There are still blacksmiths using only charcoal from wood. The iron
business in England only switched over to Coal when the Royal Navy
insisted on keeping a few trees handy, after Scotland had been clear-
cut. The problem is over quantity, not chemistry.
Bob Stuart
On 14-Aug-14, at 11:01 PM, Geoff Thomas wrote:
,
On 15/08/2014, at 4:00 AM, gasification-
[email protected] wrote:
Today's Topics:
Hi People, i had a question the other day about Coal being the only
way to make Steel, from my friend GeoffH, i am putting the
question below, it is in two parts, and my answer below that, -
displaying my ignorance, - particularly if gasified waste would
reach the high temperature required, - I realise Charcoal does, and
also the aluminium reaction I mentioned, but am personally skating
on very thin ice re temperature.
Please comment, I believe it is an important area of discussion in
the gasification arena, - PS, I have a thick skin :)
Cheers,
Geoff Thomas.
"Had a discussion with someone about the concept of 100% renewables
as to whether renewable could substitute for coal in steelmaking.
Well, it seems coal is important not only for generating very high
temperatures, but also for the chemical use of carbon monoxide in
extracting the iron from iron ore.
There are alternatives – maybe – such a DRI and ‘sponge iron’.
Hydrogen can be used instead of carbon monoxide but is so much more
expensive.
The Comments listed at the end of this article (on the Net) are
insightful.
Interested in other people’s comments on steel production vis-à-vis
renewable energy.
Cheers,
GeoffH
http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/308896/explosive-
growth-steel-production-china-why-it-matters
The Explosive Growth of Steel Production in China: Why It Matters
Posted November 27, 2013
Keywords: Carbon and De-carbonization, Energy Security, Tech,
Sustainability, Coal, Environmental Policy, China, Energy, Energy
and Economy, Energy Collective Exclusive, Fuels, china, industry
growth, steel, The Energy Transition
China and Steel Growth
There is no material more fundamental to industrial civilization
than steel. Modern buildings, ships, cars, planes and bridges would
all be unthinkable without steel, and as pointed out by Allwood and
Cullen in their fine recent book on materials production we
currently have no viable substitute materials that could perform
steel's multiple functions. We are still very much living in the
iron age.
Global production of steel has now reached almost 1.5 billion
tonnes each year. The geographic make up of steel production
however has changed profoundly in the last decade. In the year 2000
China produced 15% of the world's steel. Today almost half of the
world's steel is made in China, with Chinese steel production
increasing by over 500% since 2000. The astonishing levels of steel
consumption in China is illustrated by the fact that 60% of rebar,
used in buildings to reinforce concrete, that is produced each year
is now consumed in China.
Energy requirements of steel manufacturing in China
Last year China produced 708 million tonnes of steel. On average
each tonne of steel produced in China requires the equivalent of
0.69 tonnes of coal in energy consumption. In other words China's
steel industry consumes the equivalent of 500 million tonnes of
coal each year, and this being China more or less all of the energy
used to make steel comes from coal. China's steel industry consumes
almost 7% of the world's coal, and if China's steel industry was a
country it would rank 6th globally in total primary energy
consumption, ranking above both Germany and Canada. A comparison of
this level of energy consumption with current global consumption of
wind and solar energy is sobering.
As with all comparisons of energy consumption, methods and
calculations should be laid out transparently. Here I will compare
the total primary energy consumption of China's steel industry with
global primary energy consumption of wind and solar. In 2012 wind
and solar electricity production was 614 TWh (trillion watt hours).
However to make a more apples to apples comparison we should ask
how much coal would be needed to produce this electricity. Using
this approach current annual global energy consumption from wind
and solar works out as 200 million tonnes of coal equivalent (using
EIA's conversion methodology and BP's assumptions for the average
thermal efficiency of power plants). Therefore growth in global
energy consumption from wind and solar since 2000 has been
approximately half of the increase in energy consumption by China's
steel sector alone. A stark illustration of how little has been
achieved in the transition to low carbon energy.
This rapid growth in Chinese steel consumption poses another
problem. We are not only fundamentally dependent on steel
production, but as Vaclav Smil points out steel production is more
or less fundamentally dependent on the large scale use of coal,
with no prospect of a transition to low carbon methods of steel
production in the short to medium term. Calls to fully dismantle
the coal industry must consider how we can make steel without coal,
because currently no methods seem particularly feasible. Globally
about 1 billion tonnes of coal is used to produce steel,
representing 14% of total coal production, with steel and iron
production equating to over 6% of global carbon dioxide emissions.
This figure is much higher than that of the aviation industry, yet
have you ever read an op-ed calling steel manufacturing a rogue
industry?
The vast disparities in steel consumption in the world today
suggest that a significant increase in overall steel consumption is
inevitable and probably desirable. We are however reaching the
limits of how efficiently steel can be produced, and despite
multiple opportunities to improve the rationality of steel use it
appears clear that we will need to mine hundreds of millions of
tonnes of coal each year to produce steel for decades, and more
likely, generations to come. These realities should be borne in
mind by those who claim there are no significant barriers to 100%
renewable energy."
Hi GeoffH, thing with steel making is to remove the oxygen from the
Iron Ore, ( basically iron oxide) which is done by the carbon in
the charcoal (coal,) but charcoal is not the only way (the Japanese
have been using wood charcoal to make steel from 6000BC) nor is
coal the best source of charcoal, so this is a fruit-full area of
possible development.
Interestingly, there was a development called Direct Reduced Iron
some 20 odd years ago where electricity was used on an iron/carbon
briquette, (my vague remembering) and of course in this time we can
talk of electricity from Solar, Wind, Geothermal or tidal/wave to
provide at times when any of those have too much, but on another
side, my grandfather who was a railwayman in between fishing, when
they mixed aluminium powder with rust, to weld the rails together,
- the yearning of the aluminium for oxygen (which is normally
halted by it's instant oxide coating) would cause it to burn in
that reduced environment, created by the railway workers with clay
moulds from local mud, so the aluminium would effectively
disappear, (evaporate or float to the top) leaving superheated
steel which would go down into the clay mould between the two rail
ends - so hot it would melt the steel rails on either side to join
them,
The point being that not only carbon will do that chemical
transformation with steel.
For changing the steel production away from coal we could consider
using gasification, where one has a carbon containing substance, -
such as waste from cities, burns it without enough oxygen so
creates Carbon Monoxide, very hot, so also gives your reaction that
energy, - and of course the carbon monoxide, hungry for more
oxygen so that it can become carbon dioxide, takes that oxygen away
from the iron oxide, simply put.
Whether we blow that carbon dioxide through an 'algal bloom bed' to
make more biomass or vent it to the atmosphere may well be a point
but my main point is that the coal can stay in the ground, where it
was laid down in the Pleistocene,
So we have, from gasification, carbon monoxide, produced from
waste, to make steel.
Cheers,
Geoff Thomas.
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