Many researchers see a huge role for the gas in decarbonizing economies.
The white-hot river of liquid iron never stops. Every hour of the day and night, at this steel plant in Sweden’s far north, the metal pours out of a hole at the bottom of a massive, 90-metre-tall blast furnace. Equally relentless, a stream of carbon dioxide belches out of the top.is a waste product of the coal that the blast furnace devours. For every tonne of iron that will go to make steel, this furnace produces 1.
Sponge iron — the raw material from which steel is made — produced at the HYBRIT plant in Luleå, Sweden, without the use of fossil fuels.Making steel green is just one of the ways that hydrogen is now expected to help decarbonize the world’s economy. Although some have touted hydrogen’s use as a transportation fuel, it’s unlikely to have much impact in that sector or in heating, for which batteries and electrical power already provide more efficient low-carbon solutions.
Partly as a result, investment in hydrogen projects is experiencing a boom. The Hydrogen Council, an industry group in Brussels, estimates that the hundreds of large-scale hydrogen projects announced already amount to a possible investment of US$240 billion by 2030 — although so far, only one-tenth of these are fully completed deals. By 2050, the council thinks the market for hydrogen and hydrogen technologies will be worth $2.5 trillion per year.
The hydrogen the world already makes is largely used for chemical processing steps in essential industries. It is mixed with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia , for instance, an ingredient in fertilizer. Petrochemical refineries use hydrogen to remove sulfur from petroleum, or to break down some of petroleum’s larger hydrocarbons into smaller ones. And in the chemical industry, hydrogen goes into making massive amounts of products, such as methanol .
The hardest problem with making steel is that it involves extracting iron from iron ore — which is essentially rust, containing iron in an oxidized form. In a blast furnace, oxygen atoms are stripped from this rust, leaving liquid iron behind. To do this, ore is melted together with coke or with charcoal.
“There’s no space in the carbon budget for new blast furnaces,” says Rebecca Dell, head of the industry programme at the ClimateWorks foundation, a grant-making organization in San Francisco, California.
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