There's a saying, if it's not steel, it's not real. Think about how many things are made out
of steel. Steel has been and will always be a fundamental building block of the economy.
Steel's one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions in the world,
and it's one of the sectors that's very hard to decarbonize. It uses a large
amount of process heat, but it's dependent on chemical reactions that emit greenhouse gases
The overarching goal of GISH, or the grid integrated steelmaking with hydrogen project,
is to explore a pathway for the decarbonization of iron making.
So we are exploring a pathway to use an alternative reductant that is hydrogen,
instead of a fossil fuel like coal or natural gas, to basically derive the metallic iron
from the iron ore, which is the rock that you're basically pulling out of the ground.
This pilot plant will lay the groundwork for developing larger scale plants that ultimately
define for us how to run a reactor on a production scale with hydrogen and mixed gases.
There are commercial plants out there that use natural gas for this process,
but none of them at this stage in the U.S., at least, have run hydrogen in them.
This size of reactor is good to play with because if you have an industrial reactor, even a minor
like 1% or 2% change of some parameters, it will scrutinize the process easily and it will cause
multimillion dollar losses. And in the level of reactor which we work,
you can still highly vary the parameters and see how it is affected in a very, very big manner.
Imagine that you got iron ore from the mining process. We take these pellets and
feed it from top of our reactor so that the pellets are flowing from top to the bottom.
The gas goes from the bottom to the top. And we have reducing agents,
mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The iron ore pellet is made up of hematite, which is Fe2O3.
It reacts with hydrogen or carbon monoxide to form magnetite,
which is Fe3O4. Fe3O4 again reacts with hydrogen or carbon monoxide to form wüstite,
which is FeO in short form. That is converted into iron again using the hydrogen or carbon monoxide.
Now, in all these reactions, we have byproduct. From carbon monoxide, we get carbon dioxide,
but from hydrogen, we get H2O, which is water or steam. Whenever there is a mixture of hydrogen and
carbon monoxide inside the reactor, in the feed, we get carbon dioxide along with water vapor.
Our immediate goal is to demonstrate that we can produce a minimum of one ton of steel a
week through this reactor, operating flexibly with hydrogen and natural gas in a continuous manner.
Converting iron oxide to iron is a reduction reaction. So that reaction
when you use hydrogen is endothermic, which means it takes energy. So you have to put
extra energy in. So that's probably one of the bigger hurdles to overcome.
We have to transition from the current reactors to a hydrogen reactor, and we need to do it without
disrupting the supply chains or without having some excess investment. So that's why we need a
reactor that can be operated using both natural gas as well as hydrogen. Whenever hydrogen is
available, we can shift those reactors to hydrogen and kind of close the taps for the natural gas.
This is a great area for us to
take on more R&D, engage with more actors out there in the in the private sector,
and generally just support the industries to achieve what is in our mission space,
which is decarbonization, energy transition, and greater circularity in our economy.