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It’s the first project to turn steel-related emissions into products. But can it scale?
Last week, the Department of Energy announced $6 billion in awards to help clean up some of the most greenhouse gas-intensive industries in the U.S., including $1.5 billion to transform iron and steel manufacturing. U.S. Steel, one of the biggest American steelmakers, was not among the recipients.
On Wednesday, U.S. Steel made an announcement of its own: It is signing a 20-year agreement with CarbonFree, a Texas-based company, to capture carbon dioxide from Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in the country, and turn it into a marketable product. The $150 million project is the first to capture and utilize carbon from an American steel plant at a commercial scale.
Gary Works releases an ungodly amount of carbon into the air each year — more than the entire state of Vermont. CarbonFree will use its technology, known as SkyCycle, to collect 50,000 tons of CO2 from the plant per year and transform it into high grade calcium carbonate, a valuable ingredient for the food, pharmaceuticals, paint, and plastics industries.
Something certainly has to change if U.S. Steel is going to make good on its pledge of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, let alone stay competitive in a market that’s expected to increasingly look for greener products. It’s unclear, however, whom the company is going to convince with this project, which will capture less than 1% of the plant’s annual emissions.
“It’s deeply unserious, I think, is the words that come to mind,” Hilary Lewis, the steel director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit that advocates for decarbonizing heavy industry, told me. The effort is especially embarrassing, she said, given that two of the company’s competitors, SSAB and Cleveland Cliffs, were awarded $500 million each by the DOE for far more transformative green steel projects. “This announcement is emblematic of how U.S. Steel is a laggard.”
U.S. Steel declined to make any of its executives available to interview for this story. In response to my request for comment, the company provided a statement that said this was a first of its kind opportunity to “significantly reduce” emissions at Gary Works, and that it was “the first step in exploring the scalability of this technology” to support the company’s goals.
CarbonFree executives, too, asserted that the Gary Works project is a stepping stone to something bigger. But outside experts I spoke with were skeptical that it would be able to scale enough to make a meaningful difference in the plant’s — or the industry’s — emissions.
The steel industry contributes about 8% of global energy-related emissions. Though the U.S. is not one of the worst offenders (we actually make some of the cleanest steel in the world) U.S. steelmakers still have a long, expensive journey ahead to decarbonize.
That’s because there are eight steel plants in the U.S. that still use blast furnaces, a dirty, coal-intensive production method. Gary Works is one of them. Though these plants only represent about 30% of the country’s steel production, they are responsible for nearly 70% of the sector’s emissions, according to the Department of Energy.
The advantage of the SkyCycle project is that it doesn’t require U.S. Steel to do very much. “We build, own, and operate the [carbon capture equipment], and we’re able to get a return based on the chemicals we sell,” Martin Keighley, the CEO of CarbonFree, told me. “So it’s a much more attractive proposition for, in this case, U.S. Steel, because they don't have to invest large amounts of money into the plant.” More attractive than at least one alternative, that is, which is to capture the carbon and sequester it underground.
It’s a compelling argument. Carbon capture and storage adds big costs — to install the equipment, transport the CO2, and pump it into the bedrock — with no financial benefit to manufacturers. While the federal government does encourage carbon capture by offering an $85 federal tax credit for every ton of CO2 captured and stored, no law compels steel companies to do so. In many cases, the subsidy may not be not enough to get investors on board for a project, especially since tax credits can come and go depending on the whims of Congress.
But if you find someone else who can take your carbon and make money off of it, then what have you got to lose? Keighley said CarbonFree will be able to earn a slightly smaller federal tax credit — $60 — for every ton of carbon it turns into calcium carbonate, but that the company’s business model doesn’t depend on that.
“You know, we all look at 2050 and net zero, but it doesn't stop there. To be net zero, we’re still emitting CO2, so we still have to capture it,” he said, referring to the idea that the “net” in net zero implies there will continue to be emissions that must be neutralized. “We're going to be capturing forever. So, therefore, we need sustainable business models that aren’t reliant on government sources.”
One advantage of SkyCycle over other carbon capture technologies is that it works with raw, dirty flue gas, which might have all kinds of other gases and chemicals mixed in with the CO2. The gas is channeled through a series of chemical reactions and eventually reacts with calcium, a mineral that’s notoriously thirsty for CO2, to create calcium carbonate. Once it binds with calcium, the CO2 is essentially locked up permanently. It would take either very high heat or a very strong acid to remove it.
Keighley said the high grade calcium carbonate on the market today has much greater emissions associated with its production than CarbonFree’s process, and is about the same price. That creates a “multiplier effect,” he told me. Not only is the company reducing emissions from the Gary Works plant, it’s also reducing emissions associated with the products that incorporate the cleaner calcium carbonate. On top of that, the company is sourcing its calcium from steel slag, a waste product from the steelmaking process that nobody has really figured out what to do with. (This is different from blast furnace slag, which is valuable for decarbonizing the cement industry as a replacement for carbon-intensive “clinker.”)
So far, so good. But the issue, according to Rebecca Dell, a former Department of Energy analyst and senior director of industry at the ClimateWorks Foundation, is that the market for high grade calcium carbonate is tiny. “You’re gonna saturate these high end markets way before you get anywhere close to absorbing the full 8 or 9 million tons a year of CO2 that just the Gary Works is emitting,” she told me.
When I raised this with Keighley, he acknowledged that the market was limited. But he said the market for calcium carbonate in general, not just the high purity stuff, is much bigger, and that the company could move into other segments later. CarbonFree is already working on its next system, which will be capable of capturing 250,000 tons of CO2 per year. Calcium carbonate is essentially limestone, which is an abundant and cheap material, so it might be hard to compete in lower-grade markets without bringing down production costs. But Keighley mentioned another plan. “The beauty is, if and when you run out of market altogether, you store it,” he told me. In other words, the company could just stash the calcium carbonate on the grounds of the Gary Works plant. That assumes, however, that they’ve brought down their costs enough to make a profit off the federal tax credit for carbon storage — and that assumes the tax credit still exists.
Lewis, of Industrious Labs, raised a different issue. “If you’re choosing to invest in carbon capture, you're locking in that reliance on coal for another 15, 20 years,” she told me. Carbon capture doesn’t address the other health-harming pollutants these steel mills rain over their surrounding community, including nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, and soot. She also noted that the biggest consumer of the types of steel produced by blast furnaces, the auto industry, has ambitious climate targets. While automakers have yet to make truly market-transforming commitments to buy cleaner steel, if and when they do, Gary Works could be left unprepared, threatening the job security of its more than 4,000 workers.
U.S. Steel’s plan is a stark contrast to one of the projects awarded funding by the DOE last week, Lewis said. Cleveland Cliffs, which owns five of the remaining seven blast furnace steel mills, will get $500 million to replace one of its blast furnaces at a mill in Ohio with what’s called a “direct reduced iron” plant. Direct reduction is more efficient, cleaner, and cheaper than a blast furnace; the company said it would save $150 per ton of steel produced by making the switch. Though some direct reduction plants rely on natural gas, and therefore aren’t exactly carbon-free, the process can also be done with green hydrogen. That’s what a second project announced last week, led by the Swedish steelmaker SSAB, will be using at a new plant in Mississippi.
In my interview with Keighley, I asked what he thought about the criticism that this project would keep Gary Works hooked on coal for another 20 years, and that advocates wanted to see the plant transition to direct reduction. He responded by raising questions about green hydrogen. Producing green hydrogen requires lots of renewable energy, he said. Is that the best use of that renewable energy, or could you “get more decarbonization for your buck” by using it for something else?
Later, in an email, Keighley also pointed to SkyCycle’s readiness for deployment compared to the long development timelines for other solutions. Construction is expected to start as early as summer 2024, with operations beginning in 2026. He also emphasized that CarbonFree would be able to “easily” increase the size of the plant. “There’s so many different options and everyone’s trying to second guess everybody else. Just get on with doing something, you know?”
But Chris Bataille, a research fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy who focuses on pathways to net-zero for heavy industry, told me the tiny scope of this project is indicative of a larger issue. “These marginal changes are attractive to people who are just used to running a blast furnace their whole careers,” he said. “You can keep the rest of your plant, but that piece of equipment needs to change.”
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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive —- in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $100 billion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.