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by kobbe 2001 days ago
Sweden is actually the first country to build such an plant. Att the moment it is mostly testing plants but the real ones will be built soon. https://www.hybritdevelopment.com/
2 comments

In Austria as well. https://www.voestalpine.com/group/en/media/press-releases/20...

EDIT: I should have read the article first.

In the 1950's Norway had a pilot plant that made iron by electrowinning sulfide iron ore. Which was a waste product from copper mining. Used a low temperature wet cell. And the steel industry was perfectly happy to take their small production runs.

From memory efficiency was 4.5kwh/kg. At 12 cents/kwh that's $0.50/kg.

Seems like a better idea to do that than to pretend hydrogen is 'green'.

The amount of hydrogen you need for hydrogen DRI is quite small. From this source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/08/f54/fcto-h2-...

You need about 54kg of hydrogen per ton of iron. Assuming it takes 50 kWh of energy to make 1 kg of hydrogen, you get something like 2.7 kWh per kg of iron. This is significantly more energy efficient than the idea you're proposing.

Found this report from a more recent attempt.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6918249/

The Norwegian pilot plant used a crude asbestos separator for the anode and cathode. The above used some magic polymer.

They got it down to 3.53 kwh/kg