Scientists find a greener way to make iron

Scientists at the University of Oregon are working on a greener way to make iron metal—a big step toward cleaning up the steel industry, which is one of the largest sources of carbon pollution worldwide.

Their latest research, published in ACS Energy Letters, shows how this new method could be more efficient and environmentally friendly than the traditional way of making steel.

Right now, making iron from iron ore usually happens in blast furnaces that burn fossil fuels and release a lot of carbon dioxide into the air.

But chemist Paul Kempler and his team have developed a new method that uses saltwater and iron oxide (a natural form of iron found in the earth) to produce iron through electrochemical reactions.

In their newest study, the team focused on finding the best kinds of iron oxide to use.

They wanted to understand what makes some materials better than others for producing iron.

At first, they thought it might be the size of the particles, the chemical makeup, or even the impurities. But after testing different samples, they discovered that what really matters is how porous the material is—how many tiny holes it has.

The porous iron oxide particles have a larger surface area, which helps the chemical reactions happen faster.

In contrast, denser particles with fewer holes slowed things down. This matters a lot because large-scale electrochemical plants are expensive to build, and making iron quickly helps reduce the cost of the final product.

The team’s key insight is that surface area—not particle size—is crucial. The more porous the material, the faster and more efficiently it can produce iron.

And while they used a specific type of nanoparticle in their lab tests, the same principle could apply to many other low-cost, naturally available iron oxides.

Kempler’s group is now working with engineers and manufacturers to figure out how to scale up this process for real-world use. They hope this cleaner method can one day replace the traditional, more polluting way of making iron.

Graduate student Andrew Goldman summed it up well: “We can still have the benefits of modern industry without hurting the planet. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a start—and that’s exciting.”

The ultimate goal is simple: make iron in a way that’s cheap, efficient, and far less harmful to the environment. If successful, it could reshape one of the world’s most important industries.

The problem with this notion is that producing iron is not very useful, other than for chemical products. Iron just isn’t all that useful unless and until you convert it into steel, and to do that, via various means and methodologies, you have to heat it to its melting point and either (1) add alloying metals, (2) blow oxygen through it to remove impurities, and/or (3) add carbon to it. Typically, ALL of those operations.

Coming out of a blast furnace, you already have your molten iron and you have the residual carbon from the coal you used to heat the furnace, and you have these things in enormous quantities and you run the furnace 24 hours a day for 3+ years. You have railroad lines delivering kilotons of coal and limestone, the limestone acting as a reducing agent and slag producer = shielding the melt from impurities and carrying them off. Yes, it is a enormous filthy piece of business but the process has been really, really improved and there are valuable chemical byproducts in large volumes such as sulfuric acid and ammonia. Even the slag can be used, as roadbuilding material. The point being, no matter how green this means of production is for iron, to make it into steel is still going to require enormous furnaces for heat input and plenty of other considerations in terms of carbon addition, alloying, and impurity removal.

Now there is a kewl company I really like, Steel Dynamics, (STLD) that operates no blast furnaces, but instead makes all their steel from recycled scrap. Noice.

But I can’t see even a semi-miraculous production of iron being anything of great value.

Right now, making iron from iron ore usually happens in blast furnaces that burn fossil fuels and release a lot of carbon dioxide into the air.

This process also makes chlorine, which is a useful byproduct.

Carbon dioxide is a hazard in high concentrations. But is not usually a problem as a byproduct of combustion.

Chlorine on the other hand is highly corrosive, highly toxic in even low concentrations and expensive to contain as a byproduct of an industrial process.

As intriguing as this process sounds, I see a lot of problems putting it use in a large industrial setting.

Having worked in water treatment few things inspired more fear in me than chlorine.

Chlorine inhalation is a horrible way to die.

This is even better. Using hydrogen to smelt not only iron but also rare earth elements from bauxite waste which itself is a huge environmental nnightmare its highly toxic and water soluble. Plus there is four billion tonnes just laying around in leaking waste ponds and piles. Red mud is 40-60% iron by weight that’s why it is red in color. It also is loaded with aluminum that the first process missed and titanium in commercial amounts as well plus rare earth elements. The Iron produced is so pure it can be used directly to make steels as hydrogen carries no carbon,sulfur or other contaminates unlike coal or coke fired furnaces. It’s win win win. Once you have hydrogen from electrolysis it’s 100% H2 and nothing else. The cost of electrolysis has plummeted it’s under $300 per kg and India’s richest man has a company he founded that is going to $200Kg per hour of capacity in the next year or two they already have the cheapest precious metal free electrolysis machines on earth in is shipping container form at that.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06901-z

Another group has a leeching process that grabs all metals from bauxite or coal ash leaving on silica behind aptly named Sileach. It works for lithium clay,muds and micas too.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-95022-8_188

Once in aqueous form every metal has a corresponding sulfate precipitate that drops it out of solution as a solid it should be obvious how valuable a process like that is when you can recover every metal present in ash or tailing piles/ponds. The REE alone make it a multiple hundreds of billion plus dollar market.

CL gas plus O2 + H2O = hydrochloric acid a extremely valuable industrial chemical used in the millions of tonnes per year. The whole chloroalkaline process and industry is expressly devoted to making chlorine gas hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxides from salt water and massive amounts of electricity. 80 billion tonnes per year in that industry alone. The chlorine won’t go to waste it has real value.

As a side fact HCL is the best acid to treat wood,stalks,grass,leaves,bark,hay...anything with cellulose and hemicellulose with it rapidly reduces those polymers to their original sugars in the 5 and 6 carbon lengths. We call that food as every aerobic cell on earth uses glucose a C6 sugar which is the main component of cellulose for metabolism. Having access to cheap HCL means every plant on earth can be turned into sugar syrup and then feed to things ,like yeast to make ethanol,butanol and propanol plus gobs of 69% compete protein by mass yeast byproducts. Feed it to chickens or pigs in pellet form as it’s carbohydrate source add in the before mentioned yeast and you now have 2 of three feed ingredients. Lipids are missing but you can feed said sugars to algae in the dark and they crank out not only lipids in bulk but protein and carbs too.

In short with readily available HCL in bulk you can turn billions of tonnes of cellulose/hemicellulose into things monogastrics can eat. It expands the food web and completely eliminates the food vs field debate as the fuel is a byproduct of making food.

The SiLeach process uses sulfuric acid and a halide to break silica and oxide bonds forming soluble sulfates that are then precipitated as sulfides every metal element of interest also forms soluble chlorates as well so you can directly swap HCL for SO4. Uranium and thorium both form soluble sulfates and chlorates...think solution mining coal ash piles,phosphate mine tailings, or just drill directly into granite crust frack it and solution mine that with HCL or SO4 there is 40 trillion tonnes of uranium in the upper few KM of crust. You would also get all the aluminum you could ever want along with iron,magnesium and potassium as you crack the silicates into solubles a truly unlimited supply once you start solution mining bulk crust.

This is exciting technology...The membranes pull sodium to one side and chlorine to the other where with the water in the cells forms NaOH and HCL in liquid forms no gasses are released. This is the only grail of the chloroalkaline industry.

You get a double whammy you can reverse the reaction yielding electrons with high efficiency round trip and those electrons are stored at room temp in plastic tanks at high density for days, weeks or months. this alone has value, but you also have high molar concentration of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid in pure forms...Now it gets interesting as you can tap some or all of it off for industrial use. The cost is how much were the table salt ,water and electrons? It would be the cheapest form of both those chemicals using say off peak wind in the middle of the night in Texas when they literally are paying people to take there is such a surplus. Or use nukes like a CANDU that can put 1.8 cent electrons to the plant gates.

Once you have bulk HCL you open up hydrolysis of every cellulose source on earth as well as solution mining everything everywhere nearly every mineral ,ash or metal oxide is soluble in HCL.

NaOH has a neat habit of extracting from plant materials protein and making it into solid form. You shred leaves,stalks and other parts soak it in NaOH then squeeze the liquid out or centrifuge it. Then heat the liquid and all the protein drops out as a solid....should be clear the implications of a process that strips edible proteins from indelible materials.

Spent nuclear fuel can be dissolved in sodium hydroxide, sodium carbonate made from NaOH and limestone or HCL then leach the fissile material out via their corresponding chlorides ,calcinate back to metal oxides and you just made new fuel.

NaOH and HCL are two of the most useful iindustrial chemicals making them at will in bulk using just salt water and electrons from any source plus having the ability to reverse that process is truly a break through.

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0375/10/12/409

Yes ,not just coal ash, you could directional drill the coal seams, produce the coal bed methane first, then pump fluids like SiLeach down those votes and what comes back is loaded with REEs plus other metals like vandinium and it’s chemical sister uranium<<< this contains more energy than is in the coal itself. For giggles once you strip out all the minerals via leaching you then pump down high temperature steam or steam plus H2 gas and gasification kicks off out the return bore comes syngas (CH4,CO,H2,some C2-5s) all of which can be used to drive a turbine or better yet put them across a microchannel iron catalysts and Fat that gas to long chain hydrocarbons aka jet fuel and diesel, crack some with H2 for petrol if you really wanna.

One coal seam ,two directional bores and a craps ton of sellable products.

Shallow coal fires have communication with atmospheric oxygen that’s what is driving the combustion you would need some inert gas injected with sufficient pressure and volume to push the O2 out and also not cause the red hot coal to react with it and form more gasses. Steam would react with hot coal to form CO and H2 gasses unconstrained bad idea since the coal fire has no containment. Nitrogen would work you would get some NOx from hot O2 and N2 reactions but the nitrogen is inert with carbon so as it cools you stop the process. Argon would be better but expensive in the amounts needed. Any of the noble gasses would be ideal and Gucci eexpensive and thus we just let it burn.

There is roughly eight times as much unmineable coal as there is stuff that can be mined. Most is too deep, or under the oceans on the continental shelf or too thin or steeply inclined to support mining. Modern directional drilling can hit a ten foot pay window at any inclination and as far as 35,000 feet total length. With gyros and acoustic transponders you can parallel bores with 100 foot offsets in any vertical or horizontal separation fracs go 1200 feet or more in shales farther in granites the more brittle the rock the more it fractures a convenient aspect.

Underground coal gasification has the potential for huge amounts of gas resources adding in mineral recovery is a no brainer especially uranium. There is more energy in the uranium in a tonne of coal than the coal itself not double it’s up to a thousand or more times more some coals it’s a million times more. The coal is correctly a uranium ore who cares about the coal.

There is more energy in the uranium in a tonne of coal than the coal itself not double it’s up to a thousand or more times more some coals it’s a million times more.

I would say that there is more energy in the Thorium that you mentioned in an earlier post.

There is far more Thorium in the earth’s crust than Uranium.

The US missed the boat when it pursued Uranium reactors rather than Thorium.

And Thorium has far fewer long lived daughter particles in its waste.

Thorium still can’t catch a break in today’s world, except in China that is building a Thorium plant.

Thorium has to be breed to U233 so you have to reprocess; the USA via Carter that traitor gave up that tech.

We are not short on uranium and Pu239 is by far the best fissile isotope it has the highest neutron yield per fission and thus the best breed ratio. People irrationally fear Pu every weapons state did so without reprocessing they went with heavy water tech or graphite and simple chemical leeching. Pu is the right fuel it breeds more than it burns and every higher actinide is also fuel in a fast spectrum or even Epithermal. The absolute worst way is water moderated anything. Salt reactors have hideous corrosion iasues. The USA solved the sodium integrated fast reactor in the 1979s it only outputs fission.products that need 300 years of storage and eats depleted uranium and everything eelse above U235 with gusto. It’s a political issue the tech was solved before most alive today were born. Thorium only makes sense for uranium poor countries llike India the USA has uranium for days already mined so much that we have at least a thousand years worth for fast reactors. Russia is kicking our butts in fast tech they have a BN600 and BN800 running and the BN1200 is expected to be on par with the VVER 1200 in LCOE they just built two VVERs for $1200 Kw capex no one anywhere touches that. They simply are kicking our butts.

Also i would point out that thorium is only more prevalent in superficial deposits and not bulk crustal materials. While compared to known uranium reserves at surface and near surface deposition yes thorium is more concentrate. The earth’s granite crust is 15-35ppm in bulk uranium not thorium. Once you can get at the bulk uranium in granite as the Chinese have shown with carbon fiber electro ddeposition from part per billions even part per trillion liquids. Once you can grabs ppb from seawater or produced brines or even mild acid frac and flow back there is no limit to the uranium you can get trillions of tonnes come into play under anywhere on earth once you hit granite basement. Thorium is to placate the proliferation pearl clutchers ,breed Pu 239 burn it in everything from water reactors to fast reactors stop being a ninny about plutonium it’s man’s greatest achievement.

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