From BBC:
The [new] Woodhouse Colliery would extract coking coal from the seabed off St Bees, with a processing plant on the former Marchon site at Kells...
Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, who asked for the "call-in" described the news as "a kick in the teeth in the fight to tackle climate change".
He said: "Cumbria has so many renewable resources to provide energy - water, wind and solar - and we should most definitely not be taking the backwards step of opening a new coal mine."
Which raises the obvious question, can the world produce steel without using coking coal?
To which the answer appears to be "No".
UPDATE: Or possibly "Yes", if you believe the clever scientists.
Sunday, 3 November 2019
Vote Lib Dem for a steel-free future
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14 comments:
On the other hand we could manage pretty well without Liberal Democrat MPs.
There you go, thinking things through again. Why can't you just chant the slogans?
Sellafield is sitting on tonnes of Fissile materisl which could power Britain for decades if the political will was there.
AKH, true.
B, force of habit.
J, you've missed the point. There are plenty of ways of generating electricity, including nuclear, but only one way of making steel.
Hmm, well. sorta.
We only have the one way of making virgin steel, true. And we do need to make at least a bit of that. But we can gain much to most of our steel used from recycling.
Yes, of course Farron's being an idiot but.....
TW, yes, the second articlel explains that recycling is far more energy efficient.
What's unclear to me us how much existing steel is recycled every year. That article suggests one-third of supply. I read somewhere else it was two-thirds.
Aluminium is even more energy-intensive.
MW, from a brief stint working in a steel works when I was a student, I seem to recall that the problem with recycled steel is impurities like copper, tin and zinc that are present in the scrap. I don't know if that is what makes Italian steel rust so quickly, but it certainly could be.
Physiocrat, aluminium is produced using electricity: Iceland exports much of its highly abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power by using it to make aluminium.
Steel on the other hand is still produced by using coke as the reducing agent.
P, it is, see GC's comment.
B, sure, but would you rather extract iron from crushed rock with 50% purity or remove 1% copper etc from scrap steel with 99% purity?
Mark, unfortunately, AFAICR, removing traces of impurities is bloody hard to do and expensive, compared to making new steel from ore, a bit like getting 1% of black paint out of a tin of white paint after the paint has been mixed. OTOH it is 35 years since I've had anything to do with steel making, so perhaps things have moved on.
B, maybe it's the other way round. So making new steel uses less resources, and is hence less environmentally damaging than recycling (although I'd be surprised).
It is actually possible to make virgin steel the same way that we make virgin aluminium. No coal required!
See this article from Scientific American.
D, ta, article updated.
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