New breakthrough claims 90% reduction in Steelmaking emissions. 

One of your best videos, because you listened to the people in your Patreon community who understand the issues better than even the researchers who wrote the paper you were commenting on. Rather than just putting the hyperbolic statements of the researchers out there and letting commenters challenge them, you actually listened and put the necessary context in there for the viewing public. That is fantastic- keep up the good work!

I have absolutely nothing worthwhile to add to the content of this video, but THANK YOU for your tireless work! And your honesty and integrity.

Thanks again. You're bridging the gap between the scientific/engineering community and the environmentally concerned groups that I'm part of. There is a way of thinking about these problems that allows people from my milieu to actually contribute. You help.

I'm glad you're spending more time on decarbonizing steel. Two technologies I'm sure we would love you to cover and update are Molten Oxide Electrolysis (MOE) initially discussed by Engineering with Rosie and Lillacs Direct Carbon capture (for cement) as discussed by Simon Clark.

This is what I love about your channel, the non confrontational exchange of information and experience. Very refreshing, and as some who has retired from building huge oilsands projects, helps me get into all the great ideas put forward without getting my hackles up! Well done! Carry on!

I appreciate this dynamic of adding Information with crowd access. Brilliant.

That's what I like about this channel. Check, re-check, correct errors, re-check and be open minded enough to accept new information that changes the story. Great Job Dave. 👍🤠

I do hope the Birmingham team get some traction with the local UK steel production teams, perhaps to explore what it would look like to setup their new process in the current steel production lines. I worked as a sponsored undergraduate student for British Steel back in 1978-1981 and having lived in Newport was highly connected to steel production as were almost everyone in my street as Llanwern Steel plant was a huge local employer. It would be good to see the research team in Birmingham help the local steel producers. Thanks for presenting these low carbon ideas Dave.👍

I love this channel a lot for staying informed about the global efforts for carbon dioxide reduction. It can be a bit of a pick-me-up to hear of all the minds hard at work in the area, but also a bit of a downer to really and fully grasp the immense scale of the issues.

Hat tip to your patreon suporters. I work in steel industry decarbonisation. We saw this paper and was angry at it's conclusions for same reasons in the video and the basis being theoretical. Sadly other press sources don't give the same scrutiny! Thank you

Excellent installment as always. Your introduction of alternative views and information is so refreshing compared to the many click bate focus of headlines that often are a quantum leap from the body of the text. You are truly prompting us to have a think about some data collection rather than stating it as conclusive reality. So often Correlation is presented as causation when a little think will help to see alternatives that are often times far more viable explanations! Keep it up.

Yes, the moment you mentioned CO replacing Coke, my Pyrometallurgist training (I cut my teeth on Blast Furnaces) dug in heels (burden properties are crucial!). Could be interesting (and easier) to apply this to DRI or HBI processes, which are gas based. But for BF, not likely.

As all the commentators have said in various ways, it is rare to see this level of integrity on RU-vid technology videos. Great work in motivating people to think differently through “just have a think - -“

5:20 "[FYI; I don't know anything about this next bit, I'm just reading it]". 👍 -- This is the sound an educated man makes when he doesn't need his ego fluffed. And yet another reason these videos have trusted value.

Well that proves quailty youtubers attract quality watchers. I am humbled to find myself in such company! Keep up the good work and keep smiling!

Happy that your Patreon pointed that out - saves me the effort. Those coke pillars also allow iron and slag to be tapped safely and the taphole clays used wouldn't work without them.

Hey, good catch and so glad you corrected it. I appreciate your insight and sharing of these new technologies.

Thank you for this video and for listening to feedback with an open mind! It makes me trust your content and input all the more!

Good stuff, it is nice to have some hope! I do look forward to your videos!

The company I work for is highly dependent on high strength carbon steel. I have been watching these developments with great curiosity. Thank you for covering.

This is the only channel I trust. There's too many sites giving out information that sounds either too good or too bad to be true

Great video, Dave! Living in Saarland, Germany, a steel maker here is apparently planning to switch to green hydrogen as well

Congrats, this time only one typo in the chemistry part. Keep going 😉 And a big Cheers to your patreon who pointed out the complex and decades-long empirically optimised processes in steel production, so I don't have to elaborate on that 😁 However, please explain: If the crude iron (pig iron) has 4% carbon, and the steel has 1.5%, how can this difference make up 0.7 tonnes per tonne of iron? What else is included in that number? Because 2.5% of a tonne = 25 kg Carbon, which will become 92 kg of CO2 after reaction. That's 0.1 tonne, not 0.7.

Texas has some 20,000 wind turbines spinning and likely an equal amount of electricity from solar farms, so if there's an All-American corridor for developing hydrogen-reduction electric-arc steel production, that's the place. With Iron Range taconite shipped through the Illinois Waterway, down the Mississippi, and via the Intracoastal Waterway, Houston could be the steelmaking capitol of the world.

I love the honesty and completeness of your excellent investigations, ........ at least they are working on It !

Thanks for considering the feedback from your patrons and including these caveats at the end of the video. Really reinforces your credibility.

I love your openness. I wish more channels had that. My sincerest thanks!

Apparently there is also a concept where the iron is extracted from the ore directly by electrolysis. If you can split H² and O² with electrolysis, then why not splitting Fe and O² ? However, that process has only been shown on lab scale so far. But there is a startup in the USA, attempting to implement it on industrial scale. Let's see how this goes...

For a couple of minutes, I thought the solution was to replace the Carbon Dioxide off gassing with Carbon Monoxide off gassing, rather than using a closed loop system to use the Carbon Monoxide up. I am glad I was wrong. Carbon Monoxide off gassing would probably be considered, as my friends across the pond might say: "rather unsavory".

Very useful epilogue - I'd seen this announcement before and rather suspected the old 'works in the lab not so easy in reality' would come into play but had not really seen much discussion of the issues

Thank you! About the Swedish Hydrogen steel projects. I don’t know anything about it myself really. But when listening to and reading Swedish media, the high cost of making the steel may not be a huge problem according to some because when steel is used in for example cars the higher cost of the steel supposedly aren’t affecting the price for the consumer that much and the car industry supposedly want green steel. But there are a lot of naysayers to these green steel projects and their argument often is that the required energy for these projects would require about as much energy Sweden use now. And building all this new energy generation in huge wind farms isn’t something they like either. I don’t know if the required energy would double but it is a lot more needed and more than is currently available. So maybe that also is a problem how to build this required energy supply.

You run a more valuable channel that the dozen most popular content providers combined. Thank you.

Fascinating! Now let’s look at CONCRETE.

Good topic Dave, as always. An approach that at first seems impracticable is sometimes the one that proves eventually to be the best solution, once other supporting processes and technologies catch up, re. Electric vehicles, first coming into use before the internal combustion engine took over. Battery and electronics had to be sufficiently developed first before a practical auto was marketed, eg, the Prius. A second approach to greener steel production is to increase electric furnace steel production from scrap, which means a BIG increase in metals recovery programs. There are literally billions of tonnes of scrap ferrous that is not recycled because of the relative low value and high cost of collection and processing. Other non ferrous metals are much more likely to be recycled cost effectively. Over the years, a trend has developed amongst the world's smelters to specialize into different product groups. High value specialist steels, bringing good returns floated off to profitable companies and bulk steel steel making being a near loss maker, especially during economic downturns in the economy, less demand etc. The old problem of cost analysis over the entire cycle, that includes mining, refining, smelting, supply chain logistics, recycling, environmental etc. etc. Is still around.

Dave, have you explored Boston Metal yet? An MIT spinoff, Boston Metal is developing Molten Oxide Electrolysis, MOE, which uses electricity to separate the oxygen out of iron ore. The only "waste" gas is oxygen--MOE was developed in part to provide oxygen for lunar colonists, and it will displace the entire medical and industrial oxygen gas industry--and the only carbon involved is that which you add to the melt. Add the right amount of chrome and you get a pretty good grade of stainless steel right out of the primary melt, no need for a second heat to create an alloy. It should work with metals other than iron, too. Boston metal says that MOE will use less energy overall to make steel, and that it should cost 20 percent less than coke-furnace steel, but that we will have to expand electrical generation by about 20 percent to clean up the entire steel industry (which MOE developer and MIT prof Donald Sadoway says is 9 percent of climate change). A small modular molten salt nuke, or a bank of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics dense plasma focus fusion generators, powering each steel mill, and maybe providing its community with electricity during emergencies, or selling any excess into the grid? Boston Metal is currently prototyping, and say they are on schedule to commercialization by 2026. They also say MOE scales up/down well, and that the plant should cost a fraction of the price of a new coke-steel (is it correct to say Bessemer Process?) plant. MOE can make use of low-grade ores. The Swedish HYBRIT (hydrogen reduction) tech you mention needs the high-grade stuff. Hasn't most of the American steel industry been decapitalized and offshored? Les-expensive new plant to make 20-percent-less-expensive steel sounds to me like a better way to revitalize the American steel industry than tariffs paid by consumers. And with China's belligerence, it might make sense to not be dependent upon a wannabe geopolitical enemy for steel (or anything else strategic). Google Boston Metal, or read the rant, Clean Steel, at www.ptbocc.com. You can also download (or read and comment online) an advance reader copy of the book, Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change: A Review of the Technologies and Politics that Could Leave the Future a Future, there. The chapter, Steel is a Filthy Industry. New Tech from MIT, SSAB could Make it Clean, Cheaper, explains MOE and the (more expensive, more energy-intensive) Swedish HYBRIT techniques rather well, but misses out on the perovskite thing.

7:55 My immediate thoughts are 'It's too complicated'. Complicated means more expensive to build and it requires tight tolerances during operations. Any change in either output or input could tilt the entire process and make it either not work at all, not work as efficiently, or not work as intended. 10:09 Aaaand here you pretty much validate my thoughts above. lol. If you wanted the iron/steel smelting processes to become cleaner with regards to CO2 production, you need to make electricity cheaper. If steelworkers were able to use electricity as their heat source, then they wouldn't have to use coal/coke or natural gas to heat up the furnaces. The reason they don't is because the 'dirtier' energy producers are a helluva lot cheaper which keeps costs down for the steel. Cheaper costs means more production, easier expansion, more hiring and cheaper building processes down the line. If you force these smelteries to pay for the CO2 they produce, you're going to kill the steel industry, which will force prices of everything that uses steel way up which will cripple economies. People will turn to dirtier forms of energy (deforestation to burn wood for heat and energy) because they can't afford the cleaner ones and you'll end up making the environment worse while attempting to make it better. 11:32 Lol. And here you're validating my 10:09 comment talking about electrifying steel production. XD What we need is cheaper, reliable and plentiful energy production. If you can bring down electricity costs to $0.01-0.02/kWh, you could eliminate natural gas economically because it would be cheaper and thus a better deal for consumers. If there is enough excess energy available, then all of these energy hogs, like the steelmaking industry, would be able to switch to electricity as well because it would be cheaper than coal/coke/natural gas. So what energy production method do we have available right now to allow for this? Nuclear. It's clean. It's safe. It's modular. It's getting cheaper. And if your complaint about it is the waste, we can launch that into the sun (or empty space) pretty cheaply now using the new spinlaunching systems they're developing. No nuclear waste on Earth anymore. Wind and solar aren't going to get us there, at least not in their current forms.

Loved the intervention to realign some of the assumptions made in the paper. Another great video. Keep it up 👍.

Excellent video. Objective discussion, i like the honesty and of your investigations! People are focus and working..... As always, It is nice to have hope!

Recently, a report came out stating that the EU can cover their domestic heating and hot water needs by tapping into waste heat. This is from the company Danfoss' white paper titled: "The world’s largest untapped energy source: Excess heat"

Really interesting video. I didn't expect to see another use for perovskites, which is quite exciting, and super interesting! Double perovskites, as it happens, also have a potential (but less promising) role in PVs, as they have been proposed for lead-free devices, as a way to eliminate toxicity risks. However, they are a long way behind when it comes to power conversion efficiencies!

What do you think of the pyro plasma electrical torches replacing bunker fuel oil to pelletize iron ore before shipment to steel manufacturers? Seems like a good first step.

11:20 I'm glad to hear that _someone_ is trying to make a completely electric steelmaking plant. It makes very little sense to me to burn fuels for heat, when as far as I know (and I'm probably wrong, but hey), you can make electrodes and electrically powered plasma arcs that can get up to insanely high temperatures.

There is also an Australian scientist at the university of New South Wales called Prof. Veena Sahajwalla , Who has done a lot of research on recycling, one of her project is on polymer injection where she use waste car tyres in the steel making process and the technology have been adopted by industries.

I suspect that the issues of lack of mass-burden can be accounted by modifying the furnace design. Tailoring the slag and metal takeoffs to a different depth. Which is good from a technical standpoint, but will make retrofits impractical. Or perhaps we should consider an entirely different technology. Fluidized catalyst systems used in oil refining operate near these temperatures. Perhaps similar technology can be applied to steelmaking.

You mentioned a few all electric steel processing plants about to open, can you please do a video on that process!!!!

Great video. Especially enjoyed the "instant" qualification you added courtesy of your patreon contact. Although we are all keen to hear about the latest "game changer" I think it's wise to announce the negatives ahead of the naysayers who want to ignore any solution that may contain flaws.

Wonderful(open, honest) video as ever, thank you

Your channel is an excellent example of Open Source economy. Outstanding work!

I really like your content and the way you present it. Thank you!

excellent video... i think even better with the interjection and objective discussion .

I love your videos!! I learn so much!! You are one of my favorite RU-vid channels!! Thank you for your great content!!

Gotta love those patrons. Thanks for the re-visit to this important topic. Cobalt and Rare-earths get thrown around by "agendists" but Iron (for Steal) is the big mining elephant in the room.

a bit off topic: I'd love to hear from you about the recently demonstrated sodium-based battery for EVs by Hina.

A very interesting video, thank you. The problem of replacing the structural support provided by coke in a blast furnace is also faced by teams trying to replace air with hydrogen in conventional blast furnaces, such as Thyssenkrupp Steel. One solution may be small ceramic bricks to provide the structural support and separation in the mix, which would be recovered and reused.

well done and objective as always! I love the walk back...

Thank you David.

The problem with steel making is controlled by basic physics. Replacing C with H to remove O from the iron oxide ore is laudable. But the cost of green H is currently 2 to 4 times the cost of using coke to reduce iron. If this cost can be reduced the reduction by iron oxide by H can be achieved. If the TC-BF-BOF system can be made to work it will be a blessing. Containing such hot gasses will be tricky. But to reiterate, the basic physics is what is overlooked in many of these fanciful schemes.

Hello, did you ever look at Donald Sadoway’s electro winning process for steel making? It also doesn’t generate any CO2. Except for how we persuade the electrons to move.

Is the move from 7% up to 8% of global total, not so much the increase of steel making but of the reduction in CO2 production from other sources distorting this sort of comparison ?

If the charcoal from, say, a tree plantation, is produced by pyrolysis (heating without oxygen) the resulting gas can be put through a fractionation tower such as they have in petroleum refineries, to produce cooking gas, gasoline, diesel, airline fuel and so forth right up to tars. Perhaps this would make the whole process more economic.

Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) for Hydrogen production can emit a large amount of CO2 during production. 40% to 100% is uncapturable depending on the process. Another technology for Blue Hydrogen production is Partial Oxidation (POx) Gasification, which, when coupled with Carbon Cature & Storage / Sequestration (CCS), can result in up to 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Fantastic job Dave!! Great example of the reality of life - that not every concept is rainbows and sunshine. Yet on we must strive, and progress is being made.

At 4:35 we're told of some marvelous trick by the, "Birmingham team", to add Perovskite to a process, minimise CO² production and maximise, CO production. I remember being told back in the 70's, that CO production from cars wasn't a problem, as it would be burned by sunlight to become CO², which was thought of as OK, because of it's natural presence in the atmosphere. That seemed like perfect sense to me, and still does. So how does industry producing CO become a benefit ?

one of the big issues of steam reforming using CH4 is that the steam is created by burning CH4 making it doubly bad for the environment. Flip the equation, using renewable energy and induction heating to produce the steam, reformate the CH4 to produce H2 + C02 then pass the C02 though a closed loop to produce graphene, also requiring heat. If the CH4 is used as a feed stock and not burned it becomes a much cleaner form of hydrogen production.

7:00 (Shows diagram of a Rube Goldberg Machine).... 'This will clear things up'.

OEPS !!!!!!!!! Outokumpu is shaping the stainless steel market with its new emission-minimized product line, Circle Green. It has the smallest emission intensity in the world, with a 92% lower carbon footprint than the global average and 64% lower than Outokumpu’s regular production - which is already the current sustainability leader in the industry. The new standard for sustainable stainless steel is now set.

There is a long way from lab scale to industrial scale. Many years ago (1990's/early 2000's) BHP built a large commercial Direct Reduced Iron plant in West Australia. Technically it worked - but was economically unviable and it was shut down. No company can afford to subsidize decarbonization of steel. Until production costs are built in as a design parameter, the theme that University Research can go easily to commercial application just ain't going to happen. It needs a change in mind-set of what University research means. It is not always the best technology, often what is actually needed is the most economic technology.

If the co is replacing that much coke, then you are looking at something other than a blast furnace. That can be done and possibly cheapish compared to the coke ovens and blast furnace route. Tata have an experimental reactor that could be utilised. A top gas recovery project is also possible. The generated co is more likely going to be injected at the tuyeres instead of coal. The pervoskite will likely be an offgas processing unit.

It's time to start taxing companies per ton of CO2 emitted.

GREAT work! Thanks!

Wow - this would be a great breakthrough!

I think that the most promising solution that I have seen is Boston Metal"s Molten Oxide Electrolysis. This technique requires only iron ore and electricity in and the only outputs are high purity molten iron and oxygen plus some slag from the iron ore impurities. After adding alloying agents, the iron can be directly rolled into finished products. This solution promises to use less energy and has lower capital costs and can use lower grade iron ore. Maybe, it will produce higher quality steel at a lower cost than the current blast furnaces. This would be a real tipping point.

Thanks! Great content and love the corrections at the end. Feedback is important!

2 of the biggest industrial breakthrus are in the concrete & steel manufacture industries. As these are global industries the retrofit process will go a substantial way in cleaning our air. Their reach is large per capita & globally so they would take a big bite out of stuff in our air.

Once again, since I have commented on hydrogen production in one of your other videos, I would like you to research and report on the Hazer process. This may well be able to produce H2 much more cheaply than by electrolysis. The Hazer process is being tested in Perth, Western Australia by the Hazer company. It uses methane from a landfill source, passes it over a heated iron ore, fluidised bed and produces hydrogen and graphite, which is deposited on the iron ore granules.

The problem is always production at scale, cost of new equipment/processes, and lack of requirement/necessity to convert. No industrial scale company is going to willingly reduce outputs, raise their prices, or spend extra money on new equipment just to say "they're green". Especially when they can just buy "carbon credits" and say everything's fine. We're only going to see real change when govts start forcing these changes and govts start spreading the message of overall reduced consumption. But no one is willing to do that so...we're going to keep sending it and keep playing math games with the carbon accounting

Great stuff mate well done.

I understand that in the USA they also use induction furnaces for steel making.

Fascinating Commentary Dave, thanks indeed to you and specialist patreon supporter. Not quite too good to believe, but real world application maybe not as soon as research might at first blush imply. Cheers

What do plants think about reducing CO2 in the air? Did you know at what CO2 level photosynthesis stops?

Another great video Dave, well done, keep up the good work.

Perovskite is the new super stuff. Also used in top-notch solar cells!

Nice one Dave. Another good vid.

Please consider the enviromental footprint of producing the perovskite. Overall impact of the complete process has to be considered. Thanks for your vids, they are thought inspiring. No mean feat nowadays!

One aspect of the Hydrogen alternative is that you then can produce and store hydrogen using wind and solar, without the need of batteries to safeguard continous operations.

I always kind of just assumed that steel making would be the last industry to de-carbonize if it even did. It always seemed easier to decarbonize everything else first.

I agree with your metallurgist regarding his concerns, dust in steel plants is much more difficult to handle than one think. But there are other possibilities, one is to see if the process we use to make Aluminium can be adopted to make steel and regarding using H2 there is a unique opportunity in Australia. There they dream about making H2 with wind and sun on the west coast and transport it to Japan and S.Korea. However Portheadland from where they ship the best Iron ore in the world to Japan etc.( only rivaled by Kiruna in Sveden and a couple of other places) is just next door and it is a much better idea to make the ore to spunge with H2 and ship this product to Japan. It is though in the tradition in Australia to through away money by not processing the products themselves , besides the government is under control of the oil, gas and coal companies that do not have imagination enough to divert into other industries. Sad but who knows.

Another potential problem that wasnt mentioned is the leaching of the perovskite metal componentes to the steel. How that will affect the steel produced

Will you be covering the new Na (Sodium) steelmaking process? A team in Israel just released their findings.

Excellent video - I found in particular valuable the comment from one of your Patreons who themselves work in the industry. I would only have a naive question regarding the CO - if the plant would indeed convert nearly all the CO2 into CO - would some special additional treatment of this CO be necessary, or could it be simply blasted into the air outside the plant? The reason I am asking is that CO even at very low levels is very dangerous.

Dear David, thank you very much for your next great video. I just wonder if we would be able to use the perovskite for the production of SOLAR PV MODULES and the heat of the process for another industrial application like CEMENT or other production

Another reason to find a substitute for metallurgical coal is the damage caused by the open pit mines and the selenium pollution that they leach into the local waterways. This is a big challenge in southeastern British Columbia.

I have nothing to say really, but I appreciate your content, and wish to help with the yt-algorithms.

Carbon Monoxide may not be Greenhouse gas but it is hazardous and effects indirectly to increase greenhouse effect, don't know how increasing its production compared to CO2 will be helpful

Almost zero information on the Perovskite they want to use. They quote 40k tons but nobody makes it... Will be nice to know this

I don't think it was mentioned in the video: H2 Green Steel is based in Sweden.

It seems to me that greening up our residential and commercial electrical demand and our ground transportation systems while monumental tasks in themselves will be child's play compared to greening up the steel and concrete production. The amount of change required to make these industries green is mind-boggling.

Thank you

There is potential to get electrolysis cheaper. In parallel coal gets more expensive and CO2 emissions cost more money. So hope-think green steel can be cheaper in the near future compared to traditional steel.

Tata Steel in The Netherlands is also busy with replacing cokes with hydrogen, and a big electrolyser will be built nearby (not only for steel) running on wind power from the northsea... But I think it will take another 5-10 years for that to be realized, But the pressure is on from local people who are proven to be suffering from the cokes factory, which is old and cumbersome and sometimes emits more than what it supposed to do, and sends graphite particles and other toxic stuff in the air causing people suffering substantially more from respiratory deseases and cancer is also more prominent in the area. The stuff in this Perovskite is also not really good for peoples health, so the concerns you mentionned in your addendum are important to tackle as well, otherwise you would replace something bad with something worse.. "Yeah, we have solved all the CO2 emissions, but do not get near the factory or you will be poisoned!