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Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#72Reduction of iron ore with carbon monoxid in closed loop: • Decarbonisation of BF-BOF through thermochemical closed carbon looping. • Demonstration of mass and energy flows of thermochemical BF-BOF system. • 88% emissions reduction of UK steel industry through £720 million investment. • Decarbonisation without retiring of existing BF-BOF, reducing stranded assets. • After 5 years, £1.28 billion savings and total UK-w…
>In conclusion, this paper aims to demonstrate the first principal calculations of coupling a thermochemical carbon dioxide splitting cycle with a steel production facility for cost-effective steel decarbonisation. It's an interesting idea. But let's be clear: it's an idea . The scientific literature contains a lot of good ideas. By contrast the OP paper is actually an experimental demonstration of reduction with amm…
Swedish projects to create green steel [1] seems to have delivered the first customer batch of steel. They use hydrogen produced locally.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/sweden...
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shifting electric prices due to wind power is a strong motivation to pool it though.
So far it's easier and more efficient to reserve/contract some hydro (dam) storage than store/pool hydrogen for continuous operations.
That sounds very location dependant and not necessarily feasible at all given higher and higher share of wind power being used. That hydro will be needed during periods of low wind to stabilise everything else.
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at a company that is creating better electrolyzers for this process. Ammonia producers are clamoring for this technology. It works, and it is happening!
Could ammonia be used for stable seasonal storage of energy? The abstract suggests that ammonia is much nicer to transport and store than hydrogen. If we can use it to store summer solar to run winter heat-pumps with a low roundtrip efficiency but even lower costs per kWH of capacity it could really help.
Ammonia can indeed be used as a longish term energy storage. It's not as great as methane (that can be pumped into underground caverns), but it liquefies at room temperature at just around 9 atmospheres or at -33C at atmospheric pressure.
Though it's pretty poisonous if it leaks.
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
From article: " Currently, ammonia is synthesized through the Haber–Bosch process by converting hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. In this process, hydrogen is mainly produced via steam methane reforming. This fact makes the process of fossil-fuel-based ammonia synthesis very carbon dioxide intensive, accounting for ≈1% of the global carbon dioxide emissions.[11, 16] Yet more sustainable ammonia synthesis pathways a…
Haber-Bosch seems to be only feasible at large scale. It would be great to make this scale down and be more efficient. It's the secret to a whole lot of ways to combat rising carbon.
What's interesting is that H2 + N2 -> NH3 reaction is thermodynamically favorable, so in theory with a good enough catalyst it can be driven at mild conditions.
And this has actually been achieved back in early 2000-s! But the catalysts are very finicky and they get poisoned too quickly for industrial use. Additionally, it'd be nice to be able to use water instead of hydrogen directly.
There are some interesting developments in this area, like this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34984-1 - they synthesized ammonia using visible light as an energy source.
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#76Reduction of iron ore with carbon monoxid in closed loop: • Decarbonisation of BF-BOF through thermochemical closed carbon looping. • Demonstration of mass and energy flows of thermochemical BF-BOF system. • 88% emissions reduction of UK steel industry through £720 million investment. • Decarbonisation without retiring of existing BF-BOF, reducing stranded assets. • After 5 years, £1.28 billion savings and total UK-w…
The UK steel industry is 0.1% of the UK economy, at around 7 million tonnes per annum. China producuces a little over 1 billion metric tonnes per annum By what measure is this not futile?
Doesn't China have a free pass with their emissions through to 2030, due to their "developing country" status?
Pretty sure that's the case, though they have to start reducing their emissions after that like the rest of us.
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at a company that is creating better electrolyzers for this process. Ammonia producers are clamoring for this technology. It works, and it is happening!
Could ammonia be used for stable seasonal storage of energy? The abstract suggests that ammonia is much nicer to transport and store than hydrogen. If we can use it to store summer solar to run winter heat-pumps with a low roundtrip efficiency but even lower costs per kWH of capacity it could really help.
It could work theoretically. The only question is if it is economical to do so. And the answer to that is probably not. It ranks pretty low on the list of possible solutions in terms of cost and efficiencies.
Hydrogen and ammonia (you typically generate one to generate the other) are interesting as a fuel in some use cases (anywhere the weight of lithium ion batteries is a problem basically). Main use cases seem to be shipping, and maybe long haul aviation. Probably not for road transport (battery electric seems adequate there for most vehicle categories).
But as a battery/energy storage solution it makes less sense. The round trip from solar/wind energy to hydrogen to ammonia and back to electricity loses most of the energy in the process. It's doable but there are probably more efficient and cheaper ways to store the energy. You lose about half (at least, that's a super optimistic percentage) of the energy creating the hydrogen. Then some more creating the ammonia. And then some more converting that back to electricity. It's pretty easy to waste less energy than that.
For heat, simple thermal mass is very efficient, low tech, and has already been demonstrated to work for seasonal storage. Throwing away half the energy to create ammonia simply makes no sense. All you need for thermal mass is some basalt, sand, etc. with a lot of mass, a container to put it in, and some cheap way to insulate it (wool would do the job). Heat it up in the summer, extract heat in the winter. It scales. The raw materials are dirt cheap (because they are literally dirt), the complexity is low (pipes, plumbing, insulators, sand/rock).
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#78Another rust post making it to the front page...
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anywhere you have water you have hydrogen.
Interestingly, the paper mentions that the reactions do produce (some) hydrogen, which could perhaps be recaptured. However, a bigger concern upon a glance is that this process does produce NOx emissions...
> Interestingly, the paper mentions that the reactions do produce (some) hydrogen, which could perhaps be recaptured.
The hydrogen is used for reducing the iron oxides, that's the whole point of the process! That is,
FeXOY + H2 => Fe + H2O
Re: Reducing Iron Oxide with Ammonia: A Sustainable Path to Green Steel
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could ammonia be used for stable seasonal storage of energy? The abstract suggests that ammonia is much nicer to transport and store than hydrogen. If we can use it to store summer solar to run winter heat-pumps with a low roundtrip efficiency but even lower costs per kWH of capacity it could really help.
Ammonia can indeed be used as a longish term energy storage. It's not as great as methane (that can be pumped into underground caverns), but it liquefies at room temperature at just around 9 atmospheres or at -33C at atmospheric pressure. Though it's pretty poisonous if it leaks.
It's corrosive to humans, toxic to aquatic life, but once you dilute it, humans survive easily.
The dangers are in confined spaces.