The world’s steel comes at a steep climate cost. A Swedish company is trying to change that
SSAB, LKAB, and Vattenfall spent about $2 million studying hydrogen steel technology, and in 2017, they had one of their first successes. “I still remember when I held that first piece of fossil-free steel made in a laboratory in Stockholm,” Lindqvist says. “I thought, ‘This might actually work.’” Lindqvist and other executives then went to their companies’ boards and asked for $160 million to build a pilot plant to develop the technology further.
Last August, SSAB used the pilot plant to produce its first emissions-free steel. Workers involved in the process made a video documenting the effort. “When I saw that video … I almost had tears in my eyes because they were so proud,” says Lindqvist. “They felt that we were doing something very important, and that we were part of a solution.”
With HYBRIT’s success, SSAB is moving ahead with plans to scale up its green steel process to a million tons a year by 2026. But there are significant obstacles to a similar ramp up for other steelmakers around the world. For one thing, green steel costs about 25% more to make than its conventional counterpart, according to RMI, a climate think tank.
Another problem is that the green hydrogen steelmaking method only works with a kind of very high quality iron ore, which not everyone uses —though companies pursuing the technology say they are developing ways to use lower-grade ores as well. There’s also an international dimension: even if policies in Europe and the U.S. help facilitate a transition to zero-carbon steel, the biggest player is still China, which produces half the world’s steel, largely in coal-fired blast furnaces.
There’s also the simple fact of how much needs to change in such a short time span. The world produced nearly
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