First Ton of Steel Produced Without Carbon Emissions

A facility in Boston, Massachusetts produced the first ton of steel with only electricity and no carbon emissions. The industrial reactor that produced the steel was developed by MIT and will soon help the steel industry reduce their carbon emissions.

In the past, researchers have attempted to find ways to offset the amount of emissions produced by steel production. It’s been found that steel accounts for 11% of all CO2 emissions. But researchers eventually began pondering if it was possible to completely eliminate carbon emissions produced by steel production.

The solution was finding an alternative way to create steel rather than putting ore into furnace and turning it into iron. In the traditional process, workers would put a coal based fuel known as coke into the furnace to facilitate the process of steel production.

As a result of inserting the coke, carbon dioxide is formed and released into the environment. MIT researchers created a new approach called molten oxide electrolysis. This involves electricity running through the mixture in the furnace to increase it’s temperature, which generates oxygen as opposed to CO2.

While the process is successful for creating steel, the process is currently too slow to meet the demands of the steel industry. There are plans by Boston Metals to create a plant in 2026 to demonstrate its ability to work at a commercial scale.

While this method of producing steel without CO2 is the first to produce a ton, there have been other methods that have been successful. A technique that emerged in recent years was using hydrogen based direct reduction. It involves reducing iron to iron with hydrogen gas to make steel.

The use of this method only emits water vapor as opposed to carbon emissions. As technology continues to advance, hopefully there will be more methods that eventually eliminates the traditional process of productng steel.