this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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According to this graph from 2016 those emissions were about 1.7% of the whole pie. Reducing emissions is definitely a step in the right direction, but in this case it’s not going to be a very big step.
Just to give you some perspective, road transport is responsible for about 11.9%, so tackling that should be a significantly higher priority IMO. We could take that step by developing electric lorries, trucks and vans and other electric cars, but they would also need to be recharged using nuclear or renewables.
Energy use in buildings covers about 17.5% so that should probably be even more urgent. Burning oil to heat up your house in the winter should be replaced with more ecological options. As usual, running your air conditioning in the summer also contributes to the problem if the electricity comes from coal, oil or gas.
People tend to forget that 24.2% comes from industry, so optimizing that part should be among the top 10 of our priorities IMO. In many cases, you could switch from carbon based fuels into other sources, but that may require building more nuclear, wind, solar and grid energy storage.
Steel production is also pretty big (7.2%), and as far as I know, there’s no easy way to replace coke. However, it is possible to capture the CO2 right at the source, but currently there are no economic incentives to build an entire carbon processing factory right next to your steel mill. Carbon tax might a good way to make the steel industry look for ways to reduce emissions. If keeping the old factory running costs hundreds of millions a year in taxes, while building that carbon plant costs about the same, many companies might consider it… or they might just outsource everything to China instead.
source
Picking and choosing which one to fix "first" is a problem, IMO.
We are capable of tackling every area simultaneously. Let's get more EVs out there, let's try hydrogen-powered airplanes, more nuclear, and sails on ships.
Let's do everything we can.
There is a replacement fore coke. Check out NZ steel plant moving to renewables.
And get this. NZ tax players get to pay for that privilege. What a win for a private company
I found an article about it, and it mentioned using arc furnaces. That’s the obvious move, because it simply involves replacing coke with electricity to melt the iron.
However, a steel mill also needs some carbon as it’s a key ingredient of steel. That’s the tricky part. If your process has no carbon at all, you’re not going to be producing steel either. My guess is, they replaced all the things they could and left what they had to. Most likely, there’s still one part of the mill that uses coke or some other carbon source.
Can you get carbon from a different source ? Would it need to be coke ?
I can't remember the details but yeah they were electrifying the process. Seemed a great idea. Just bad that tax layers are basically bailing out a company. They get a free ride and we get slightly better air quality
Yeah, the politics of it can get nasty. I guess they did that to keep the jobs or something.
Anyway, if you put a little bit of carbon into molten iron, you get steel. Traditionally that has been done by burning coke, and we’ve been using that for ages because it’s cheap and relatively clean in the pyrometallurgical sense. If you burned wood, oil or something else, you certainly could get the carbon that way too, but your steel would be contaminated by the rest of the periodic table, and that’s not great if you’re trying to build a bridge out of steel like that. Various carbon sources such as wood can be purified into coke, so there are options. It’s just that they haven’t been economically viable while normal coke has been available.
And that’s when we get back into politics. If it makes economic sense for companies to keep on polluting, they certainly will. The government gets to decide which business practices are rewarded and which are punished.
Nobody wants Chinese steel.