[KennyBlanken]

You don't need hydrogen to smelt, refine, recycle, whatever, metal.

You build an electric arc furnace.

[marcosdumay]

Furnaces don't refine metals just by themselves.

Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.

[alephnerd]

You still need iron to be processed in steelmaking. THIS is where the carbon bottleneck in steelmaking exists because pig iron has a high carbon ratio. H2 helps with processing sponge iron which dramatically reduces the carbon ratio within iron ingots used for steelmaking.