LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Some companies in Sweden have found a way to cut steel's carbon footprint down to almost zero. That's a big deal because its production accounts for nearly 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Reid Frazier of the Pennsylvania-based public radio show The Allegheny Front has more.
REID FRAZIER, BYLINE: Anne Graf hops into the back seat of a Toyota pickup truck in Boden, Sweden.
ANNE GRAF: So what are we doing? We're putting our seat belts on, and we're driving out onto the site.
FRAZIER: Graf is with the Swedish company Stegra. She's showing off the company's huge construction site here in the Swedish forest just below the Arctic Circle. Stegra is building the world's first commercial-scale, fossil-free steel mill. Graf says steel made here will be the same as what's produced at traditional mills.
GRAF: It will become cars, trucks, construction materials. It will become dishwashers and fridges and freezers.
FRAZIER: Basically, all the stuff that makes modern life possible. But the way most steel is made now, all that stuff comes with a heavy climate price. Steelmakers have been using the same basic recipe for hundreds of years. They heat up iron ore in a blast furnace with refined coal. That chemical process releases lots of carbon dioxide. But Stegra will use a different process. Instead of coal, they'll use hydrogen, a common industrial gas. This way, the biggest by-product is water, Graf says, not CO2.
GRAF: In a very concrete way, we are physically going to remove CO2 emissions by providing better steel.
FRAZIER: Scientists have known hydrogen could be used to make steel for decades, but it's hard to work with and more expensive than coal. Plus, most hydrogen today comes from fossil fuels and is a carbon pollution problem of its own. Stegra will produce its hydrogen out of water, using renewable energy, significantly cutting its CO2 footprint. Other steel companies in Sweden are also starting to work with hydrogen. The steelmaker Ovako recently converted some of its furnaces from natural gas.
MIKAEL PERSSON: It was very hard (laughter).
FRAZIER: Mikael Persson managed that project for the company.
PERSSON: I've never done this. Nobody has done this. We went into it with - blindfolded.
FRAZIER: His team spent four years building a hydrogen plant inside an old steel mill.
PERSSON: Yeah, this is the plant.
FRAZIER: Inside a large white room are eight cylindrical tanks. Picture huge double-A batteries, each laid on their side. An electric current courses through each tank, separating water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.
PERSSON: The current is really, really, really high. So the power needed as a maximum is what we call 20 megawatt.
FRAZIER: That's a lot of juice, enough to power 10,000 homes in the U.S. The company can use this much electricity with very little climate impact. That's because Sweden's electric grid is virtually carbon-free. The country relies mostly on hydro and nuclear plants, not fossil fuels. But what's really driving this investment in green steel now? Money. In Europe, it's about to get much more expensive to make steel the old-fashioned way. Max Ahman is a professor at Lund University in Sweden.
MAX AHMAN: The EU system for putting a price on carbon has actually started to work.
FRAZIER: The European Union has a carbon trading system that taxes companies for emitting greenhouse gases. It's set to impose a larger penalty on traditional steelmakers in the next decade.
AHMAN: With that price on CO2, suddenly, green steel from hydrogen is more or less competitive.
FRAZIER: Dozens of similar projects are in the works around the world. Experts say Sweden is proving that making green steel is possible. But to make it work elsewhere, the industry needs lots of affordable, clean energy and policies, like a carbon tax that will help it compete with traditional steel.
For NPR News, I'm Reid Frazier in Boden, Sweden.
FADEL: That reporting was made possible by a grant from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative.
(SOUNDBITE OF MIZLO'S "NEED SOME SPACE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
