With more than $350 million in venture funding and a new factory in Brazil, Boston Metal looks to scale up production of its green method for making steel.Donald Sadoway sees steel as a climate crisis of its own — and a conundrum. Its manufacture is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions, primarily because making it usually involves burning vast amounts of coal. But steel is also a material that’s crucial to modern life.
It also requires a major shift in thinking for an ancient industry. The notoriously dirty steel manufacturing process hasn’t changed much in a thousand years. Since 1950, global steel production has risen fromto nearly 2 billion. CO2 emissions have soared in tandem, to roughly 4 billion tons a year today – roughly four times that of the aviation industry.
Just how much all this will cost relative to traditional steelmaking is the big unknown here. Steel is a commodity industry where every penny of cost counts, and building new steel plants costs a fortune. The cost should be on par with traditional steelmaking once plants are producing between 1 million and 2 million tons a year, as long as electricity prices are around $30 per megawatt hour, according to the company’s calculations.
Boston Metal cofounder Donald Sadoway is a retired MIT professor and serial entrepreneur who spent decades working on the underlying technology.“Everyone told me I was crazy to think about electrolytic production of steel,” said Sadoway, 73, who today runs a skunk works called Sadoway Labs with funding from former GoogleCEO Eric Schmidt.
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