this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I found an article about it, and it mentioned using arc furnaces. That’s the obvious move, because it simply involves replacing coke with electricity to melt the iron.
However, a steel mill also needs some carbon as it’s a key ingredient of steel. That’s the tricky part. If your process has no carbon at all, you’re not going to be producing steel either. My guess is, they replaced all the things they could and left what they had to. Most likely, there’s still one part of the mill that uses coke or some other carbon source.
Can you get carbon from a different source ? Would it need to be coke ?
I can't remember the details but yeah they were electrifying the process. Seemed a great idea. Just bad that tax layers are basically bailing out a company. They get a free ride and we get slightly better air quality
Yeah, the politics of it can get nasty. I guess they did that to keep the jobs or something.
Anyway, if you put a little bit of carbon into molten iron, you get steel. Traditionally that has been done by burning coke, and we’ve been using that for ages because it’s cheap and relatively clean in the pyrometallurgical sense. If you burned wood, oil or something else, you certainly could get the carbon that way too, but your steel would be contaminated by the rest of the periodic table, and that’s not great if you’re trying to build a bridge out of steel like that. Various carbon sources such as wood can be purified into coke, so there are options. It’s just that they haven’t been economically viable while normal coke has been available.
And that’s when we get back into politics. If it makes economic sense for companies to keep on polluting, they certainly will. The government gets to decide which business practices are rewarded and which are punished.