So...I'm learning about how steel is made and I'm wondering if there is a more environmentally friendy method. I view it as unfriendly b/c of the oxygen that is injected when the steel is in the blast furnace or electric arc furnace. This oxygen bonds w/ the carbon to produce CO and CO2. THis is necessary to reduce the amount of carbon content to produce harder steels. So what other methods are there that can be used w/o having to end up w/ co and co2? thanks
From what I understand of it, US steel is better as the steel is more recycled than Canadian, so a lot of that oxygen / CO2 has already taken place compared to working from ore. The second reason US steel is environmentally ahead of Canadian is that US tends to use Electric Arc, while Canadian uses Basic Oxygen, Basic Oxygen uses more energy than electric arc, and I think it also uses more oxygen, but I would suspect that oxygen that it uses is 'waste oxygen' and not converted into Co2 because the Co2 process is limited by the carbon, and steel only has so much carbon.
