Awarded DOE Early Career Award!
On August 5th, the DOE announced that we were one of the 93 groups selected to win an Early Career Research Program award for our new work studying sustainable ironmaking! Our new project is called “Sustainable Ironmaking: Using Photons to Understand and Drive the Mechanism of H2-Based Direct Iron Reduction” and will support our group’s work starting up a new area of research for Stanford in the materials science of green steel.
Steel is one of the most important commodities on the planet; we produced 1.94 billion tonnes of steel last year and that number is only increasing. While steel is essential to the development of modern technology, its production today accounts for ~11% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. More than half of those emissions come from a single step: converting iron ores (oxides) into molten iron metal that will get alloyed into steel. “Ironmaking” today is done mostly in Blast Furnaces that use coal and limestone to reduce the iron ores and separate the impurities as “slag”, generating ~3.5 molecules of CO2 for every atom of Fe produced. The use of H2 instead of coal to reduce iron ores into iron metal (generating H2O as a byproduct) is the most established zero-carbon version of ironmaking today, but its use has been limited due to challenges scaling the reaction to the appropriate scale. My Early Career project with Separations Science will explore the use of light to understand and drive the reduction of iron ores with hydrogen.