How easily they were fooled

 Vincent J. Curtis

2 Feb 23

RE: Dofasco aims to build pipeline to service ‘green steel’ project.  The Hamilton Spectator 2 Feb 23.

Throw the word green around, and the gullible sit up.  But you can’t fool Mother Nature, or the thermodynamicists responsible for building Dofasco’s ‘green’ iron-making process.  Dofasco says it’ll need half a billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to run the new, ‘green’ iron-making process.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates that this amounts to 256,000 metric tonnes of carbon, producing just under a million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.  Switching from one fossil fuel, coal, to another, natural gas, reduces emissions to the extent that hydrogen is able to participate in reducing iron oxide to metallic iron, but carbon still does the bulk of the work.  The story doesn’t say how much coal Dofasco expects to discontinue using.

This ‘green’ iron and ‘green’ steelmaking is a farcical boondoggle.  It’s all about looking good and pretending to be good.  It can’t produce steel in the quantity and at the low cost of the blast furnace – BOF method.  The Chinese and the Indians don’t care about climate and making steel the old way, are going to eat the ‘green’ steelmakers’ lunch.

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1 cubic meter of natural gas contains 0.512 kg of C.  500 x .512 = 256.  times 1,000,000/1000 kg per metric tonne.