Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote: > Coal could be an ideal replacement for imported steel…that is, when it is > in the form of graphite fiber or nanotubes. Nanotubes are 10 times > stronger than steel by weight. A significant % of hot rolled steel comes > from abroad, and with enough incentives, directed and aimed directly at > imported > steel . . . > That is an interesting idea. It may be worth doing strictly on the technical merits of the plan. Graphite fiber is now used to build airplanes instead of aluminum, so it has advantages. Large-scale production would lower the cost. It might even become cost-effective for things like bridges or houses.
However, I do not think this would do much to preserve employment. Just on the face of it the numbers do not look promising. Here are the reasons. 1. Employment will fall the matter what happens. Coal mining is an ideal target for robots. It is dangerous, difficult, repetitive, and human miners are paid a lot. The number of coal miners is already a fraction of what it was in the past. https://anticap.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/war-on-coal-miners/ In recent years, production has soared while employment did not increase at all: https://doe.state.wy.us/lmi/0498/0498g5a2.htm 2. The total mass of coal needed to replace steel this would be much less than the mass of coal we now burn. I estimate it would be roughly 1/5th. World production of steel is 135 million tons per month or 1.620 billion tons per year: https://www.worldsteel.org/statistics/crude-steel-production.html Carbon fiber is lighter than steel, so you would need somewhat less than 1.6 billion tons of raw material per year. Coal production is 7.925 billion tons per year. See p. 15: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld_Statistics_2015.pdf It will take a long time to transition away from coal as fuel, and it would take a long time to begin manufacturing millions of tons of carbon fiber. But in the end, if coal production for fuel falls to zero and carbon fiber replaces all steel, you consume only about 1/5th as much coal. This reminds me of the argument that with cold fusion we will stop consuming oil as fuel, but the oil industry will survive because 20% of oil goes to plastic feedstock and other non-energy use. This is incorrect. The industry will not survive. A natural resource raw material extraction industry that is built to provide X amount of material cannot survive producing only 20% of X. I mean that the oil tankers, refineries, oil pipes and so on would not be economical to operate at 20% of capacity. You would have to build new ones on a smaller scale. The old industry would probably go bankrupt before you finished downsizing it, the way passenger ships went bankrupt after airplanes killed off ocean liners, and before the cruise ship industry emerged. Actually, with cold fusion it would probably be more cost-efficient and safer to synthesize oil from garbage and water, or air and water. 3. Also, I do not see why this would necessarily help US employment. I think the Chinese would master this technology as quickly as we do, and they would soon be exporting cheap graphite fiber material. They mastered the production of PV cells, which is a high-tech business. China is by far the world's largest coal producer. (See p. 15 referenced above.) Their production is used domestically; they are a net importer. Their coal mining industry is in deep trouble. - Jed
