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Originally Posted by Steely Dan
^ the billion dollar question for Gary Works (and the other two nearby integrated mills) going forward in this century is whether ownership (whoever that will eventually be) will make the major investment to revamp the plant into a more eco-friendly DRI-type operation or just shut the old blast furnaces down and close the plant altogether.
It's absolutely of vital national interest/security for the US to maintain some degree of native ability to make primary steel from mineral ore, but those dirty old blast furnaces will have to go away at some point, especially given all the newer technologies maturing today to separate the iron from the oxygen in much cleaner/less energy intensive ways.
But it's gonna take serious money to upgrade an operation like Gary Works. Could be cheaper to just start from scratch somewhere else.
However, the bottom of lake Michigan will remain as good a place to make steel as it has for the past 100+ years.
We'll see.....
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Yeah, traditional blast furnaces are incompatible with reducing GHG emissions to fight climate change. I've seen articles about this subject online, apparently the solution would be to use hydrogen gas in a process to convert raw iron ore from the ground into steel. Also making those processed iron pellets works better for the US steel industry because there are a ton of steel plants in the South that have electric arc furnaces which can use them. Instead of a single site facility that has a fixed production capacity that cannot be lowered or raised to meet market pricing changes and that's impossible to build nowadays because of economics, pollution regulations and overseas competition, the industry would produce direct reduced iron with clean fossil-fuel free sources of energy closer to where the ore is mined or in places with surplus energy sources, and they'd be shipped to small plants everywhere.
In Middletown Ohio the steel mill there will close their old blast furnace, but will still be able to make raw steel from ore by creating direct reduced iron pellets with hydrogen. The pellets will go straight into the existing mill there so it will still be an "integrated" facility sort of.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news...-green-economy