Part 3: Resisting Renewables — Hydrogen hubs the key to unlocking renewable steel
As peak oil thinkers such as John Michael Greer reveal, untangling the now globalised web of fossil fuel dependency is becoming an increasingly difficult task and necessitates examining every aspect of modern life with an increasingly critical lens. To take meaningful action towards forging a more sustainable world, action on climate change must be considered a reformation on the largest of scales rather than simple innovation in relation to a single industry. In the previous sections of this series, we dealt with the renewable scepticism of Ed Ireland in relation to sustainable mining, recycling and energy storage as this series works towards a comprehensive account of the global decarbonisation process. With this goal in mind, part three of this article series will address Ireland’s claims about key building materials necessary for renewable technology.
“Wind and solar facilities currently require massive quantities of steel and concrete, both of which require oil and natural gas in their manufacturing processes.”
As argued in previous parts of this series, addressing the environmental sustainability of renewable technology requires that its basic components can be produced without damaging the environment. If a solar panel or a wind turbine is produced by processes that rely on fossil fuels, it cannot be considered a truly renewable energy source.¹
Decarbonising steel production remains one of the most crucial but difficult challenges when it comes to tackling emissions. Steel is currently responsible for between 7 and 9% of global fossil fuel emissions and its share will only grow as other industries decarbonise.² Unfortunately for the climate however, it is also one of the most popular building materials on earth and is currently a crucial material for wind turbines and solar panels.
To make steel production more environmentally friendly, the introduction of hydrogen as an alternative reducing agent to coking coal offers policymakers a path to making steel a fossil-free resource. As Mårten Görnerup, the CEO of Hybrit says, their new pilot steel production plant will only emit water vapour as a result of its switch to a hydrogen-based reducing agent.³ If these hydrogen solutions could be applied successfully throughout the steel industry, this would be a massive step towards solving the pollution issues of this vital industry.
Standing in the way of clean steel production is the fact that this technology is unlikely to be fully operational in non-pilot facilities until 2040. With the decarbonisation of steel still being at least 20 years away, Ed Ireland’s concerns are fair, as global temperatures creep higher and higher each year. As Görnerup emphasises, even a 2040 prediction still relies on adequate government support for this to become a reality.⁴
At the moment the Morrison and Palaszczuk governments have both developed hydrogen plans which seek to support a sustainable and internationally competitive hydrogen industry in Australia. Key to the Australian approach to developing a hydrogen industry will be the promotion of high-demand hydrogen hub locations which “will make the development of infrastructure more cost-effective, promote efficiencies from economies of scale, foster innovation, and promote synergies from sector coupling”.⁵ Behind the scenes, governments are also working on issues with hydrogen storage, transportation, and market regulation to ensure that the industry is placed in a favourable position for investors. Though there is still a long way to go before a fossil fuel-free steel product is commercially viable, it is eminently clear that supporting a renewable hydrogen industry is a key part of this transition process.
“The amount of steel required for wind and solar to replace fossil fuels exceeds the world’s capability to produce it for decades.”
Putting issues of renewability aside, the concerns of Ed Ireland about the global capacity for steel production later on in his article seem largely unfounded. In contrast to Ireland’s claims, in 2016 The Economist published an article which shows substantial evidence of a global oversupply rather than an undersupply of steel.⁶ As the article argued, Britain saw two furnaces at Port Talbot’s steelworks close not because of a lack of demand, but due to low international prices spurred by high steel production.⁷ As the article also points out, this is a trend that is spread across the globe, as the Belgian, Italian, and American steel industries all took losses due to oversupply.⁸
The source of this global oversupply is undoubtedly China who continues to out-compete Western steel producers.
As Figure 1 shows, China’s output of 928.3 million metric tons of crude steel in 2018 compared to 831.7 million metric tons the year before.¹⁰ These changes over just one year represent an increase in China’s share of global steel production from 49.6% to 51.3% which not only highlights the dominance of the Chinese in this industry (with its nearest competitor India producing a modest 5.8% of global crude steel), but also highlights the ability for them to ramp up production quickly.¹¹ Although the increasing reliance on China for steel production represents a serious political concern for the rest of the world, there is little reason to expect a shortage of global steel anytime soon.
“State-of-the-art wind turbine blades are made of carbon fiber, which consists of layers of plastics and plastic resin, both of which are derived from oil and natural gas feedstocks.”
The author raises another serious yet solvable issue with the wind power industry, namely, their current lack of recycling. It goes without saying that if steel production processes can be made fossil-fuel-free through the use of hydrogen, then the carbon fibre problem is diminished somewhat. However, even if steel maintains its dominance as a building material, developing sustainable carbon fibre remains an important innovation due to its comparatively light weight, providing improved fuel economy and lower emissions during transportation.
Carbon fibre is admittedly difficult to recycle at this stage, though there are many groups working on improving carbon fibre recycling methods to make the material less environmentally harmful. At Washington State University, for example, researchers are pioneering a chemically based recycling process for the material which is capable of turning old turbine blades into eco-friendly building materials.¹² Whilst these recycling processes are yet to hit the market in any large-scale capacity, there remain other roadblocks which prevent this from transpiring.
Unfortunately for potential carbon fibre users, the material remains economically unviable to produce on the same scale as steel due to its high cost. When stacked against current steel prices carbon fibre is undoubtedly the inferior product, with prices for carbon fibre remaining 10 times more expensive than steel per pound.¹³
Despite a lack of competition with steel, research in the area has seen the price of carbon fibre decline rapidly in recent years making it an asset with promising future potential. As researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are currently investigating, a renewable carbon fibre production process that uses catalysts three times cheaper than the ones used in petroleum-based production is starting to bring down both monetary and environmental costs associated with the material.¹⁴ In addition to these savings, the new carbon fibre production process avoids the production of toxic chemical waste which petroleum-based processes emit.¹⁵ If this increasingly ecologically-friendly production process can be refined further the possibility for a fossil-fuel-free wind power industry clearly remains a legitimate prospect. Although the magnitude of the cost-reductions necessary to present eco-friendly carbon fibre as a potential steel replacement should not be understated, as previous parts of this article series have shown, significant reductions in costs within the renewable energy space are possible if incentives are aligned correctly.
The relatively infantile state of the renewable carbon fibre and hydrogen power industries undoubtedly warrants a degree of scepticism from even the staunchest renewable advocates; though the limitations of the material hardly lend support to the despondent claims made by Ed Ireland in his article. Without trying to downplay the seriousness of energy transition as a political and economic problem, it is clear from the examples presented in this article that the emerging trajectory of industrial sustainability warrants a positive outlook as opposed to a negative one. Instead of retreating to an affirmation of environmentally harmful oil and natural gas-based energy generation, Australians ought to be supporting the hydrogen hub initiatives in any way we can.
[1] Chad Haag, Being and Oil (Colombia, S.C.: Chad Haag, 2019), 60.
[2] World Steel Association, Steel’s contribution to a low carbon future and climate resilient societies, (Belgium: International Iron and Steel Institute, 2020), 5.
[3] Steve Hanley, “Hydrogen From Renewables Could Make Emissions-Free Steel Possible,” CleanTechnica, May 14, 2018, accessed January 9, 2020, https://cleantechnica.com/2018/05/14/hydrogen-from-renewables-could-make-emissions-free-steel-possible/.
[4] Ibid,.
[5] James Murray-White, “New Developments: Environmentally Friendly Concrete,” Sustainable Build, January 18, 2020, accessed February 7, 2020, http://www.sustainablebuild.co.uk/environmentally-friendly-concrete.html.
[6] The Economist, “Why the world has too much steel,” The Economist, May 5, 2016, accessed January 8, 2020, https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/05/05/why-the-world-has-too-much-steel.
[7] Ibid,.
[8] Ibid,.
[9] World Steel Association, A Handbook of World Steel Statistics, (Belgium: International Iron and Steel Institute, 2018), 2.
[10] Ibid,.
[11] Ibid,.
[12] Liam Critchley, “Eco-Friendly Recycling of Carbon Fibres from Composites,” AZO Cleantech, March 7, 2017, accessed January 8, 2020, https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=636.
[13] Jamie Deaton, “The Difficulties of Carbon Fibre,” Accessed 27 February, 2020. https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-economy/carbon-fiber-oil-crisis2.htm.
[14] University of Limerick, “EU researchers aim to halve CO2 footprint of carbon fiber production,” March 6, 2017. Accessed January 8, 2020. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/uol-era030217.php.
[15] Ibid,.
