If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list. This new technology may have solved how they did it.
What’s the catch ?
“This process also makes chlorine, which is a useful byproduct.”
The global production of chlorine is 100 million tons. What happens when another 200 million tons hit the market?
“This process also makes chlorine, which is a useful byproduct.
“Is chlorine biodegradable?”
“No, it is not biodegradable”
Are we trading a headache for an upset stomach?
Finally, after more than a century of doing litte more than graduating expatriate California morons, the U. of Oregon has something to be proud of. Will wonders never cease?
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list. Investors want an ironclad may to make some green. 💰💰
China also just announced a new way of making iron.
Exchange student from China?
Sounds a bit like thermite.
CO2 has increased less than.01% since the Industrial Revolution yet the Greens still believe the sky is falling.
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.
Carbon pollution? China produces more than all the world combined. Since China doens’t care we shouldn’t either.
Their goal is world domination not cleaning up the Yellow River or the air above it. Enviro laws are meant to harm us not China.
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.
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