Iron Air Battery Maker Form Energy Might Have a Solution For Steel Emissions

De-carbonization is one of the key goals of the green movement and has been one of the toughest challenges to solve for the past few decades. And it looks like it’s been solved.

In a completely accidental find, Form Energy, a green battery company discovered a solution to cleaning up the iron and steel industry. In what is being termed a serendipitous yet stunning development, Form Energy’s innovative battery technology is being used to solve two completely disparate problems plaguing the global energy industry.

Using an innovative ‘iron air’ battery to store clean energy at longer intervals than standard lithium-ion batteries are able to, the Massachusetts, US-based green energy supplier has created a system to store energy by converting rust into pure iron, and feeds it back into the grid by turning that iron back into rust.

Using the same principle for the steelmaking industry, high-emission coking coal used for purifying the iron oxide and iron hydroxide that are extracted from the Earth is no longer needed. Instead, the new technology puts powdered iron ore in a low-temperature alkaline solution. When an electrical current is run through it, powdered metallic iron is produced. The team at Form Energy says that this process can be run continuously and at high efficiency. In fact, they contend that it has the potential to financially compete with conventional fossil-fuel powered furnace technologies. While Form still needs to prove that this is commercially viable, its competitive potential is significant. “Furnaces entail a minimum investment in the billions of dollars,” say Form Energy “Form’s electrolytic technique could be easier to deploy because it can be scaled up in smaller increments.”

Till now, only So far, only a plant in in Sweden (Hybrit )has implemented DRI with hydrogen, but these plants depend on for now expensive clean Hydrogen to run operstions, making them prohibitively expensive. The potential impact of finding and developing a scalable technology for clean steelmaking is hard to overstate. Decarbonization of steel would have massive green implications for a huge number of sectors. Emissions would be cut substantially for industries reliant on steel, which would be massive for the green movement.

By Yash Singh