Decarbonization of Iron and Steel Industry via Electrification

Abstract

The iron and steel industry accounts for a large proportion of fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions. In total, 11% of the global carbon emission and 7-9% of the global greenhouse gas emissions is due to iron and steel production, and the average total emission of the steel sector is approximated to be around 3.7 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year for the last six years (Dollinger). Thus, an important project concerning the industry is finding modifications to the ironmaking and steelmaking process, either through alternative energy sources or new technology/process implementations, that would reduce the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere. An avenue that has/is being explored is process electrification, which redistributes the energy source of the process towards electricity as a prevalent source of energy. This has manifested itself into a greater shift towards a pathway called the “secondary steelmaking” or electric arc furnace (EAF) route. The EAF route uses electric arcs and chemical energy from fuel gas burners to heat up furnace charge. However, most of the carbon emissions that come out of the US iron and steelmaking industry are still produced from the “primary steelmaking” route, also known as the blast furnace - basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) route; 85% of steel emissions come from BF-BOF production, while 15% of come from EAF production (Evans). Thus, my independent research throughout the semester was to perform an in-depth literature review on the energy source breakdown of both pathways, and look at how the increase of electricity usage can provide an avenue for decarbonization through a cleaner electric grid. The total energies and flows were then encoded into Python, and different electric grid emission rates were tested to calculate the impact of cleaner grids on the total carbon emissions. Additionally, the distribution of steelmaking using the DRI-EAF pathway and the BF-BOF pathway was altered to look at the resulting benefits of prevalent electricity usage.