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Electric Steel Furnaces | Earth Wise

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Steel was first made thousands of years ago.  The discovery that heating up iron ore in a hot enough charcoal fire could purify the iron into a strong and valuable material was the start of the Iron Age.  In many ways, things have changed very little since then.

Global iron and steel production accounts for 7% of society’s carbon emissions. Making steel generally involves burning coal in a blast furnace to produce the very high temperatures required to turn iron into steel.  The coal is used both as a feedstock and as a fuel.  Steel is made from iron and a substance called coke, which is basically coal that has been carbonized at high temperatures.  Coal itself is burned to provide the high temperatures needed.

A new analysis from the Global Energy Monitor think tank shows that the global steel industry is slowly embracing electric-arc furnaces to produce the necessary heat, which is a cleaner alternative.  The analysis found that 43% of forthcoming steelmaking capacity will rely on electric-arc furnaces, up from 33% last year.

According to the study, the shift to cleaner steel is not happening fast enough.  To meet the emissions reductions goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, electric-arc furnaces must account for 53% of global steelmaking capacity by 2050.  Based on the current plans, those furnaces would only account for 32% of total capacity by that year.

In order to meet these goals, the steel industry will need to retire or cancel about 381 million tons of coal-based manufacturing capacity and add 670 million tons of electric-arc furnace capacity. 

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Steel Industry Pivoting to Electric Furnaces, Analysis Shows

Photo, posted March 3, 2012, courtesy of Jeronimo Nisa via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Fuel From Coffee Grounds | Earth Wise

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The world drinks a lot of coffee.  Americans alone consume 400 million cups a day.  Each cup of coffee results in about half an ounce of coffee grounds.  Adding that up, this country produces over 6,000 tons of coffee grounds each day.  While coffee grounds are not particularly harmful, that is an awful lot of waste that mostly ends up in landfills or is incinerated.

Researchers at Aston University in the UK have developed a method of producing high-quality biodiesel fuel from coffee grounds.  Their study was published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

The technique consists of growing a particular species of microalgae (Chlorella vulgaris) directly on spent coffee grounds.  The coffee grounds provide both the nutrients for the microalgae and a structure upon which it can grow.   Exposing the algae to light for 20 hours a day and dark for just four hours a day produced the best quality biodiesel.

Microalgae is well-known as a feedstock for biodiesel production.  Previously, it has been grown on materials like polyurethane foam or nylon which don’t provide any nutrients.   Using the coffee grounds as the substrate for growth means that no external nutrients are needed.

The resultant enhanced biodiesel produces minimal emissions and good engine performance and meets both US and European specifications.  This feedstock for producing biodiesel is ideal since it doesn’t require any competition with food crops and instead makes use of a widely available waste product.  The hope is that it may reduce the cutting down of palm trees to extract oil for biofuel.  In southeast Asia, this has been a major source of deforestation and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

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Aston University researchers ‘feed’ leftover coffee grounds to microalgae to produce low emission biodiesel

Photo, posted October 13, 2007, courtesy of David Joyce via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

A Better Way To Recycle Plastics | Earth Wise

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The global accumulation of plastic waste is an ever-growing problem.  At least five billion tons of the stuff has accumulated on land and sea and is even showing up in the bodies of animals and humans.  Recycling plastic instead of making even more of it seems like an essential thing to do but it has proven to be extremely challenging.

The main problem is that plastics come in many different varieties and the ways of breaking them down into a form that can be reused are very specific to each type of plastic.  Sorting plastic waste by plastic type is extremely impractical at large scale.  Certainly, most consumers can’t do it themselves.  As a result, most plastic gathered in recycling programs ends up in landfills.

New research at MIT has developed a chemical process using a catalyst based on cobalt that is very effective at breaking down a variety of plastics, including polyethylene and polypropylene, which are the two most widely produced plastics.   The MIT process breaks plastics down into propane.  Propane can be used as a fuel or as a feedstock for making many different products, including new plastics.

Plastics are hard to recycle because their long-chain molecules are very stable and difficult to break apart.  Most chemical methods for breaking their chemical bonds produce a random mix of different molecules which would somehow have to be sorted out in order to be useful for anything.

The new process uses a catalyst called a zeolite that contains cobalt nanoparticles.  The catalyst selectively breaks down various plastic polymer molecules and turns more than 80% of them into propane.

The researchers are still studying the economics and logistics of the method, but it looks quite promising.

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New process could enable more efficient plastics recycling

Photo, posted April 25, 2016, courtesy of NOAA Coral Reef Ecosystem Program via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Getting Value From Plastic Waste | Earth Wise

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To date, the world has produced more than five billion tons of plastic and is making more all the time.  Based on the way things are currently done, most of that will end up in landfills or in the natural environment.  By 2050, the amount of plastic is expected to exceed 13 billion tons.   This is one of the world’s biggest environmental problems.

Recently, an international collaboration by universities and institutions in the UK, China, and Saudi Arabia has developed a method of converting plastic waste into hydrogen gas and high-value solid carbon.

The technique was achieved with a new type of catalysis that uses microwaves to activate catalyst particles that effectively strip hydrogen from plastic polymers.  The work was recently published in the journal Nature Catalysis and details how the researchers mixed mechanically pulverized plastic particles with a microwave-susceptor catalyst of iron oxide and aluminum oxide.  That mixture was then subjected to microwave treatment and yielded a large volume of hydrogen gas and a residue of carbonaceous material, most of which was identified as carbon nanotubes.

The process is more rapid than most methods for dealing with plastic waste and can extract over 97% of the hydrogen in plastic without producing any carbon dioxide emissions. 

The new method represents an attractive potential solution to the problem of plastic waste.  Instead of polluting the planet, plastics could become a valuable feedstock for producing clean hydrogen fuel as well as valuable carbon materials.  Proponents of the so-called hydrogen economy have continued to seek a green and economical way to produce hydrogen.  This new work might be just what they are looking for.

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Turning plastic waste into hydrogen and high-value carbons

Photo, posted April 21, 2007, courtesy of Redwin Law via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Plants Paying For Biofuels | Earth Wise

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Biofuels are an important element in broader strategies to replace petroleum in transportation fuels like gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.  The idea is that biofuels recycle carbon by getting it from growing plants rather than from fossil sources.  The biggest problem with biofuels is that they cost more than conventional petroleum fuels, so there is economic incentive to keep burning the fossil fuels.

One strategy to make biofuels cost competitive is to have the plants provide additional economic benefits beyond being a feedstock for fuel.  This in principle can be done by engineering plants to produce valuable chemical compounds, or bioproducts, as they grow.  Bioproducts include such things as flavoring agents and fragrances as well as biodegradable plastic.  These bioproducts can be extracted from the plants and then the remaining plant material can be converted to fuel. 

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently published a study to determine what quantities of bioproducts plants need to produce to result in cost-effective biofuel production.

The study looked at a compound called limonene, which is used for flavoring and fragrance.  They calculated that if this compound was accumulated at 0.6% of the biomass dry weight, it would offer net economic benefits to biorefineries.  This corresponds to recovering 130 pounds of limonene from 10 tons of sorghum on an acre of land.

Such quantities are completely practical but, on the other hand, none of these substances are needed in huge quantities. Just six refineries could supply the world with limonene.  So, fuel crops would need to be engineered to produce a broad range of bioproducts to enable a viable cost-effective biofuel industry.

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Making Biofuels Cheaper by Putting Plants to Work

Photo, posted September 28, 2019, courtesy of Michele Dorsey Walfred via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

More Plastic Pollution On The Way | Earth Wise

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Public concern about plastic pollution has been rising.  More and more of us are choosing reusable grocery bags, metal straws, and reusable water bottles.  We shake our heads at images of immense plastic garbage patches in the ocean. We see reports of birds with 15% of their body weight in plastic.

While all of this is going on, companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up production of plastic – which is mostly made from oil, gas, and their byproducts.  They are doing this as a hedge against the growing possibility that the global response to climate change will reduce demand for their fuels.  Plastics are part of the category called petrochemicals, which currently account for 14% of oil use.  Petrochemicals are expected to drive half of oil demand growth over the next 30 years.

The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.  The fracking boom in the United States has turned this country into a big growth area for plastic production.  Natural gas prices are low which is hurting profits at fracking operations.  But fracking also unearths ethane, which is a feedstock for plastic production.  So plastic is becoming a kind of subsidy for fracking.

The American petroleum industry’s hub has historically been the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana as well as a stretch along the lower Mississippi River.  There is a slew of new projects there.  The industry is also seeking to create a new plastics corridor in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, where fracking wells are rich in ethane.

Society in general may be increasingly concerned about the impact of things like carbon emissions and plastic pollution, but the fossil fuel industry continues to focus entirely on growth and profits.

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The Plastics Pipeline: A Surge of New Production Is on the Way

Photo, posted January 10, 2015 , courtesy of Daniel Orth via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Reducing Emissions From Natural Gas Processing

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Qatar, a small country in the Middle East with a population of about 2.5 million has the highest per capita income of any country in the world.  This is largely a result of being one of the world’s top producers of natural gas.  The upshot of that is that the tiny country has the dubious honor of being the world’s leading emitter of CO2 per capita.

Texas A&M University has a campus in Qatar and researchers there in collaboration with colleagues at the main campus in College Station, Texas have developed a new reactor technology that can help Qatar process its wealth of natural gas while reducing the country’s carbon footprint.

The technology processes natural gas and captured CO2 to produce both syngas – which is a valuable precursor for many products – and high-quality carbon nanotubes, all without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.

Natural gas reforming is a process by which syngas – a feedstock for liquid hydrocarbons and ultraclean fuels- is produced.  The process requires lots of heat and emits CO2.  The new technology adds a novel CARGEN (or CARbon GENerator) reactor that advances the natural gas reforming process and includes a catalyst that captures the CO2 emissions and produces nanotubes.  The reactor can be driven by either electric or solar power, eliminating the need to burn fuel that ordinarily results in more carbon emissions.

The result is that Qatar’s CO2 emissions would be converted into two products that are important to its economy.  In particular, carbon nanotubes are very expensive and extremely versatile, and can be used to manufacture products such as computers and other high-quality materials.

The next step for the researchers is to partner with industry collaborators to further scale up the technology.

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Qatar Researchers Develop Natural Gas Processing Technology That Could Reduce Qatar’s Carbon Footprint

Photo, posted September 30, 2012, courtesy of Jimmy Baikovicius via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

WAMC Northeast Public Radio

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