But the thing that makes steel steel is that it contains carbon
Dig iron ore up from the ground, and it’s not going to have much if any carbon in it.
And unless you have some crazy particles accelerator/fusion reactor nonsense going on, nothing you do with just hydrogen is going to get carbon into that steel, because there’s no carbon in hydrogen either.
Coal, however, is mostly carbon, so using as the heat source naturally tends to add carbon into your iron to make steel.
There’s other ways of doing it, but at the end of the day most of them kind of rely on coal in one way or another at some point in the process because it’s a really convenient source of carbon.
The next best alternative is probably cutting down a bunch of trees to process into charcoal
Would be really damn cool to be able to suck CO2 out of the air and use that carbon somehow, but to the best of my knowledge no one has figured out any efficient way to do that at scale.
It can be used as a heat source sure
But the thing that makes steel steel is that it contains carbon
Dig iron ore up from the ground, and it’s not going to have much if any carbon in it.
And unless you have some crazy particles accelerator/fusion reactor nonsense going on, nothing you do with just hydrogen is going to get carbon into that steel, because there’s no carbon in hydrogen either.
Coal, however, is mostly carbon, so using as the heat source naturally tends to add carbon into your iron to make steel.
There’s other ways of doing it, but at the end of the day most of them kind of rely on coal in one way or another at some point in the process because it’s a really convenient source of carbon.
The next best alternative is probably cutting down a bunch of trees to process into charcoal
Would be really damn cool to be able to suck CO2 out of the air and use that carbon somehow, but to the best of my knowledge no one has figured out any efficient way to do that at scale.