US Steel Tries Carbon Capturing with Mixed Results

Some of the worst carbon emission come from heavy industry, so it’s a welcome development to see U.S. Steel attempting to capture carbon. Last week the Department of Energy announced $6 billion in funds to help clean up some of most intensive greenhouse-gas industries, including $1.5 billion to transform iron and steel manufacturing, but U.S. Steel, one of the biggest American steelmakers was not among the recipients.

On Wednesday, U.S. Steel made its own announcement signing a 20-year agreement with CarbonFree, a Texas company. It plans to capture carbon dioxide from Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in the country. This $150 million project is the first of its kind to capture and utilize carbon from an American steel plant at a commercial scale.

Gary Works, located in Gary, Indiana releases releases enormous amounts of carbon into the air each year, more than the entire state of Vermont. CarbonFree plans to use its technology, SkyCycle, to collect 50,000 tons of CO2 from the plant each year and transform it into high grade calcium carbonate, an ingredient in foods, pharmaceuticals, paint, and plastics.

Since U.S. Steel has pledged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and stay competitive in an increasingly greener economy, it’s surprising to learn this project will only capture less than 1% of the plant’s annual emissions.The steel industry contributes about 8% of global energy-related emissions. There are eight steel plants in the U.S. that still use blast furnaces. This is a dirty, coal-intensive method of production, and Gary Works is one of them.

One of the projects awarded funding from the DOE last week is Cleveland Cliffs. They own five of the remaining seven blast furnace steel mills. They will get $500 million to replace one of their 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. Some reduction plants still rely on natural gas so they are hardly carbon-free, but the process can also be done with green hydrogen. A second project that will do this was announced last week by the Swedish steelmaker SSAB for a new plant in Mississippi. But green hydrogen requires a lot of renewable energy so it has its limitations too.

Reducing carbon emissions from heavy industry remains a serious problem and there is yet to be a significant solution that can scale up.