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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

I read a retrospective paper by a Norwegian group that worked on electrowinning iron from mixed sulfide ores. Taking iron sulfide waste and converting it to sulfuric acid and iron sheet. I think they were getting 4.25kwh per kg. Nop idea if that is good or not but at $0.15/kwh that's $640/ton.

I thought about that over the last few years because it's aqueous process so should be able to run intermittently.

Edit: Paper

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.843...

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640$/ton won’t be profitable as that’s about the current price for high end steels.

OTOH, I remember industrial electricity prices to be closer to 7-10cents per kWh, so it won’t be that far off what we have now.

I'm amazed how cheap that sounds. Does that mean that for a cost of a decent laptop I could get two tons of steel delivered?

That's probably slabs of billet: unprocessed steel right from the mill. Not cold rolled bars or rods, or sheet.

I only know a little about steel prices from being a hobby machinist, but I know a bit more about hay prices. For the price of a cheap laptop, you can get two tons of hay delivered :-)

Actually I was thinking of hot rolled. Turns out the regional differences are huge:

Hot rolled in US is 928$ per metric ton

Hot rolled in EU is 620$ per metric ton

China is in the mid 500s.

Unclear to me if the new US tariffs are to blame, gap is larger than the 25% I expected.

Source: http://steelbenchmarker.com/files/history.pdf

It doesn't have to turn a profit, it just has to lose less money than it costs to dump the waste products it's made out of. Depending on how regulated that becomes, it might be worthwhile in the future.

Energy prices are going to be key here. The mistake would be assuming they are a constant though. They've been trending down and lately coal has been considered on the expensive end of the spectrum. Those prices have been trending down due to clean energy prices dropping. Both solar and wind are now winning bids on price that used to go to coal plants. Also as coal plants shut down and coal mines are closed, coal might actually get more hard to get (i.e. more expensive). Some recent solar plants are delivering power well below the prices you cite (I've heard prices going as low as 3-4 cents/kWh).

I could imagine most steel plants are big enough that they'd want their own infrastructure in any case. So, for a future steel plant based on this stuff with its own cheap energy supply, it might end up being cheaper and cleaner. That could end up being really disruptive.

Energy prices and the price of carbon dioxide emissions, especially in Europe.

Cokeing coal for making steel is a different grade then what is typically burned at power power plants.

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