A new way of making steel without producing carbon dioxide was proposed in new research out of Great
Britain this month. Scientists at the University of Birmingham have proposed
using a form of the mineral perovskite that would recycle the carbon dioxide
that blast furnaces emit during the steelmaking process. At a large scale, it
could reduce emissions by around 90 percent without requiring manufacturers to
purchase new equipment or machinery. The mineral can be retrofitted onto
existing blast furnaces, the most common method of making steel. So far, the
method has been demonstrated in a lab but not at a larger, commercial scale,
which will be the crucial test to whether it works or not. That is expected to
take place within five years, according to the research.
The new technology would be much cheaper than the
current alternative method, known as green steel, that uses hydrogen to heat
the ore. One thing that might hold back the use of the technique is that the mineral
crucial to the process, Niobium, is only mined in Brazil and Canada, so major
steelmakers in the US and China would have to rely on imports. As I wrote about
earlier this month, green steel technology has been advancing in Europe and
advocates hope to keep the momentum for adoption going, but educating and
marketing the technology is one of the biggest hurdles at the moment. If the
proposed technology out of Great Britain does what scientists say it could and
is usable at a wide scale, it would be a massive accomplishment in
decarbonizing a sector that contributes to about 7 percent of the world’s
carbon emissions.