Monday, December 04, 2023
Tackling carbon emissions in a steel-hungry world
Note that there is no mention of costs in "alternative" steel making
Steel is a material that will need to be used extensively in lower carbon emission energy technology and infrastructure. In particular, wind generation and hydro require significant amounts of steel in their construction relative to traditional fossil-based power generation.
Steel will be used extensively in lower carbon emission energy technology and infrastructure. iStock
According to global engineering consultancy Hatch, an offshore wind turbine requires 190 tonnes of steel per megawatt of power generation capacity, whereas a gas-fired power facility only requires 35 tonnes per megawatt.
However, the production of steel globally is a significant greenhouse gas emitter as most steel around the world is produced in blast furnaces using iron ore and metallurgical coal. The world is looking at a range of solutions to make steel with a lower carbon emission intensity. Yet high temperature renewable energy sources and new lower carbon emission chemistries for steelmaking are nascent and need further R&D and investment at present, so there’s no silver bullet yet to success.
Moreover, harsher weather projected to be a part of climate change would put more wear and tear on infrastructure, which could mean that it will need to be repaired or replaced more often creating more demand for steel.
According to the recent The brown to green transition - Unleashing the energy transition paper released by BlackRock, one of the world’s leading providers of investment, advisory and risk management services, with insight and analysis from BHP, this need for more steel will see global demand rise to the equivalent of adding another South Korea to global markets by 2050.
And with steel set to continue playing a major role in the world’s so-called “brown to green” transition (which is the transition from an energy system that’s carbon-intensive today to a world of deep electrification backed by a range of renewable, low or zero carbon-emission energy sources), BHP is working hard right now to support industry efforts to find ways to progressively decarbonise the steelmaking sector.
For example, earlier this year BHP and Hatch signed an agreement to design an electric smelting furnace (ESF) pilot plant. The facility will aim to demonstrate a pathway to lower carbon dioxide (CO2) intensity in steel production using iron ore from BHP’s Pilbara mines.
The small-scale demonstration plant would be used to collaborate with steel producers and technology providers to generate and share learnings with the aim of accelerating scale up of ESF plant designs.
The pilot facility would be intended to test and optimise production of iron from the ESF, a new type of furnace that is being developed by leading steel producers and technology companies targeting low CO2 emission-intensity steel. The ESF is capable of producing steel from iron ore using renewable electricity and hydrogen replacing metallurgical coal, when combined with a direct reduced iron (DRI) step.
Current estimates show that reductions of more than 80 per cent in CO2 emission intensity are potentially achievable processing Pilbara iron ore through a DRI-ESF pathway, compared with the current industry average for the conventional blast furnace steelmaking route.
BHP and Hatch are assessing several locations in Australia for the proposed facility based on supporting infrastructure, technology skills and the availability of local partnerships to build and operate the facility.
According to BHP’s chief commercial officer Vandita Pant, the company sees the ESF process as a critical breakthrough in significantly reducing the carbon emissions intensity of steel production and “one that provides an opportunity for iron ore from our Pilbara mines”.
“The steel industry has identified the ESF as a viable option to use a wider range of raw materials, and steel companies globally are looking to build commercial-scale ESF plants as part of their CO2 emission reduction roadmaps,” said Pant.
Hatch’s managing director for bulk metals, Joe Petrolito, said the project marks a significant milestone in the pursuit of decarbonisation within a challenging sector that underpins global infrastructure and progress.
Additionally, BHP is collaborating with ArcelorMittal, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering (MHIENG) as well as Mitsubishi Development Pty Ltd on a multi-year trial of MHIENG’s carbon capture technology.
The agreement involves a trial at ArcelorMittal’s steel plant in Gent, Belgium and another site in North America, and brings together the expertise of the various partners in identifying ways to enhance carbon capture and utilisation and/or storage (CCUS) technologies in the steelmaking industry.
The steel industry is estimated to account for around 7-9 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and CCUS has the potential to be a key technology for reducing emissions from existing global blast furnaces, which are anticipated to remain a significant portion of steel production over coming decades.
The International Energy Agency estimates CCUS technology needs to apply to more than 53 per cent of primary steel production by 2050 under its Net Zero Emissions scenario.
At present, there are no full scale operational CCUS facilities in blast furnace steelmaking operations, with only a limited number of small capacity carbon capture or utilisation pilots underway or in the planning phases globally. However, late last year ArcelorMittal Gent opened its Steelanol project, a scale demonstration plant that will capture carbon-rich process gases from the blast furnace and convert them into ethanol.
“There is currently no certain or single pathway to net zero for steelmaking,” BHP’s Pant said.
“CCUS is one of the key abatement technologies with potential to support development of some of those pathways, so working with industry leaders like ArcelorMittal, Mitsubishi Development and MHIENG, we hope to arrive at scalable solutions more quickly to help reduce carbon emissions in steelmaking.”
“Steel is a critical product for the world to develop and decarbonise, and we must work hard, together, to enable lower GHG emissions steel, support the reduction of carbon intensity in the blast furnace and test new technologies for steel production.”
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Woke ESG assets have collapsed by $5 trillion in just two years
Global investments in trendy sustainability assets shrank by nearly $5 trillion over two years, researchers say, as US and other financiers soured on investments seen as risky and opaque.
In its biannual assessment, the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA) said on Wednesday that investors had $30.3 trillion in sustainable assets in 2022, down from $35.3 trillion in 2020.
In the US, where Republicans have railed against ESG funds, which push for environmental, social, and governance benefits, such assets plunged from more than $17 trillion to just $8.4 trillion over the same period.
The drop in part reflected changes in how ESG assets were measured and classified.
Will Hild, executive director of Consumers' Research, a non-profit, called the drop-off 'startling.'
'The market for ESG bonds decreased significantly in the past two years as state leaders from across the country have fought back against the injection of woke politics into the bond market,' he told DailyMail.com.
The strategy gets more controversial when it guides funding to firms promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) schemes, which irk conservatives, who say they help women and minorities by sidelining white men.
This has spawned a fractious debate about whether efforts to make society fairer and cut carbon emissions are in the strategic interest for investors, by mitigating the risks of climate chaos and social disorder.
ESG investing boomed in the pandemic, when lockdowns caused energy prices to fall and buoyed portfolios that shunned fossil fuels.
Those same strategies have floundered as lockdowns ended and economic activity resumed.
Questions about the future of sustainable finance persist in the US as lawmakers from more than a dozen states, from Florida to Utah, try to fight the incorporation of ESG principles into business and investing. […]
A recent Bloomberg survey showed that investors expect the downturn to continue into 2024, with the negative sentiment extending to Tesla and other electric carmakers.
'Sustainable bonds make for bad investments when they actually meet the radical left's definition of sustainable, and when they don't, Wall Street greenwashes them to justify the higher fees they charge for selling them,' added Hild.
'It's a scam on investors either way.'
GSIA researchers said the trend was downward — the proportion of sustainable assets is shrinking by 5 percent each year, as regulators ratchet up disclosure requirements and the definition of ESG assets are tightened.
'The industry is maturing,' James Alexander, the chairman of GSIA, told reporters.
'We're thinking more carefully about how do we avoid inadvertently perhaps greenwashing through the actions that we take.'
New regulations across jurisdictions is forcing asset managers to justify ESG claims that previously went unchecked, researchers said in their report.
There's a 'need for clearer definitions and a more shared understanding around what makes a sustainable asset 'sustainable,' said the 47-page document.
Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, which manages 'non-woke' funds, said the ESG sector was a covert vehicle for liberal politics and was ripe for a reckoning.
'Companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders and should not be trying to do things that they can't get done at the ballot box,' Tuttle told DailyMail.com.
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‘Carbon offsets are not credible’: the travel boss exposing the truth about the industry’s sustainability
Having dodged corporate jobs to find a way to keep travelling, Darrell Wade was, as he tells it, pretty pleased with life as his business took off. But the climate crisis wasn’t yet on his radar.
The Australian entrepreneur was on holiday in Botswana in 2005, fresh from winning an award for responsible travel, when he read The Weather Makers – a book by scientist Tim Flannery spelling out the causes and consequences of global heating. “I was feeling chuffed, and then I read that book. And I thought, holy shit, we’re a disaster – we’re doing the wrong thing.”
The co-founder and chair of Intrepid Travel – the world’s largest travel company to be accredited as a B Corporation for its social and environmental performance – Wade appears genial and self-deprecating, frequently laughing, but not pulling punches. Minutes earlier, he had told delegates attending the Abta convention, the UK travel industry’s annual get-together, that their record on climate was a clear “fail”, sparking a brief outbreak of self-flagellation in the conference hall in Bodrum, Turkey.
After spending years as an advocate for sustainability standards within the industry, Wade told them, he had found one in three travel firms were still “actively hostile” to policies aimed at reducing travel’s carbon footprint. Another third were ambivalent – and the better ones, well, they weren’t doing enough.
That includes his own company, he admits – even though Intrepid’s adventure travel holidays have been audited as climate neutral since 2010. “So in theory, we’re doing our bit, but, you know, the reality is, we weren’t doing enough.”
That carbon audit has, as Wade acknowledges, one very big caveat: Intrepid does not sell the flights that take its customers, mainly from the UK, US and Australia, to the starting point of their low-impact, sustainable tours. Is that not a bit like Heathrow proudly claiming to be net zero, if it wasn’t for all the pesky planes? “That’s right, it’s very similar,” he says. “Consumers want to take a holiday. Let’s say half of those holidays are taken with aviation – we’ve got to fix our industry.”
He believes there is a role for offsetting and, eventually, sustainable aviation fuels, when (or if) they are made on a large scale from green hydrogen. But, he says, travel has to move from relying on offsets to “definitely now reducing emissions per person per day”. “Offsets have to be credible,” he says. “And at the moment, they’re not. That’s the reality.”
There are good business incentives to go greener, Wade points out, not least cost savings in fuel bills. And despite there being no imminent answer to travel’s environmental footprint, he maintains: “You’ve just got to hold people’s feet to the fire, talk about it, [say] that hey, we do have a problem. And all the rhetoric in the world is not going to solve this problem. You need taxation, you need regulation, you need media pressure – you need litigation as a last resort.”
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Climate reparations are an awful idea
There is a word that we are going to hear once COP28 gets underway in Dubai later this week: ‘reparations’. While US climate envoy John Kerry has tried to rule out any US agreement to pay reparations to countries affected by what he himself might claim were ‘climate-related disasters’, many developing countries are determined to put compensation top of the agenda, and push it far further than the agreement last year at COP27 to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund whereby developed nations hand out money to poor ones deemed to be affected by climate change.
The demands for reparations will be helped along the way by western academics and pressure groups. A paper published by a pair of British environmentalists in the journal Nature Sustainability earlier this year claimed that Britain owed £6.2 trillion in ‘compensation for atmospheric appropriation’ as a result of historic emissions. But that was based only on UK-based emissions. Now, the website Carbon Brief has found a new way of counting Britain’s historic carbon emissions, so that we are responsible for greenhouse gases in our colonies, too (though they don’t call for reparations) – including every puff of carbon dioxide spewed out in India between 1850 and 1947. That nearly doubles our historic emissions and moves us up to fourth in the table of the world’s biggest emitters, behind the US, China and Russia. Climate reparations, of course, will be on top of the £18 trillion we apparently owe in slavery reparations, as calculated by a UN judge Patrick Robinson last year.
It would be tempting to dismiss climate reparations as a rather silly parlour game carried out by left-wing academics. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that if anyone is expecting co-operation from developing countries on cutting carbon emissions, it is going to be accompanied by ever-more fanciful demands for handouts. And, true, if you are the president of a developing country being told by western governments that you mustn’t industrialise if it means relying on cheap and reliable coal power, why wouldn’t you want to screw an awful lot of money out of the governments telling you this?
The West has brought these demands for climate reparations on itself, through catastrophising the climate. Every time a UK government minister or official uses the word ‘crisis’, tells us we have ‘only five years to save the planet’, or lazily tries to blame every storm on climate change, they stoke the boilers of the reparations industry.
The West has brought these demands for climate reparations on itself
As I wrote here a year ago, John Kerry is one of the biggest offenders in this, trying to claim that 10 million people a year are being killed by excessive heat caused by climate change, which seems to have been based on a misreading of a paper that claimed 5 million a year die of extreme temperatures, 90 per cent of them from the cold. Climate change has long since shifted from reasoned debate into a crude morality tale of goodies and baddies, perpetrators and victims. Never mind that some of the countries backing the demands for reparations – such as China and India – are far bigger present-day emitters of carbon dioxide. Never mind that the fossil fuels emitted in UK colonies during the Empire helped lift those countries from pre-industrial poverty, extending life expectancy in India from around 25 in 1850 to 70 now. Britain must be put on trial for the industrial revolution.
Never mind, either, that the nation-to-nation transfers which the climate reparations movement demands make no sense from an ethical perspective – it would mean, for example, a transfer of cash from poor black Britons to wealthy tax exiles living in the Caribbean. The reparations demands are going to carry on growing so long as we try to force carbon reduction targets onto the developing world. The claimants, I fear, are not going to be satisfied with a few million to clear up after storms.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/climate-reparations-are-an-awful-idea/ ?
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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