Stainless Steel?

The industry searches for new technology to radically reduce greenhouse gases

By Mark Halper Monday, Feb. 07, 2011
    • Pierre Heckler/Le Republicain Lorrain/Photopqr/Newscom

    ArcelorMittal plans to test a greener manufacturing process at its plant in Florange

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    In tandem with its top-gas scheme, ULCOS is developing another technology, led by Tata Steel, that permits steelmakers to feed common, sand-size bits of iron ore called fines straight into a blast furnace, eliminating the energy-intensive process of first sintering the fines into bigger chunks. The Tata technique also uses coal directly instead of first converting it to coke—thus knocking out another energy hog.

    Once ULCOS perfects either technology, all ULCOS members will be free to use it, in keeping with the consortium's collaborative spirit. That means that in about 10 years, European steelmakers could have at their disposal technologies that would on average reduce their CO 2 emissions by half.

    But what about the possibility of replacing technologies that use fossil fuels like coal and coke with those that use noncarbon alternatives like hydrogen and electrolysis? ULCOS and some other steel-industry experts believe those technologies are decades away, but the American Iron & Steel Institute seems a bit more bullish. Larry Kavanagh, president of AISI's Steel Market Development Institute in Washington, says hydrogen and electrolysis could be ready commercially by sometime in the 2020s.

    The industry needs the breakthroughs desperately, because it has pushed the limits of CO 2 reduction through existing technology. "The level they've reached, they're really at the boundaries already," says Michel Van Hoey, a Brussels-based partner at McKinsey. He notes that even though the industry is the fifth leading producer of greenhouse gases in the world, CO 2 emissions per ton of steel produced tumbled 45% between 1960 and 2007. Industry measures have included the use of stronger iron ores and the deployment of natural gas as a coke replacement. (Gas contains less carbon.) The industry can also take credit for increasing the fuel efficiency of cars and the energy efficiency of buildings by making stronger and lighter-weight steel. Another green feather in its cap: steel recycles as no other industry does, as evidenced by that nearly one-third of product that World Steel says comes from scrap.

    Yet the industry struggles to reduce that 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Without the technological breakthroughs described above, any new reductions will be a challenge. Indeed, the dramatically increasing need for everything from railroads to bridges to shopping malls and new housing developments in emerging markets that produce the dirtiest steel is going to make the clean-steel mission both more urgent and more difficult. "We're seeing a higher concentration of blast furnaces come on board—especially in China," says McKinsey's Van Hoey. "The developing countries are the challenge," notes Nick Sowar, an expert in global steel at consulting firm Deloitte. "An efficient steel mill in Germany may get shut down when an inefficient one in China picks up the business." If the industry is to really make a CO 2 difference, the gray picture will have to change to green not just in Florange but wherever else in the world steel is rolling out of a factory.

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