PeroCycle: carbon recycling technology for lower emission steelmaking
Birmingham researchers devised a ‘closed loop’ carbon recycling technology that could radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the steelmaking industry, and new venture PeroCycle is developing and commercialising it.
The energy- and carbon-intensive iron and steel sector is one of the hardest-to-decarbonise foundation industries.
The energy- and carbon-intensive iron and steel sector is one of the hardest-to-decarbonise foundation industries. The sector generates around 8% of total global emissions, but the products are hard to substitute, and it requires process heat at temperatures as high as ~1,600-2000°C in e.g. part of blast furnaces.
One option is the use of electric arc furnaces to replace conventional blast furnaces. This requires either or both of the integration with direct reduced iron (DRI) process that still emits a substantial amount of carbon dioxide, and the use of scrap steel for which the world does not have sufficient amount to meet the demand. An alternative is to use the so-called Carbon Capture, Storage and Utilization methods, but these are energy-intensive and are yet to demonstrate cost-effectiveness.
Birmingham’s Chamberlain Chair of Chemical Engineering, Professor Yulong Ding has led the way on foundation industrial decarbonization technologies. In the early 2020s, Professor Ding, who is also founder of the University’s Centre for Energy Storage, encouraged his then PhD student, Dr Harriet Kildahl, to investigate further when she found a perovskite material she was working with could convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO2) at considerably lower temperatures than current methods. The perovskite retains its stability during this process, showing no degradation in over a month of use.
Carbon monoxide could be recycled, in a closed loop, as a substitute for coal or coke currently used in the blast furnace (BF) ironmaking process,
The result of the research included a process to convert CO2 to carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide could then be recycled, in a closed loop, as a substitute for coal or coke currently used in the blast furnace (BF) ironmaking process, in turn significantly reducing the carbon dioxide emissions. This technology can be retrofitted to current or new built BFs, with the retrofit options also addressing the stranded asset challenges.
The innovation gained significant media attention and interest from industry, and the University’s commercialisation team led discussions with potential partners in the iron, steel and coke industries, as well as their supply chains including end users. The University has now partnered with leading global miner Anglo American and venture-builder Cambridge Future Tech to launch PeroCycle, which will build on the novel in-process carbon recycling technology pioneered at the University, and de-risk its path to commercial applications.