Removal of molten iron from a pilot facility on the Boston Metal plant in Woburn, Massachusetts.
Image courtesy of Boston Metal
The $1.6 trillion steel industry is the backbone of the trendy world. Based on the World Steel Association, it also contributes significantly to global warming, accounting for between 7% and 9% of world carbon dioxide emissions.
That is why massive global corporations, including multinational steel giant ArcelorMittal and tech stalwarts Microsoftspend money on boston metalthe corporate from which it was separated Massachusetts Institute of Technology and developed a recent way of manufacturing pure steel.
“There is no such thing as a economy, no infrastructure without steel,” said Boston Metal’s CEO Tadeusz Carneiro he told CNBC in a video call on Wednesday. So on the subject of decarbonizing industry to fight climate change, “that is a giant piece of the puzzle. I do not think it’s obvious to everyone,” Carneiro said.
In 2013, MIT professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore published article within the journal Nature with laboratory results proving that it is feasible to provide steel without carbon dioxide emissions. That very same 12 months, they founded Boston Electrometallurgical Corp. to scale and commercialize the technology.
In 2017, Carneiro joined the corporate as CEO. He’s a veteran 40 years of profession in metallurgy, mainly within the Brazilian metal giant CBMM. In 2018, Boston Metal raised theirs First funding round, $20 millionwithin the round led by Breakthrough energy projectsa climate investment company founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Gates has been emphasizing the necessity to take into consideration decarbonising the manufacturing sector for years. Transport receives a whole lot of attention, but it surely only accounts for 16% of world emissions, while manufacturing generates 31%, based on Gates’s book:How you can avoid a climate catastrophe“.
“Each time I hear an idea of what we are able to do to stop global warming – whether on the conference table or over a cheeseburger – I at all times ask this query: ‘What’s your blueprint for steel? ”wrote Gates by myself blog in 2019.
On Friday, Boston Metal announced it had raised $120 million in a Series C round led by international steel giant ArcelorMittal with funding from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.
With the funding, Boston Metal will increase crude steel production at its pilot plant in Woburn, Massachusetts, and support the development of its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil, where the corporate will produce quite a lot of metals. It plans to begin constructing an illustration steel mill in 2024 and a industrial one in 2026, Carneiro told CNBC.
Boston metal band.
Image courtesy of Boston Metal
Carbon cost for ArcelorMittal
For ArcelorMittal, producing steel without greenhouse gas emissions is just not only a responsibility, but in addition a business necessity based on Irina Gorbounovavp and head of the XCarb innovation fund at ArcelorMittal.
“Our customers are asking for it, our investors expect us to make the transition, and our employees – and our future employees – wish to work for an organization that is an element of the answer, not a part of the worldwide climate problem,” Gorbounova told CNBC.
“We’re also seeing the price of coal increasingly more,” Gorbounova told CNBC. In Europe, the so-called The Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETSis already setting a carbon price, Gorbounova told CNBC.
“The EU has been on the forefront of climate policy, but it surely is affordable to expect other regions to follow suit. So there’s a business case for decarbonization,” Gorbounova told CNBC. “Zero or near-zero carbon steel will change into a reality. The one query is how quickly we are able to complete this journey. Unless steel corporations decarbonise, they’ll not stand the test of time.”
Mockingly, steel is an important ingredient in most of the technologies being built to decarbonise, equivalent to wind-up electric vehicles, said Gorbounova.
Microsoft doesn’t construct cars or make steel, but it surely tries achieve their very own aggressive climate goalswhich include limiting carbon emissions by 2030 and removing the entire company’s historical carbon emissions since its founding in 1975.
Boston Metal CEO Tadeu Carneiro worked within the steel industry for many years before becoming head of MIT.
Image courtesy of Boston Metal
How does Boston Metal do it?
Traditionally, step one in steel production is to mix iron ore or iron oxide extracted from the bottom with coal in a extremely popular blast furnace. This process generates significant CO2 emissions.
Scrap recycling can also be a key a part of the worldwide industry, accounting for 30% of steel production (70% within the US) and has a “much smaller” carbon footprint, Carneiro said.
Boston Metal’s technology, Molten Oxide Electrolysis, runs electricity through iron oxide mixed with what Carneiro calls “other oxide soup” to create iron and oxygen. Oxides are chemical compounds that contain not less than one oxygen atom, and the Boston process includes common oxides equivalent to alumina, silica, calcium, and magnesium.
“There is no such thing as a carbon” within the strategy of making iron with this method, Carneiro said.
That said, heating this soup to the required 1,600 degrees Celsius requires significant electricity – producing 1,000,000 tons of steel a 12 months would require 500 megawatts of pure base load electricity, about half the electricity needed to power an average-sized city. “The provision of electricity will determine how quickly the method may be implemented,” Carneiro said.
Electricity must even be clean, otherwise it defeats the aim.
“We consider that in the long run we may have abundant, reliable, green and low cost electricity to make the most of this process and produce green steel,” Carniero said.
Other processes for making pure steel with hydrogen are being developed, but they require very pure iron oxide, and only about 4% of commercialized iron ore is suitable, Carniero said.
Boston Metal will eventually license its technology to steel corporations moderately than be a steel producer itself.
“Every steel company is in touch with us to know our progress and when we are going to go industrial,” Carneiro told CNBC. “All of them promise to be carbon neutral by 2050. And so they don’t really have an answer at once. So that they really want a large-scale solution, and our technology is the one one which can scale up to those billions of tons of capability.”