Sandeep Nijhawan presented 4 business ideas, each related to emerging global temperatures, at its March 2020 meeting with an investor from Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), founded by Bill Gates. another about batteries: Nijhawan only had seven slides to show. The first argument of his game was to make iron without coal, intense heat or emissions, powered only by renewable electricity.
“Let me avoid it there,” BEV investor Dave Danielson told him. “If you can do this, then that’s what I would do. I don’t need to hear the following 3 ideas.
Iron makes up 98% of the substance of steel, the ubiquitous element that has built the fashion world. massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
The iron then goes through a series of steps to become steel, but the step of producing iron accounts for 90% of the greenhouse fuels generated. Steel production is responsible for 7% of greenhouse fuel emissions released into the air each year. , more than the weather have an effect on shipping and aviation combined.
Producing iron at warm temperatures and coal would bypass the maximum pollution step by resorting to expensive technologies.
That’s why Nijhawan’s concept caught Danielson’s attention: Affordable green metal is a huge challenge and can disrupt an industry that generates more than $870 billion in annual profit.
With the green light to go ahead and $2. 25 million from BEVs and investors, Nijhawan introduced Electra, in stealth mode, to do just that.
The stereotypical of a startup, Electra began its experiments in a garage. Nijhawan’s former colleague, Quoc Pham, joined the organization as a leadership generation officer. His first task was to find out if it was imaginable to dissolve iron ore in water combined with acid.
The failure came in a matter of weeks. ” I have bad news for you,” Pham told Nijhawan. “This will be the shortest start of my life. “
To realize what went wrong, it’s worth considering the 3 known tactics for reducing emissions from the metal industry.
First, capture the emissions generated through the procedure and bury them deep underground. The first such plant built in 2016 in the United Arab Emirates, however, thanks to initial spending on carbon capture technology, none has been built since.
Second, use hydrogen as a replacement for coal. The first shipment of metallic hydrogen occurred last year, but advertising volumes are unlikely to be obtained until 2026.
However, since hydrogen obtained from renewable electricity is still more expensive than coal, corporations are forced to use high-quality iron ore, which is so abundant.
“The world lacks high-grade minerals for steelmaking,” Nijhawan said.
Third, it uses electric power. Metals such as aluminum, copper and zinc are made using electrical energy, admittedly in much smaller quantities than iron. Until electric power became cheaper, it was not economical to apply it to iron production.
However, electrical energy cannot pass through wrought iron ore. One solution is to melt it. That’s what Boston Metal Co, a startup founded in 2012, did. Over the more than 10 years, it has perfected and expanded the technology, which works by heating iron ore to 1400°C, enough electrical power to force thousands of houses into a steel box not much bigger than a landfill.
To concentrate so much electrical energy in such a small area, special fabrics will have to be used. Boston Metal can accomplish this by employing coal as an electrode, a device that allows energy to enter without melting, but also generates carbon dioxide, which defeats the purpose of employing green electrical energy.
Boston Metal has discovered an option made of iron and chromium, but so far it only works on a pilot scale.
Nijhawan didn’t need to melt anything. Once a procedure operates at molten steel temperatures, it will need to operate 24 hours and 365 days. If stopped, the ore solidifies and new tanks must be installed, resulting in months of delay.
So the procedure had to be “harmless from a temperature perspective,” Nijhawan said, adding that it should be warmer than the temperature at which “coffee is prepared. “
This would allow simple start-up and shutdown and allow reliance on intermittent renewables, but for the procedure to work at such a low temperature, Pham had to dissolve iron ore in water combined with acid.
“My speech to all [investors] was: ‘Look, I don’t know if this can be done. I thought about the challenge and asked the experts. I think there is a way imaginable,'” Nijhawan said. “All I want is less than 10 other people and maybe a year or a year and a part to run this on the ground. “
He didn’t have to wait that long. Pham went back to the drawing board, read the clinical literature and consulted experts, and added Dan Steinart, a professor of chemical metallurgy at Columbia University.
After weeks of searching for new experiments, he discovered a successful solution.
Electra is now coming out of stealth mode and refuses to publicly reveal her process.
However, Nijhawan and Pham have shared enough main points for independent experts to verify that what the company claims to do is technologically feasible.
“Electra has achieved a difficult conversion of iron oxide to iron-only electrical energy at such low temperatures,” said Venkat Viswanathan, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “The steps they take make them in the right state. “
A visit to the company’s Colorado facility also highlights its progress. There is no coal furnace or molten metal, and laboratory demonstrations show how iron ore can be dissolved. Once the electrical procedure is executed, Electra produces paper-long plates covered with a thick layer of silver-gray metallic iron that are strangely heavy.
The good fortune of the experiments helped Electra raise a total of $85 million from BEV, mining giant BHP Group, Singaporean fund Temasek Holdings, Amazon. com Inc. and some other investors. All that’s left is to evolve the technology.
Electra to build a facility next year that would have several commercial-sized iron plates; A few years later, he plans to manufacture thousands of plates in a larger factory.
With Swedish metal SSAB AB aiming to produce carbon-free metal advertising quantities by 2026 and Boston Metal promising to produce emission-free iron by 2026, the race has officially begun.
A full-size Electra advertising plant would be much smaller than traditional metal steel mills, which can produce 2 million tons of metal a year, charge more than a billion dollars and are so giant that entire villages are popping up all around them.
Electra aims to build plants that generate just 300,000 tons of metal per year, a duration that would allow commissioning to be located close to existing electric arc furnaces. Electra and modify the procedure to raise more virgin iron than scrap.
Another merit may be simply locating Electra’s plants near iron ore mines, which are far from urban centers and close to the land where renewable energy can be built. Electra’s plants can process ore into iron on site and remove all impurities. , particularly by reducing the volume of curtains you want to transport to a metallurgical plant and additional cutting costs.
It may even be Electra’s first ad app. By proposing a procedure for dissolving iron ore, the company has also succeeded with impurities much more smoothly than traditional steel: at lower temperatures, the impurities do not react chemically as they would in a furnace at 1,600 °C.
The world is sitting on billions of tons of low-grade iron ore. It would possibly be conceivable for Electra to build plants near those mines and make existing operations economically viable.
“Making or dying in a startup is real,” Nijhawan said. “You don’t have 10 years to expand a new science. You want to be in that pressure cooker, to be fair to yourself, to have infinite time and resources to be You had to see what can be done differently.