A company that made waves with its solution for long-duration energy storage has “stumbled on” a groundbreaking way to decarbonize the emissions-heavy iron and steel industry.
“Form Energy [whose acronym cannot be a coincidence!—Ed.] launched in 2017 to tackle one of the biggest problems hindering the clean energy transition: how to cheaply store renewable energy for days on end,” writes Canary Media. It created a new battery that stores energy by converting rust into pure iron, then discharges electricity by oxidizing or rusting the iron again.
“In developing its iron-air battery, though, the company stumbled on a potential breakthrough for another notorious climate challenge: cleaning up the iron and steel industries.”
While figuring out how to decarbonize the iron that goes into the company’s batteries, Form’s engineers found they could prepare it using electricity, rather than burning fossil fuels at high temperatures.
And iron ore is a key input for the steel industry, which generates approximately 9% of global carbon emissions, mostly during the process of removing the ore’s naturally-occurring oxygen to produce metallic iron. Traditionally, the ore is scorched in a hot blast furnace along with limestone and a purified coal called coke, though some steel companies now flow fossil gas over iron pellets, Canary Media explains. Both methods of removing oxygen produce large volumes of climate pollution.
Form Energy managed to produce powdered metallic iron by placing powdered iron ore in a low-temperature alkaline solution and adding an electric current.. The process can be run efficiently and continuously, and is “easier to deploy because it can be scaled up in smaller increments,” the news story states.
But it still calls for a lot of electricity, so its cost-competitiveness depends on a cheap source of power. Electricity will have to cost no more than 3¢ per kilowatt-hour to compete with fossil-fueled iron making—a cost that is significantly lower than the U.S. average. And the process will only be as clean as its power source—electricity-based iron making that used coal-fired electricity, for example, would still be considered a high-emissions process.
The company is addressing these potential pitfalls by designing its iron electrolysis to integrate directly with variable renewable generation and trying to improve the efficiency of its alkaline electrolysis techniques compared to the historical baseline. The proposal received US$1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) last month, creating an opportunity to scale up its method.
“In short, one of the most ambitious energy storage innovators has entered the colourful and dynamic field of clean iron and steel technologies,” Canary Media writes.
