‘Zero carbon steel’

[Edward CrouchParticipant @edwardcrouch25793]

Evening all. I really like my wood burning stove. It's lovely. I could do with getting it to sit further out in the room perhaps, so I've looked at buying an offset pipe.

Now, all the pipes I see are proudly made of laser welded 'zero carbon steel'.

Whilst I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool metallurgist, I'm slowly becoming one and I hang around with people with PhDs in metallurgy. We don't know about this zero carbon steel.

What on earth is zero carbon steel, other than iron?

Thank you…!

Ed.

[Edward CrouchParticipant @edwardcrouch25793]

[Nick_GParticipant @nick_g]

.

Could it be that it's to keep the green brigade happy by 'stating' that the metal or the weld has been produced without carbon emissions.?

Whether it has or not is of course a different story.!

 

Nick

Edit :- But just thinking about it. Someone who has a log burning stove will not give a rats testicles about chucking carbon into the atmosphere. 

Edited By Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:31:38

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

<siri> I found this on the web </siri>

http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/innovation/building-construction/sweden-aims-for-first-place-in-carbon-free-steel-race/81456

[Roderick JenkinsParticipant @roderickjenkins93242]

304 stainless has less than 0.08% C. 304L has even less **LINK**

Perhaps this is close enough to zero for the advertisers.

Cheers,

Rod

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

Just a "dodge the Enviro-Nazis" label.

Refers to how the steel is produced. For example an electric arc furnace fed with scrap steel is, according to industry definitions, zero carbon because no carbon dioxide is directly produced and released during the steel making process. Carbon dioxide released by the generating plant supplying the electric arc furnace doesn't count.

Clive.

[Edward CrouchParticipant @edwardcrouch25793]

I don't *think* the pipes are Stainless.

Maybe they are? The existing one is covered in Matt black enamel, I guess to keep the flue gases nice and hot (buoyant).

So they're either Stainless or there's some marketing/environmentalism going on…

Similar to the nitro-cellulose thinners I saw for sale the other day. Made me look twice and then google it I must admit!

[MadMikeParticipant @madmike]

Zero carbon steel? A lot of tosh and "green speak". In very simple terms steel is made by adding CARBON, normally between 0.002% and 2.1%, in the blast furnace. Other materials are added to produce specific grades of steel of course.

Lots of talk about zero carbon during the production process, but Zero, Carbon and Steel in the same sentence is nonsense.

[MWParticipant @mw27036]

I can't really see what's wrong with it.

If they've found a way to reach the same product but don't have to dump the waste into the air then good for them.

Michael W

[richardandtracyParticipant @richardandtracy]

Green-wash marketing new-speak.

If the steel has been made using only renewables, then that is good, but wrapping it up in a 'zero carbon' label indicates the fool creating the marketing lines is as technically ignorant and incompetent as most such people. They should at least be aware of how much they are ignorant of, as opposed to the usual 'go ahead anyway'.

Regards

Richard.

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

Steel contains carbon. There is no doubt about that – simply by definition! So this carbon they are referring to has nothing to do with the chemical composition of steel. Make no mistake about that!

Pig iron contains far more carbon, which is removed (to the atmosphere) to convert the basic iron production into steel. Only a few years past, the scrap metal merchants were offering around £150 for every ton of scrap iron/sreel and then sending it all the way tonChina for processing into our new goods.

Now, with scrap steel at around £35/tonne (at the scrappy), recycling is clearly far cheaper. It still needs energy for remelting, but some of that energy is now from renewable sources, so cleaner.

This 'zero carbon' steel is simply referring to melting scrap with either all fossil-free electricity and comparing it with other structural building materials (mainly concrete). That is all. Marketing spin, nothing more.

[Nick_GParticipant @nick_g]

.

Because the Chinese are really, really concerned about renewable energy at chucking muck into the air ain't they.?

Can the retailers of this so called zero carbon steel provide documentation (as required by many) back to original source.?

Nick

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Clive Foster on 15/04/2017 22:39:51:

Just a "dodge the Enviro-Nazis" label.

Refers to how the steel is produced. For example an electric arc furnace fed with scrap steel is, according to industry definitions, zero carbon because no carbon dioxide is directly produced and released during the steel making process. Carbon dioxide released by the generating plant supplying the electric arc furnace doesn't count.

If you see the link I posted, it does. Sweden's electricty is nearly all hydro, wind or nuclear.

Neil

[HopperParticipant @hopper]

I had a salesman the other week at the medical equipment supply store tell me that their premium brand bath chairs were made from low carbon steel so would not rust in the shower. The cheaper ones his competitors sell are made from recycled steel that is dirty and contains lots of carbon so you end up with "high-carbon steel" that rusts and falls apart more easily than the better quality low carbon steel.

Well, that's what he told me.

[Chris Evans 6Participant @chrisevans6]

I would not be without my woodstove and have no hangups about it's construction. Just buy the pipe and move it.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:29:18:Edit :- But just thinking about it. Someone who has a log burning stove will not give a rats testicles about chucking carbon into the atmosphere.

Edited By Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:31:38

Burning wood produces no more carbon emission than growing the trees absorbs.

Russell

[vintagengineerParticipant @vintagengineer]

Recycled steel is total crap. When they scrap cars they go into a giant shredder and all types of steel is mixed together. So you get high carbon steel mixed with mild steel and this gets made into black steel which is only good for non structural work!

Engineering and structural steel beams are always made from new steel. Some modern cars are now made from boron steel!

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by Russell Eberhardt on 16/04/2017 10:15:14:

Posted by Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:29:18:Edit :- But just thinking about it. Someone who has a log burning stove will not give a rats testicles about chucking carbon into the atmosphere.

Edited By Nick_G on 15/04/2017 22:31:38

Burning wood produces no more carbon emission than growing the trees absorbs.

Russell

.

Interesting point, Russell

… but I would mention that the cycle-times differ by several orders of magnitude:

This may [or may not] be significant; depending on how the atmosphere responds

MichaelG.

[John DurrantParticipant @johndurrant47282]

Burning wood produces no more carbon emission than growing the trees absorbs.

Russell

It takes a tree a hundred years to collect that carbon from the atmosphere. Burning it releases that carbon in less than an hour.

[Roderick JenkinsParticipant @roderickjenkins93242]

Not to mention the air pollution from wood burning **LINK**

It's complicated

Rod

[old AlParticipant @oldal]

My wife keeps releasing large amounts of methane. Should i worry that i will have to replace her with a newer, more enviromentally friendly model

[MWParticipant @mw27036]

Nothing like a good doing-down on here I suppose.

So we'd rather deplete every natural source and poison the air than look into ways of protecting what we have?

I am by no means an environmentalist, but I think getting negative about real progress in reducing carbon input isn't very helpful.

Michael W

 

 

Edited By Michael-w on 16/04/2017 12:34:59

[vintagengineerParticipant @vintagengineer]

The quickest way to stop carbon emissions is to stop making new cars and all the other consumer crap people buy. If things were made to be repaired and to last a lifetime , carbon emission production would be slashed. Some of the most polluting cars being sold as good for environment are all the electric powered cars! The amount of pollution generated by mining the lithium negates any saving by the fools who drive the cars!

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by vintagengineer on 16/04/2017 10:38:19:

Recycled steel is total crap. When they scrap cars they go into a giant shredder and all types of steel is mixed together. So you get high carbon steel mixed with mild steel and this gets made into black steel which is only good for non structural work!

Engineering and structural steel beams are always made from new steel. Some modern cars are now made from boron steel!

Ummm, that's not my understanding of modern steel-making at all. Much has changed since 1980. True that a shredded car contains many impurities. False, that no effort is made to remove impurities before they go into the furnace. Also misleading is the idea that steel-making consists of melting down a random mix of scrap and flogging it off as black steel. Actually, the charge contains minerals added specifically to react with unwanted elements. Oxygen is injected into the molten mix, and a series of carefully managed chemical reactions take place, producing steel to a specification. The impurities end up in the slag and exhaust gases, and may be valuable enough for further recovery. No doubt processes go wrong, but not as often as some imagine.

Now that 'steel to a specification' may not be what you wanted or thought you were buying. For example unwanted Boron in Steel seems more to do with tax dodging than faulty production methods. Steel with Boron in it isn't classified as being "Mild Steel", and this enables it to avoid tariffs. Having avoided tax somewhere in the world, it reappears on the market. Like horse-meat in your Lasagne.

Poor quality steel was much more likely in the past. For example, Nitrides are a problem in Mild Steel made by the original Bessemer Process. The Siemens Process avoided that particular problem, but was much more expensive. Producing 'quality steel' was skilled work. These days, most steel is made using much improved technology, heavily automated and efficient.

Where you might get 'random metal', is from the sort of Foundry that makes cast iron street furniture from scrap. That kind of rough work doesn't call for much science.

Dave

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

It takes a tree a hundred years to collect that carbon from the atmosphere.

I think exotic hardwoods from old forests is being muddled with fast growing softwoods which mature in a couple of decades or so. The resultant timber is used for things other than burning and the bits that do get burned are the offcuts, sawdust etc. Of course some trees are culled and sent for burning as thinnings within that maturation period.

Other coppicing sources are harvested every two, three or four years on a cyclic basis for wood pellet production or other forms for energy release. So the notion of 300 years to replace is, frankly, rubbish. Apart from cutting down our rainforests for exotic hardwoods, instead of making most timber products from more sustainable sourC

es.

Other problems, like clearing rainforests for plantations is on a similar scale, as I see it. Also I don't particularly like to see evergreen forests replacing our native deciduous ones, but that is another matter.

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