new method relies on electricity to heat up a cell filled mixture of dissolved iron dioxide to about 1600 degrees Celsius to extract impurities and emit oxygen gas. According to Borkar (2022), Green steel is a ‘carbon-free’ steel which need not require fossil fuels during its manufacturing process, instead it uses hydrogen as replacement.  

After reading more about green steel, I am for the innovation of green steel. Many world leaders are aiming to reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Therefore, through decarbonizing steel with the usage of technology as well as utilizing renewable source like hydrogen, green steel is a step forward into reaching that goal despite a few setbacks like high production cost.  

The main function of green steel is to decarbonize steel industry.  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. However, through this process, carbon and oxygen would react hence emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. When compared to regular steel, it utilizes electricity and hydrogen instead of coke to heat up the material forming a hot oxide ‘soup’, and allowing molten iron to gather at the bottom and in return emitting oxygen (Crownheart, 2022).

Currently, with an increasing 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).

Secondly, utilizing renewable sources, as mentioned in “How ‘green hydrogen’ could make ‘green steel’ real”, written by Bloomberg Quicktake (2019), hydrogen plays a huge part in green steel production, it is able to revert the process used in fuel cells whereby hydrogen and oxygen reacts and in turn produces water and electricity. By producing electrolysis, it removes carbon dioxide through splitting of natural gas modules. Therefore, instead of constantly burning coal in the original steel manufacturing process, hydrogen can be replaced. Hydrogen is a renewable resource which can be easily replenished when it is depleting. But when it comes to coal, it is not renewable, and is a fast-depleting source with about 18.2 billion tonnes left.

Therefore, green steel is able to kill two birds with one stone, by reducing carbon emission 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).