Mining giant Rio Tinto will spend more than $200 million to test a product it claims would almost completely remove carbon dioxide emissions from the manufacture of steel from its iron ore. The company will set up a research and development centre in Perth's south, but the challenge will be producing it on an industrial scale and keeping the costs affordable.
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00:00 Big claims for a research centre due to be built where a shed now stands in Rockingham.
00:07 A facility that could be critical to the world's transition to net zero.
00:11 It will seek to replicate on a larger scale the laboratory production of a form of low carbon steel making Rio is calling bio-iron.
00:20 Instead of using coal to heat the iron ore, raw biomass such as straw heated by microwave energy is used.
00:27 It has the potential to reduce carbon emissions from the steel making process by 95% compared to currently used methods.
00:35 Steel manufacturing produces 8-10% of global carbon dioxide emissions so the impact could be huge.
00:42 The science is well known and there's no impedance to how you do it in a small scale.
00:51 The challenge is to do it on an industrial scale with hundreds of millions of tonnes of iron ore.
00:56 This is typical haematite from Piripira.
01:00 And sourcing massive amounts of biomass and microwave energy.
01:04 To shine microwave to a large body of biomass and iron ore mixture and heat it up to achieve iron ore reduction to make a raw iron.
01:17 The costs are also expected to be high.
01:19 As the technology matures and there is a greater rate of deployment across the world we will see prices of green steel drop significantly.
01:28 Raw biomass is just one of the methods being investigated to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the manufacture of steel.
01:35 Researchers here at a laboratory at the University of Western Australia are also looking into using hydrogen and ammonia.
01:42 We need all sorts of technical scientific breakthroughs to be able to achieve that.
01:49 Enormous promise and enormous challenges.
01:52 [End of recording]
01:52 Thank you.
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