Presumably the company proposing opening the mine are expecting to get a return on thier investment from the coal they extract (and or convert to coke). They do not have to pay for import alternatives into the UK unless of course it's the Steel Industry opening the mine. Why would they per se be interested in developing new ways of making steel.

It's nonsense to assume that savings in one part of the economy will result in funding some other economically non connected area.

regards Martin

Yes. Iron is a reactive metal and the ore, which comes in many forms, is mainly Oxides and Carbonate, plus many impurities. Steel makers go to considerable trouble to remove unwanted elements, including Silicon, Phosphorous, Manganese, Cobalt, Magnesium, Sulphur, Copper, Nickel and Calcium. However, the main problem is removing Oxygen. This is usually done by reducing the Oxide or Carbonate with Carbon: at high temperatures Oxygen has a higher affinity for Carbon, so Oxygen transfers producing Carbon Monoxide leaving more-or-less pure Iron behind.

Although any Carbon will reduce iron ore, it pays to use high purity coke, which is made from particular types of coal. Early iron-makers used Charcoal made from wood and many miserable failures resulted from using the wron sort of coal.

However, though metallurgical coke is cheap and clean for steel-making, any reducing agent would do, though many of them are toxic and expensive.

Of the likely future methods I guess electrolysis holds most promise. It's already used to make any metal more reactive than Iron such as Aluminium, Magnesium, Sodium, Potassium, Lithium, Scandium and Titanium etc.

About a third of the world's steel is produced electrically by melting scrap. Same job could be done with coke but electricity makes purer steel that's more profitable.

Until recent times Coal was the cheapest way of making Iron and Steel. The cost advantage will fade over the next century or so, but Global Warming is pushing it out too. The world is moving towards 'polluter pays', and burning coal would be expensive if wasn't dumped for free into the atmosphere. Fortunately there are alternatives, though I suspect steel prices will be higher in future.

Most chemical conversions in any direction are possible provided energy is available.

Dave

As I understand it , the Chinese have, or are in the process of buying 'Scunthorpe' . One of the major considerations is access to cheap coal.

"Fine", we said, , " We'll open up a seam in Cumbria".

Now , all that is being thrown away.

And Scunthorpe makes railway lines ………………for HS2 , now a white elephant.

All true, but the conclusion is suspect. The mistake is assuming things are done in a particular for sacrosanct reasons and there no alternatives.

When I was a lad almost all aluminium was made with green renewable energy, mostly hydroelectric. Norway was good – plenty of rain landing on mountains producing more electricity than the population could use. Back then, most natural gas was flared off because it appeared in remote oil fields and was difficult to transport; it needed a network of expensive pipelines to be laid. The early gas supply situation is very like renewables today: a cheap energy source requiring massive investment to use it.

The gas problem was solved by applying fresh engineering. Today, there are many transcontinental natural gas pipelines and tankers ship compressed gas by sea safely. Result, for the moment, gas is the cheapest way of generating electricity we have – cheaper and cleaner than coal, with other advantages.

But gas is only at a temporary advantage. It's a diminishing fossil fuel with supply is reckoned in decades, not centuries. When the sources dry up, all those expensive pipelines become scrap-metal, and gas ceases to be the cheapest way of generating electricity. At some point Aluminium will switch to something else.

JA suggests wind power isn't the answer, but it could be. Not by expecting a lone local wind-farm to power a smelter, but by connecting the smelter to a multinational power grid fed by multiple different sources. As most UK energy is already imported from abroad, this isn't a fundamental change. The difference is in how energy is collected, transported and managed. Yes, technical challenges, but there are plenty of solutions to them.

Think big, think different! Engineers fix problems. We never give up at the first obstacle or assume the only answers are old school.

Dave

Carbon is not a catalyst in the iron making process, it is part of the chemical reaction. It combines with the oxygen from the iron ore leaving behind the molten iron, which can then be made into steel. This means that even if we could find enough coffee grounds, we'd still be producing CO2.

The neat trick would be to find a way to use plastics (hydrocarbons) instead of coal. Use the stuff which cannot be recycled, saves digging up coal, and gives the plastic waste a value so it won't be dumped into the rivers/seas

I saw this a while ago.

**LINK**

..or for really big thinking change the way we construct stuff: .carbon nanotubes, graphene sheets and large diamonds?
Using atmospheric CO2 to get the pure stuff…?

pgk

There is the process of Direct Reduced Iron, where the ore is heated in a reducing atmosphere of Syngas ( a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen ). This still produces carbon dioxide, but if adapted to use only renewable hydrogen, water vapour would result. The only problem then is producing enough green electricity to heat the process and provide the hydrogen.

The way I inderstand it, roughly, is this. At least the

Coke, limestone and ore plus scrap is fed into the top of the blast furnace. The Coke generates the heat for the melt. The limestone dissolves impurities and is skimmed as slag.The carbon dissolves into the iron and acts as a flux. The molten iron is tapped off and fed to a converter (Bessemer maybe) where Oxygen is blown in which burns off the carbon converting what is essentially cast iron into steel.

Thats the basic process, remelting and refining is neccessary for special steels.

So I suppose Metallurgical Coal is used in making bothe Steel and Iron.

I'm fully open to more up to date information so feel free.

regards Martin