,
On 15/08/2014, at 4:00 AM, [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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