Discharge molten iron from a pilot scale facility at the Boston Metal facilities in Woburn, Mass.
Photo good manners Boston Metal
The $1.6 trillion steel industry is the backbone of the modern world. It’s also a significant contributor to wide-ranging warming, representing between 7% and 9% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Steel Comradeship.
That’s why massive global businesses, including international steel giant ArcelorMittal and tech stalwart Microsoft, are supplying in Boston Metal, a company that spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and developed a new way of making clean steel.
“There is no thrift, there is no infrastructure without steel,” Boston Metal CEO Tadeu Carneiro told CNBC in a video call on Wednesday. So when it arises to decarbonizing industry to fight climate change, “it’s a big piece of the puzzle. I don’t think this is obvious to everybody,” Carneiro put about.
In 2013, MIT professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore published a paper in the journal Nature with lab results analysing that it is possible to generate steel without releasing carbon dioxide emissions. The same year they discharged a company, Boston Electrometallurgical Corp., to scale and commercialize that technology.
In 2017, Carneiro joined the company as a CEO. He is a past master of 40 years career in the steel industry, mostly at Brazilian metals giant CBMM. In 2018, Boston Metal bring to an ended its first round of funding, $20 million, in a round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate investing firm bring about by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Gates has for years emphasized the need to think about decarbonizing the manufacturing sector. Transportation set free d grows a whole lot of attention but is responsible for only 16% of global emissions, where manufacturing generates 31%, according to Doorways’ book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”
“Whenever I hear an idea for what we can do to keep global warming in check — whether it’s floor a conference table or a cheeseburger — I always ask this question: ‘What’s your plan for steel?'” Gates set on his own blog in 2019.
On Friday, Boston Metal announced it has raised $120 million Series C round, led by multinational steel ogre ArcelorMittal, with funding from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund as well.
With the funding, Boston Metal require ramp up production of green steel at its pilot facility on Woburn, Massachusetts, and support the construction of its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil, where the concern will manufacture various metals. It plans to begin construction of a demonstration steel plant in 2024 and a commercial valued plant in 2026, Carneiro told CNBC.
The Boston Metal team.
Photo courtesy Boston Metal
The outlay of carbon for ArcelorMittal
For ArcelorMittal, making steel without greenhouse gas emissions is not only a responsibility, but also a business neediness according to Irina Gorbounova, a vice president and the Head of XCarb Innovation Fund at ArcelorMittal.
“Our customers are asking for it, our investors conjecture us to transition and our employees — and our future workforce — want to work for a company that is part of the solution and not part of the world’s weather problem,” Gorbounova told CNBC.
“Increasingly, we are also seeing a cost of carbon,” Gorbounova told CNBC. In Europe, the Emissions Patron System, or ETS, already puts a price on carbon emissions, Gorbounova told CNBC.
“The EU has been at the forefront of climate approach, but it’s reasonable to expect other regions to follow. So, there is a business case for us to decarbonize as well,” Gorbounova told CNBC. “Zero or near-zero carbon emissions grit ones teeth will become a reality. The only question is how quickly we can make that journey happen. If steel companies don’t decarbonize, they desire not stand the test of time.”
Ironically, steel is a primary component ingredient in many of the technologies being constructed to decarbonize, such as impending toward and electric vehicles, Gorbounova said.
Microsoft does not build cars or make steel, but it is trying to meeting its own aggressive climate goals, which include being carbon negative by 2030 and removing all of the company’s historic carbon emissions since the circle was founded in 1975.
Boston Metal CEO Tadeu Carneiro worked in the steel industry for decades before coming on to lead the MIT fabricate out.
Photo courtesy Boston Metal
How does Boston Metal do it?
Traditionally, the first step in steel production is to join iron ore or iron oxide, which is mined out of the ground, with coal in a very hot blast furnace. That convert generates significant CO2 emissions.
Scrap recycling is also a key part of the global industry, accounting for 30% of steel setting (70%in the United States), and has a “much smaller” carbon footprint, Carneiro said.
Boston Metal’s technology, Molten Oxide Electrolysis, back numbers electricity through the iron oxide mixed with what Carneiro calls a “soup of other oxides” to construct iron and oxygen. Oxides are chemical compounds that contain at least one oxygen atom, and Boston’s process take ins common oxides like alumina, silica, calcium and magnesium.
“There’s no carbon involved” in the process of making the iron from this method, Carneiro put about.
That said, heating this soup to the required 1,600 degrees Celsius requires significant electrical vigour — making one million tons of steel per year will require 500 megawatts of baseload clean electricity, or nearly