Comment by tuatoru
1 day ago
This is reducing iron ore to iron metal. It's making the main input feedstock for all kinds of steels. So yeah, it might be viable as the feedstock for boutique steelmakers that want to claim to be green. But it's going to have to work eventually if we want to get to net zero, or anywhere close.
Iron refining is done with coke, coal, and limestone, calcium carbonate. It produces more carbon than the second step, making steel from the iron metal.
Yeah - it's far more complex, and iron != steel.
(The article talks almost entirely about steel (vs. iron), but is too detail-fuzzed to trust that.)
I made very charitable assumption from this:
> Ultimately, the company hopes to license its technology to steelmakers.
Actual steelmakers know all the myriad costs and details and steps required to make steel - and would probably prefer that any radical new process replace as many of those step and details as possible, at an economic cost.