How fast can European steelmakers decarbonise?

https://www.economist.com/business/2023/05/11/how-fast-can-european-steelmakers-decarbonise

by Pietertje • 3 years ago

55 74 3 years ago

economist.com

johanneswu• 3 years ago

Without paywall https://archive.is/tzEcD

ranting-moth• 3 years ago

Is everyone decarbonising? India, China? I get the feeling they're laughing all that way to the bank.

(All in favour of it, just everyone has to play along)

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

They've made commitments, at least enough to convince Europe and the US that they are working on it... but whether they will spend more than $5.20 on enforcement, I doubt. Far more fun and strategic to let the US and EU do what they do and shout "We're with you!" from the sidelines. China also makes 80% of the world's solar panels, so we shouldn't pretend that China convincing the US to decarbonize doesn't have some pretty nice business interest in selling them to us - even though it is only 3.5% of their energy generation over there.

Kind of like how China is a WTO member, claims to support Copyright, upholds Patent Law, and respects Intellectual Property. They also respect their Constitution, including the provisions for Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech, and have an independent Supreme Court to enforce checks-and-balances on their President. They also have a Functioning Democracy with 8 other political parties. Anyone who has actually interacted with them in any of those fields...

WeylandYutani3• 3 years ago

The CCP is dedicated to social stability. China has a long history of environmental disasters causing political unrest.

Being a democracy is actually bad for taking action on this issue. The Republicans are still denying climate change.

gumby• 3 years ago

(All in favour of it, just everyone has to play along)

It's worth doing even if others don't. Especially for the wealthy countries -- the poor countries emit relatively little carbon per capita.

The new energy transition is from op ex to cap ex. Looks expensive in the short term but a big win in the medium and long term. Plus you get the benefit of reduced emissions. Sure, other people do, but even if you're selfish it's a good deal.

goatlover3• 3 years ago

The climate doesn’t care about per capita. The developing world has the majority of the population, so the majority of additional CO2 will be coming from there.

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

It's not the 20th century anymore. China's per capita emissions are higher than you're letting on. Higher than some European countries.

Avshalom• 3 years ago

It's worth doing especially if others don't.

Like whats the alternative: get into an arms race to see who can boil the oceans fastest? Oh but we'll make slightly more money than India from steel manufacturing so it will definitely be worth it?

TrainedMonkey• 3 years ago

This video summarizes this point pretty well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJdqJu-6ZPo&t=201s

I don't know the solution because the problem is huge, but my strong suspicion is that focusing on industrial efficiency is the largest needle we can move. Specifically, making it economically sensible to use green technologies in developing countries.

kieranmaine• 3 years ago

This is covered in the article:

"Europe’s steelmakers have one more strong incentive to get decarbonising. Under the eu emissions-trading system, they are currently awarded 80% of their allowances for CO2 emissions free of charge in order to remain competitive with dirtier producers in places like China and India. Over the next ten years the eu will phase out these freebies and replace them with a carbon tariff on dirty imports. If eu steelmakers stay grey, calculates Morgan Stanley, their profits could sink by up to 70%."

ognarb• 3 years ago

I wonder if at some point the EU should block the usage of dirty steel and only authorize carbon neutral steel. This would provide a great incentive for other countries to also invest in clean alternative.

quasarsunnix• 3 years ago

I think that's a great idea and could be applied to a lot of industries with large offshore carbon footprints. Maybe tariffs or quota limits that are linked to carbon?

zokier• 3 years ago

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will apply to imports across several sectors, including steel and aluminum, forcing them to respect EU environmental standards. It will come into effect in 2026 or 2027.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/12/13/eu-...

TheSmiddy• 3 years ago

China is rapidly decarbonising their transport, faster than any other country.

They also produce the vast majority of the world's solar panels.

yongjik• 3 years ago

There are Wikipedia articles for 2015 Indian heat wave (2,500 dead), 2016 heat wave, 2019 heat wave, 2022 heat wave, and the current ongoing 2023 heat wave.

2021 Henan flood killed hundreds and forced evacuation of 800k people.

Imagine what you want, but nobody's laughing any more.

HPsquared• 3 years ago

Prisoner's dilemma. What better way to pay for flood walls and air conditioning, than profitable high-emission industry.

ZeroGravitas2• 3 years ago

Wenbo He, secretary of the Party Committee and executive chairman of the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA), spoke about China’s green steel plans at the integration conference of green steel, green energy and green finance industries on March 2

https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/chinas-roadmap-to-green...

solarkraft• 3 years ago

Yes, they are. The bank is Europe.

defrost• 3 years ago

China takes this seriously:

World’s biggest steel maker (based in China) eyes new green steel plant in WA (Western Australia)

https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/world-...

Western Australia is in the running to host a green steel plant bankrolled by the world’s biggest steel maker, China Baowu Group.
During talks with Trade Minister Don Farrell in Beijing, company chairman Chen Dorong said the availability of clean energy and ore made Western Australia ideal as a site for the new facility.
The biggest buyer of Australian iron ore wants to decarbonise operations but is also eyeing West Africa, South America and Saudi Arabia as alternatives.

The largest resource companies are making commitments they regret, but are now tied to public statements and shareholders to meet:

Rio Tinto boss says he regrets ambitious emissions targets

https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/rio-ti...

Rio Tinto boss Jakob Stausholm has admitted he regrets the company’s ambitious emission reduction targets, doubling down on comments about the feasibility of moving to renewable energy at the pace expected.
“There have been a lot of strong statements made [about the energy transition], but I don’t think people have realised and accounted for the process of getting the land, the cultural clearings and then executing the project,” Stausholm told a business breakfast in Perth on Friday.

WeylandYutani3• 3 years ago

Not having heavy industry means less pollution. China has serious environmental issues. Which costs you money in the long run.

quirk• 3 years ago

Just please don't decarbonize my swords. I need them for work.

aidenn02• 3 years ago

Now I want to know what you do for work that requires swords...

pestatije• 3 years ago

swordcery

tmtvl• 3 years ago

Fencing teacher?

AnonymousPlanet• 3 years ago

Maybe running cutting edge blade servers

hinkley2• 3 years ago

Professional edge lord.

hinkley2• 3 years ago

This is either a joke or you don't know how your tools are made. I'm hoping it's the former.

The carbon in the steel serves two purposes. One, it alters the structure of the final steel. Too much, or too little and the metal doesn't behave right, so it's not fit for purpose. Two, it's a sacrificial reducer that keeps any stray oxygen from eating the metal during the heat and cool cycles (most of us call hot oxidation 'burning').

You're still going to need a little carbon to get the steel right and maybe to help catch a few stray oxygen atoms, but if you can heat the metal with something other than coal/charcoal, and you can provide another reducing agent, then you don't have to bathe the entire process in carbon. You'd just need enough to get the crystalline structure right, and perhaps a margin of error. And that sort of fraction could come from renewable resources.

scythe• 3 years ago

One thing I've been sort of curious about with non-carbothermal iron ore reduction is whether it could bring back wrought iron. Wrought iron disappeared around the 1960s due to high production costs — the crude product contains carbon, which must be removed by working — but iron produced with hydrogen or electricity will not have a chance to absorb carbon like this. There's more to it than that — you have to achieve a particular grain structure and fibrous silicate inclusions. But the corrosion resistance is nice — some wrought iron fencing in the highly corrosive atmosphere of New Orleans persists to this day. One paper reported that the corrosion resistance is better than mild steel but lower than weathering steel — but without creating the stains we associate with weathering steel:

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/237170109.pdf

aidenn02• 3 years ago

Aren't some high-tensile steels rather equivalent to wrought iron?

[edit]

I couldn't find any high-tensile steel with C alloyed below 0.18%, which is more carbon than what Wikipedia lists for wrought iron.

Zamicol2• 3 years ago

The first solar-powered steel mill was recently built in Pueblo, Colorado: https://gizmodo.com/the-world-s-first-solar-powered-steel-mi...

dporter• 3 years ago

The last paragraph of this article sums up a trend I keep seeing in this industry I don't like:

But while decarbonizing heavy industry is a good thing, the folks behind this project are not my favorites. Lightsource BP is a joint venture between the steel company EVRAZ and the energy giant BP, as well as the utility giant Xcel Energy, which will provide the steel mill with fixed electricity rates through 2041. BP and Xcel wouldn’t exactly be my top choices to control the energy of the future, what with both companies’ histories of spewing out carbon emissions, greenwashing their polluting business plans, and screwing over workers. I personally don’t think these kinds of companies should get to make big profits on solar power or use it to paper over their destructive legacies. But hey, maybe that’s just me!

The alternative to this is what? Complete newcomers to the industry attempting to execute multi-million or -billion dollar projects? Anyone in an existing carbon-intensive industry is going to have a "climate unfriendly" reputation because they operate in a "climate unfriendly" industry. Attempting to block existing players in the industry from decarbonizing seems counterproductive.

Zamicol2• 3 years ago

You're right, omitting opinions would have made for a more informative piece.

Here's some other (probably better quality) links: - https://www.chieftain.com/story/news/2022/03/18/bighorn-sola... - https://www.constructiondive.com/news/worlds-largest-solar-p...

_hypx3• 3 years ago

That's steel recycling, not production of new steel.

throwaway59592• 3 years ago

On a long enough time horizon wouldn’t it make sense for most steel to be recycled? I think we already get a lot of our aluminum from recycling.

wkat4242• 3 years ago

The energy isn't the only way carbon is involved in steel production.

easytiger6• 3 years ago

Only in the absurd world of carbon credits is this required - something that is nearly impossible to do any other way - that contributes practically nothing to global CO2 vs the incredible benefit to society it proffers - has to stop. Why?

Barrin92• 3 years ago

decarbonizing the industrial supply chains is pretty crucial because a lot of the other green infrastructure that's going to be needed to be built around the world is going to be less effective otherwise. If your green tech needs to run for years to simply claw back what was required to make it that is a huge issue.

easytiger6• 3 years ago

If your green tech needs to run for years to simply claw back what was required to make it that is a huge issue.

An engineering mind would never prefer high risk authoritarian enforcement of theoretical solutions to solve a problem. You are reducing diversity to shoot yourself in the foot

SECProto• 3 years ago

Only in the absurd world of carbon credits is this required - something that is nearly impossible to do any other way - that contributes practically nothing to global CO2 vs the incredible benefit to society it proffers - has to stop. Why?

Every individual action "contributes practically nothing to global CO2", so with this argument, nothing should ever be done.

But this is a strawman argument regardless: globally, steelmaking contributes ~11% of direct CO2 emissions[1]. Other countries[2] are progressing towards decarbonization. Per this very article, Europe will subsidize initially (progressively replacing subsidization with import tariffs over the next decade). And the whole point of all of this is to "internalize the externalities" - recognize that carbon emissions aren't free: Steel is incredibly emissions intensive, and free emissions lead it to be used in areas where other materials would be better from an emissions perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steelmaking#Carbon_dioxide_emi...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/algoma-steel-420milli...

easytiger6• 3 years ago

* Europe will subsidize initially*

Not charging levies and taxes is not providing a subsidy.

These things push up costs of living, costs of housing, costs of doing business - at a time when such artificial costs are presenting an existential threat to our way of life.

It's all laughably irrelevant anyway. In 2021 China estimated >1,000 million tonnes of steel (and that doesn't count the steel they finance in other countries). EU: 152 million.

And the whole point of all of this is to "internalize the externalities"

This childishly reductive paradigm of victimhood in relation to every macro and microscopic element of western life is a noose around our necks.

neonate• 3 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230512214044/https://www.econom...

https://archive.ph/tzEcD

roamerz2• 3 years ago

The sooner that people realize that the climate is going to change regardless of what humanity does the better off we will be. When the reality sinks in maybe we can put our efforts into adapting. Might have a chance that way.

dukeyukey3• 3 years ago

The climate is going to change.

Whether or not it changes 1000x times the historic norm is up to us.

roamerz2• 3 years ago

I read in places their are feedback loops that will be impossible to reverse once they start. If that’s true or not I don’t know. My simple mind says we should start with additional dams and develop huge desalinization plants. If we have water we’ll be okay.

On the flip side there is an unstable criminal with his finger on the WW3 button. When he’s done we might need some of that global warming.

kwere• 3 years ago

The world had a chance to keep climate change under the belt in the 80s with nuclear energy, but unscentific enviromentalists pushed hard against it and helped to kill the nuclear industry in most of the world before it reached maturity/economies of scales (like modular reactors today). Now, the trillions of $ should be better spend adapting our societies to climate changes instead of playing Don Chisciotte

user6723• 3 years ago

Safire plasma, which forms self-containing magnetic fields and is a fusion reaction that can stay lit pretty much indefinitely with no artificial magnet infrastructure (like the crappy Tokomak) renders the CO2 narrative moot.

How fast can European steelmakers decarbonise?

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