I will say the area I’m living in northern Sweden has a new green steel plant being constructed. I’m thrilled such things exist but they’re also obliterating the local housing market. I’m trying to find student housing and it’s fucking impossible because companies stopped catering to the several nearby colleges and are instead tripling rent and marketing to the construction workers. I wish they had put some thought into avoiding this before they fired up a massive construction project in a small town.
The trouble with green steel is that coal has like 3 uses in steel production - it’s not just used to heat the metal but also becomes part of the steel itself. There are alternatives but you’re having to replace 1 thing with 3 and it ends up being ridiculously energy intensive, so unless your grid is made up exclusively of renewables you’re really just moving the CO2 production around. Especially as most of the demand is additional on top of regular steel production, we’re already trying to switch to renewables but this pushes that target further away.
Really green steel, much like green hydrogen, seems driven more by marketing than it being a sound engineering decision.
I hope that they get the factory in Boliden to work, the news lately has been that Stegra are looking for more money from investors. It would be sad if both Northvolt and Stegra fails, we need new companies.
Imagine those troll accounts attempting to frame evs made with green steel and powered by renewables as “less efficient than ice.”
