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Anon questions our energy sector
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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we'll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.
Even with fusion up and running we're going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running... and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they'll have customers from day one.
No it isn't? What makes steel steel is the carbon inbetween Fe.
Green hydrogen has been promised to me my whole life. Sad to day I now understand your point of view. Natural gas wins.
What makes iron is the lack of O in Fe~3~O~4~ (that's magnetite, other ores are similar). Carbon for alloying is not an issue it can be easily covered by biomass, you smelt the magnetite by combining it with hydrogen resulting in iron and (very hot) water, no carbon involved, then you add carbon, something like 2% thereabouts, to get steel. Add too much and you get cast iron. The overwhelming majority of coke used in the coke process is not used for alloying, but smelting and reducing the iron. That part of the steel making process is completely decarbonised in the hydrogen process, and the carbon that's used in alloying, well, it's not in the atmosphere is it.
You can rip the oxygen off iron ore with electricity but that's less energy-efficient than taking a detour via electrolysis. It's different with aluminium, there using electricity directly is more efficient.
If you think that's what I'm saying then no, you don't understand my POV.
Vs
OMG yes I said "blast furnace to reduce steel". I meant "to reduce iron [to produce steel]". Obviously: What else would you use hydrogen for in a blast furnace?
But "reduce steel" is still, at least colloquially, correct for recycling steel: Scrap has rust on it so it also needs to be reduced. Which you would've realised instead of trying to turn this into a silly gotcha if you knew what you were talking about.
Go ahead, do tell me about your plan on how to produce steel, from ore, without getting fossil fuels or hydrogen involved. Charcoal? Could work, but I don't think the economics make sense.