Green Steel

[MiloMorai]

‘Green steel’: Swedish company ships first batch made without using coal | Climate change | The Guardian

The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

[bojan]

Do a research how they are getting hydrogen.

Same almost-scam as electrical cars, it is only "green" if nukes are major electricity source.

Edited August 19, 2021 by bojan

[sunday]

Then there is the very much non-trivial issue of hydrogen manipulation.

[Detonable]

  Since steel is iron with carbon dissolved presumably they have some carbon source. Looking at the article on Australian green steel, hydrogen is used to remove oxygen from carbon the iron ore. Presumably they then add carbon and alloy metals. 
 

  Steel manufacturing uses lots of energy so unless they’re using nuclear, wind, or solar energy they haven’t helped much. 
 

  Is hydrogen produced from water? If so, what happens to the oxygen produced? 

[bojan]

35 minutes ago, Detonable said:

...If so, what happens to the oxygen produced? 

Millions of uses for it.

[glappkaeft]

2 hours ago, bojan said:

Do a research how they are getting hydrogen.

Same almost-scam as electrical cars, it is only "green" if nukes are major electricity source.

Swedish electricity production is is hydro, nuke and wind with very little else.

Edited August 19, 2021 by glappkaeft

[Detonable]

Wondering how Australia is going to compete with them. Probably not much hydro there. 
 

  If oxygen was produced on a massive scale as a result of hydrogen production, I wonder if it would just be released into the atmosphere, and what the effect would be. 

[MiloMorai]

3 hours ago, Detonable said:

Wondering how Australia is going to compete with them. Probably not much hydro there. 
 

  If oxygen was produced on a massive scale as a result of hydrogen production, I wonder if it would just be released into the atmosphere, and what the effect would be. 

According to research from the Clean Energy Council, Hydropower made up more than a third of Australia’s clean electricity generation in 2018, with over 120 operating hydropower stations across the country. Despite hydropower being a major contributor to clean energy generation, its impact only accounted for 7.5% of the country’s total electricity generated in 2018.

Hydro Power Stations in Australia | State Guide - Canstar Blue

[TrustMe]

18 hours ago, Detonable said:

Wondering how Australia is going to compete with them. Probably not much hydro there. 
 

  If oxygen was produced on a massive scale as a result of hydrogen production, I wonder if it would just be released into the atmosphere, and what the effect would be. 

I'm not 100% sure about this but I think that if a car is hydrogen powered the emissions would be water.

[sunday]

5 hours ago, TrustMe said:

I'm not 100% sure about this but I think that if a car is hydrogen powered the emissions would be water.

You are correct, and that is probably the only advantage of hydrogen as energy transfer medium for use in automotive applications.

The use of hydrogen for energy storage could be also an application, but I am afraid the overall energy efficiency of the process is not enough.

Edited August 20, 2021 by sunday

[DB]

Australia has plenty of sunlight, of course, and a lot of empty space to put solar arrays. It also is quite keen on using battery storage systems for peak shaving. It's quite possible that they will be able to leverage other methods like gravity storage.

Given that most hydrogen is currently generated using hydrogen steam reforming, which reacts hydrocarbons with steam, a change will be needed there also - perhaps electrolysis is appropriate if hydro is the main power source.

One would expect Canada to be looking at this type of green steel, too, given their energy mix.

[bojan]

5 minutes ago, DB said:

...Given that most hydrogen is currently generated using hydrogen steam reforming, which reacts hydrocarbons with steam, a change will be needed there also...

Nice to see that at least someone got what I meant with "Do a research how they are getting hydrogen."

Also electrolysis with the price of electricity from solar is no go. Even with hydro and coal it is not good. Only nukes make it effective enough, and even then barely.

Edited August 20, 2021 by bojan

[jmsaari]

16 hours ago, bojan said:

Nice to see that at least someone got what I meant with "Do a research how they are getting hydrogen."

Also electrolysis with the price of electricity from solar is no go. Even with hydro and coal it is not good. Only nukes make it effective enough, and even then barely.

I think you're looking at old price data, solar LCOE is pretty cheap these days wherever you can get reasonable full-load hours per year, wind likewise. The problem with both of course being that power is generated based on weather, not demand, but the cost itself is basically very low. But that's a problem from the power system point of view, if capital cost of H2 by electrolysis is  sufficiently low, having several tens of percent of VRE in the power generation mix can become an advantage when frequent excess production will drive electricity market prices down and cut the opex, and you can afford to shut down for the most expensive few thousand hours of the year.

Edited August 21, 2021 by jmsaari

[sunday]

23 minutes ago, jmsaari said:

frequent excess production will drive electricity market prices down

Excuse me, but how is that possible? You may have all the excess unplanned production you want, but if there is no demand for that production, you are not going to sell those MWhs.

Only way I could think of that being feasible is in a electrical system with a strong presence of highly flexible, highly intensive in variable costs generation, such as gas turbine, natural gas fired, power stations. But that kind of generation mix should be rare in a sensibly designed national system.

Edited August 21, 2021 by sunday

[jmsaari]

5 minutes ago, sunday said:

Excuse me, but how is that possible? You may have all the excess unplanned production you want, but if there is no demand for that production, you are not going to sell those MWhs.

That's what's happening all the time in places with high VRE fractions, when it's windy / sunny without the demand for it, prices plummet, sometimes even to negative. That's a problem for electricity producers of course, and how VRE will start to cannibalize it's own profitability once you start to have enough of it, but for someone with an energy intensive but low-capex use for that energy, that's an opportunity.. that's what i was trying to explain, perhaps poorly.

 

Edited August 21, 2021 by jmsaari

[sunday]

6 minutes ago, jmsaari said:

That's what's happening all the time in places with high VRE fractions, when it's windy / sunny without the demand for it, prices plummet, sometimes even to negative. That's a problem for electricity producers of course, and how VRE will start to cannibalize it's own profitability once you start to have enough of it, but for someone with an energy intensive but low-capex use for that energy, that's an opportunity.. that's what i was trying to explain, perhaps poorly.

 

I see, and what you wrote makes sense. However, a large fraction of VRE (Variable Renewable Energies) also presents its own problems, like the need of having enough backup generation for when the wind does not blow, or the Sun does not shine. 

Here is a recent study on the matter:
 

Quote

5. Conclusions

The penetration rate of renewable energy resources is increasing globally. As a result, it has become important to assess whether flexible resources are secured to cope with the variability of renewable energy resources. In many previous studies, the assessment method of flexibility often did not consider time horizons. Therefore, their evaluation methods resulted in insufficient system flexibility for rapid fluctuations in less than an hour, although sufficient resources were available for long-term fluctuations. Consequently, it is necessary to evaluate whether there is sufficient system flexibility within each time horizon. The variability of renewable energy resources was analyzed, and the capacity to provide system flexibility to respond was calculated for each time horizon. As a result, this process determined the required flexibility for each time horizon. Based on these results, it is desirable for system designers to plan the optimal flexible resources required for each time horizon.

(...)

 

[DB]

I think this may be why I mentioned storage options.

Arguably, H2 generation can be considered a storage option as well.

The point about timescales is a good one - we see a dash to decommission traditional power generation in favour of VRE, but not so much on storage, and industry cannot rapidly adapt to variable availability.

[DB]

Timely.

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by DB

[sunday]

Not a bad video, but...

Were they unable to find a less annoying chick? I know several female electrical engineers more qualified than a supposed physics graduate.

Also, it is nice to have efficiency figures for H2 storage based on electrolysis, and that thermal-photovoltaic thing. The later surprised me.

Edited August 26, 2021 by sunday

[DB]

She is who she is. She seems competent to me when popularising physics related stuff. this is a recent digression into the use of hydrogen for automotive use (the fuel cell Mirai has been her vehicle for the last few videos). 

For someone operating out of her discipline, I think she did a far better job than many manage - she gave meaningful numbers of the scalability of the options, round trip efficiency figures and a description of the technology's maturity. I think that makes this an above average layman's presentation.

I too was surprised at the TPV numbers, but it's worth remembering that they're not wasting their time with thermoelectrics which despite recent advances still very low efficiency and also use strategic materials.

I'd love for TPV to succeed - it even provides long term storage for carbon!

[sunday]

22 minutes ago, DB said:

She seems competent to me when popularising physics related stuff.

Dunno. It is likely that she is not much above whose Ryan call "talent" at his company, as there is a non-inconsequential staff behind her:

 

Quote

Creator/Host: Dianna Cowern
Editor: Levi Butner
Producer: Hope Butner
Production Assistant: Laura Chernikoff
Story Consultant: Patrick Muhlberger
Research: Sophia Chen and Erika Carlson

On the other hand, a cursory search about thermophotovoltaic systems gives efficiency figures notably lower than the quoted in the video, this 2020 paper -linked in the relevant wikipedia article- gives 30% in case of a near perfect energy conversion. I wonder if in the video they accounted the residual heating while storing energy as a plus instead of a minus.

Edited August 26, 2021 by sunday

[Adam Peter]

On 8/19/2021 at 5:47 PM, bojan said:

Same almost-scam as electrical cars, it is only "green" if nukes are major electricity source.

Saying electric cars are scams almost like saying NBC filters are scam.

[sunday]

Going for popcorn...

[bojan]

2 hours ago, Adam Peter said:

Saying electric cars are scams almost like saying NBC filters are scam.

Almost scam. If most of your electricity comes from coal they are flat out scam in overall reduction of pollution. They can still serve as a local pollution reduction (in cities), but overall they will not be "green", and will on average be worse overall than a gasoline cars, since coal is much more "dirty" fuel than gasoline. When you come to ~40:60 coal/other electricity sources they become "almost scam", as overall pollution will be slightly less from conventional cars, but then you have pollution from batteries. If you are one of the few (fewer and fewer unfortunately) smart countries and most of electricity comes from nukes and hydro - they are excellent choice, really reducing pollution.

How many countries you can put in the 3rd category, with less than 1:4 of electricity coming from coal and at least 50% coming from nukes? Those are countries where electric cars matter. Rest are cargo culting or at worst flat out scamming.

Edited August 29, 2021 by bojan

[sunday]

There is also the question of new power generation needed to replace the fossil fuels used by the current fleet of ships, locomotives, trucks, cars, and motorcycles. Question that is remarkably absent of the future plans for the electrification of road transport.

Paranoid minds suppose the ruling classes want a future with unwashed masses deprived of private transport.