 I'm gonna go ahead and encourage people to, if you're interested in staying, have a seat. If you're interested in standing, feel free, but don't wander too much. So thank you very much for coming to today's Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series. I'm David Barr, Head of the School of Materials Engineering, and my first job is to introduce Dr. Wayne Chen. Dr. Chen will be the starting MC for the event. He received his PhD in Astronautics and Aeronautics from Caltech in 1995. He's currently a Riley professor of Aeronautics, Astronautics, and Materials Engineering. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, students, thank you. And professor of Mechanical Engineering, by courtesy. Good, nothing, thanks. And the nice thing is, as it's being recorded, now I'll be mocked forever by Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as, most importantly, right now, as the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Engineering. He works on dynamic behavior materials and high-strain rate behavior. He's a fellow of the American side of Mechanical Engineers, American side of Experimental Mechanics, and associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He's been received an honorary doctorate of Science and Technology from Tempar University in Finland, and the Elmer Brune Award for Excellence in Teaching at Purdue a few years ago. So with that, I'll turn it over to Wayne. Thank you, boss. So my, the title is as important as I'm a professor of Material Engineering, right? So again, welcome to Purdue Distinguished Lecture Series. And it's my honor and the pleasure to introduce Professor Alan Cram, as today's lecture. Professor Cram was president and provost at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a Dean of Engineering at the Resilient Polytech Institute and Department Head of Material Science and Engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, he's a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical Aerospace and Materials Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology. He's a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. He received the Bessemer Gold Medal from the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining. He's a distinguished member or fellow of the Iron Steel Society, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, the American Society for Materials, the American Academy of Advancement of Science and the Iron Steel Society of Japan. He was also the president of two of these societies. Please join me, welcome Professor Cram on stage. Well, thank you very much for that introduction. I have to say that my whole career has been fortunate because I ended up in materials. I was in high school and I was thinking, I was good at chemistry, good at physics, and I should go to University of Glasgow, Scottish, and I should do chemistry or physics. And the headmaster or rector, as he was called in the school I went to, pulled me aside and he said, Cram, what are you doing? I said, what do you mean? He goes, I hear you're gonna do chemistry or something at, you know, university. Yeah, I saw his thing of doing. He goes, well, you know, there are hundreds of people that are really good at chemistry at many universities across the world. And you'll have to compete with all of them. Why don't you do an applied science? You know, there you could be better than most. I thought, well, that sounds good. And he said, well, look into metallurgy, the forerunner of the materials departments. And I did. And I decided to do a degree in metallurgy. And when I was in my final year of my undergraduate, an American professor came to the university in Scotland where I was at once a badical happened to be the best friend of the professor there. And he asked me if I'd like to do a PhD in America, which I'd never considered. And I said, that sounds good. So I did that. I ended up getting a materials degree from the University of Pennsylvania. And from that, I ended up working in the steel industry. And that brings me to this lecture because when Purdue asked me if I would come here and give a lecture, I thought, oh, it's Indiana. I have a lot of relationships with Indiana. My wife's from Lake Station. She told me the other week she bought a burial plot for us in Indiana. So I think I'm going to be buried there. My first job was in Indiana for Inland Steel. So I have a lot of Indiana relationships. And then I thought, you know, the second amazing change to my life was when the people from Inland Steel came and said to me, do you want a job? And that took me into the steel industry. That took me into the materials world that led me to the whole career of going from seven years in industry into the university and spending time at Carnegie Mellon, RPI now, Illinois Tech. And the materials choice that happened in high school led me here. You have to realize that in life, you'll be invited to do things and the doors will open. And you can choose to walk through that door or not. But when you walk through the door, it takes you somewhere you could never have ever thought of. I remember my mother saying to me when I was going to do a PhD, she goes, will you never work? And I said, well, eventually, hopefully. And so, you know, life is interesting. But for all of the material students here, it's a great background to take you through life because it's specific but general. You learn how to understand failure and the solution to everything is overcoming failure. So it's a good start for everyone. So when I was asked to do this, I thought, I should go back to the beginning and talk about my beginnings in the steel industry because it's a very interesting world. So we'll look at Indiana. Why Indiana? Well, this is one of the largest steel producing areas in the country. And if you look at this, why? Well, it's on Lake Michigan. And the iron ore that's best quality comes from Hibbing, Minnesota. Therefore, it can be transported across the Great Lakes cheaply. Coal was available in Illinois to make coke. So that was good. The world was moving away from the East Coast. So moving out to the Midwest at the time in the 1900s, et cetera, when this started to grow here, it was reasonable it should be here. And we saw what we call integrated steel plants being built along the river. So you've got many of them. They're now all called Cleveland Cliffs, apart from US Steel. But then there was Inland Steel, which was the largest family-owned steel plant in the world. By the way, when I joined Inland Steel, there was 29,000 people working in that plant. Amazing. I think there's 3,000 there. Now, same tonnage, roughly. Or more. Sorry, thank you, Linda. Linda works at this plant. There's one of you I'm here. Linda and I were young engineers together in England back in 1980. So you look at that, and then you say, OK, so you've got all this wonderful steel making happening in the Northwest Indiana, the region as people referred to up there. And then something wonderful happened that there were electric furnaces remelting scrap. And in general, at the beginning, there was mini mills beginning. And it really was low-quality steels and making billets with a continuous caster and rolling to make a product, mostly rebar at the beginning. But some really visionaries here in Indiana decided that they could build a plant based on a new technology to cast slabs. And this was a revolutionary technology that had never worked anywhere other than a pilot plant. And the people in Crawfordville, Indiana, for Newcore built a plant. It was not just a plant that could cast thin slabs, but it was a plant that was inline rolling and inline finishing. So it was an inline production facility. And they did something else. They said, we'd like to go to places to build these plants where people like to work hard. We'd like to avoid the union. We didn't want to have to deal with the union because we wanted different work rules than unions would allow. And they picked places out in cornfields around the country to build plants. And they built Crawfordville because of that. Revolutionized the steel industry because suddenly there was an alternate way of making sheet steel. There was an alternate way of making plates that didn't have to be done by the integrated duet from iron ore and coke, et cetera. So this grew and we started to see another industry grow in Indiana. And actually it's nucleated across the country now. So very interesting. Here we have two industries in Indiana, one using ore, iron oxide to form iron, and one taking iron that's already been made and remelting to produce a new iron. So here's Indiana today. So it's about 69% from ore, 31% from scrap. And you have all these companies that I've documented here from all the ones that are along the lakefront. And you can see that really it's quite amazing. More than 25% of the total steel in this country is produced here. So I've done all of this. And then I was driving down 65 on my way here yesterday. And I got off at the new area they have as a rest area. It's one of the most beautiful rest areas I've ever seen. And what's the first thing I run into is a big sign saying this is the home of steel in the country. There's a whole discussion of that there. They called it Vulcan's Hammer. Indiana's Vulcan's Hammer, which I thought was interesting. But anyway, so we're in the state that makes 25% of the steel in the country. But let's go back and just ask ourselves a question. How did we get to here? Why are we making steel the way we're making it? And I think, first of all, you have to go back in time and say, where does iron come from? And to realize that all iron is extraterrestrial, it came from outside of the planet to the planet at some time when the planet was formed or by impact. And if we follow the scientists, we can see that originally it was all made high pressure, high temperature by first the burning of hydrogen, to helium, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, through carbon, eventually to iron. And actually, probably to nickel and then reversion to iron because of the iron that we see today. So we're really in a situation that all of the iron that was here came from outside. And it came as iron. And then the problem is that the ambient temperatures and atmosphere of the planet, iron is not stable. So then it became iron oxide. So what are we doing? We are now trying to bring the iron oxide that used to be iron back to iron so that we can use it. So the issue is, it's not stable in the world. We know that because of rust. I mean, we all have seen that. So if we look at the beginning, everything came from outside. And we can find it. This is a picture of a meteorite sample called from the El Chaco region in Argentina. And it's 60,000 kilograms. And this original meteor, because if you take all the bits as it broke up, was about 840,000 kilograms. So enormous meteor, this was. You can find others. And I just want to note the chemistry. It's 92% iron, 6% nickel, a small amount of carbon, a small amount of phosphorus. So it's an iron-carbon alloy. If we go further than this and go to Namibia, you can find this one. And this one's about 80,000 years old. This time it's 82% iron, 16% nickel, 0.8% cobalt. And this is the one that you can see very straightforwardly, because in the early pictures, you can see the surrounding dirt is all iron oxide as this starts to oxidize. So we can say, OK, we have iron from the stars. There's not enough of it to be useful to us, although early man liked this. But we're forming oxides. So which oxides do we form? We form Fe3O4, Fe2O3, FeO. These are the three obvious oxides. I haven't gone into the whole non-stochometry of FeO, but we're just looking at the straight FeO at this time. And then you have the ability to actually remove this oxygen from iron. How are we going to do it? Well, we don't have the option of using fusion, as it did in the stars. So that's not an option. But it tells us high temperature is probably a good idea. Oxides becoming less stable as temperature increases. And then we need a reductant. And if we look through reductants, we can look at Ellingham diagrams, et cetera. We can find out what reductants are. We also have to ask, well, how do we take a solid and reduce it easily? Well, we have to have penetration of something into the solid itself. So we need a gas. And there's two obvious gases. That's carbon monoxide and hydrogen. And carbon monoxide is an easy one, because if we burn coal, we get carbon monoxide. Hydrogen is a little difficult, because there's no obvious natural hydrogen sources without actually reducing an oxide, such as water. So these are the two options. And if you look at what's happening here, if we start with carbon, we burn it. We can form CO, and we can burn the CO and form CO2. And that'll be exothermic reactions. So the first things we have to realize, as we're going to reduce iron oxide and form iron, we're going to have to heat the material up to get a reaction rate that's significant, so that we can reduce it quickly. So there's a heat issue here. We must have a heat source from somewhere. And carbon does that. And then if you look at it, once we have it hot enough, we have carbon that can react directly with iron oxide. However, if you think about it, having two solid particles touching to react means the reaction rate's going to be pretty small, because there aren't a lot of contact points. But if you have gas that can flow from this, then you're going to get indirect reduction, as we talk about reaction with carbon monoxide. And then we have an interesting thing. And that is the interaction between carbon and iron. And if you think about it, if you were an early smelter of materials, you were one of the Hittites, for example, coming out of Turkey. And it's 1300 BC. And you're heating things up and finding that, oh, it's copper's turning up. You would be saying, well, what else can we heat up? And as we heat things up more and more, you find an interesting thing that the iron, starts to pick up carbon. And then as this happens, this phase diagram has what we call a deep eutectic. As you can see, the melting point of iron, about 1538 degrees centigrade in this diagram, which, by the way, I don't think is correct. I spent my PhD measuring this. I think it's 1355. But 1535, that's a personal issue. Since I actually measured it myself, I believe that. That's one of these issues of being an experimentalist. So anyway, you can see, as carbon increases, all of a sudden, you run into this situation where you have a deep eutectic. And you get to a very low temperature compared to 1500, where you can, at 1147, form a liquid iron carbon alloy. But what does this mean in practice? This means that as you're reducing the iron with carbon and it picks up carbon, it transforms into solid to liquid and drains. Now all of a sudden, you have a liquid draining from the material you're reducing by gravity. And you have affected the transformation of separation from the burden of the material from the other oxide. So that's an amazing thing, because now, before this, you would have iron as solid particles within the material itself and not actually separated, and you'd have to separate it later. So these things became very interesting and what was found by the early steel makers. And if you look at this, this is o-to-iron by carbon reduction. And if we take the Wustite temperature of 570, where Wustite's stable, you can separate it into two points. And here, if we're looking at this, if we're using carbon, we find that below 900, you end up with a dark gray porous mass. That's what comes out of the furnace. So you have to run it in batch formation. You react it for a while, and then take material out. And then you have the metal. And then you have to think about, what else is there other than metal? Well, when you have the ore, it's also got some silica in it. It's got some other materials in it. And these materials aren't removed at all. So now you have a metal mass with this gang material, as we call it, which is a silicate, usually of some kind, mixed in with the metal. And that led to the early steel makers having to physically pound this out. So they would physically have a hot fire. They would have these metal masses, or blooms, as it would be called. And then there would be a guy, as you see in all the TV programs, a giant, strong person who spends his life in a hot oven smacking pieces of metal to get rid of this solid material that's there. And then saying, OK, well, if I have this piece of metal that I just got rid of the smaller material and I take another piece and I hit it hard enough, I can solid state weld it together. So this is the beginning of welding and the beginning of amalgamation by welding all in the solid material. Now, but as it gets hotter, and this really you can follow the whole history of the development of the high temperature furnace. As you developed high temperature furnaces, you saw other things. So as they get the temperature up to about 1,200 degrees centigrade, it became more easy to deform the mass. And there was a lot more metal in it. And actually, some of the salacious mysterio started to turn liquid, which made it easier to try to remove it. And then above 1,300, the carbon started to diffuse more quickly into the solid iron. So this is solid state diffusion. And eventually, once you get enough solid state diffusion to start following the liquid, the liquid starts to then reduce and fall from the burden itself. So you can start thinking of a furnace where you're putting material in at the top and you're getting liquid iron out at the bottom. So all of a sudden, you have a production facility. If you look at hydrogen, if you do this with hydrogen, you never get a liquid. You only get the solid. So the problem with hydrogen is you're stuck with the situation that you're never going to have just pure liquid material. You're going to have this solid mass that's got the salacious material in it. And that's just the nature of using hydrogen versus carbon. If we look at reduction kinetics, it turns out that hydrogen is a much faster reducing agent than carbon is. And here I'm showing you hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and the mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. So if you can use a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, the reaction rate is faster than it is with carbon monoxide. So let's look at the history of iron. What do you find? Obviously, the first things you find, actually, the Tutankhamun's situation with the pyramids is you found iron beads. And these were just simply pieces of meteorites that they had found that were stable and didn't oxidize so quickly because the nickel content was higher. So if you want to go to stainless steel, you add nickel, then you add chromium. But the natural material coming from the stars meant much of it had a lot of nickel, so it didn't oxidize so much. So the ancients could find it still in its metallic form. The material that came with very low nickel just slowly decomposed into iron oxide. But then about 1350, again, we see from looking at the pyramids, the very first dagger that was ever found that was made with iron. And this is from the Ashmolean Institute from the University of Oxford. And I'm sure they should actually give this back to the Egyptians sometime, along with the other stuff they have. But that's a time for another discussion. But one could also ask, how did that end up here? But it's a beautiful example of a very early steel, actually iron dagger here. Although it looks as if it would be very useful, it's a little soft compared to what you'd really want to have in an implement. But it's there, 1350 BC. And this is the issue I was bringing up about people learning using coal or wood to begin with, to burn, to form charcoal, and finding that if you had these oxides that they could tell by color and put them into these furnaces, you would end up finding metals due to reaction and led to the beginning of smelty. Now, the Indians actually became one of the world's greatest steel makers early on. And this is an amazing piece. And this is an iron pillar that can be found in Delhi or in Dara. And they're made around 310, 312 AD. And if you look at the chemistry of this, it's 99.7% iron, 0.8% carbon, and then interesting enough, 0.114% phosphorus. And this is an interesting thing here, because this is a situation where they could not get the temperature high enough to form liquid iron carbon alloys at the eutectic composition. So everything was made solid. And then everything was pounded together by artisans to make this pillar that's 42 feet high. And amazing. By the way, if you want to know if people were rich in these days, I think you're incredibly rich if you can build something like this as a decorative piece. So we're looking at the people who did this as being incredibly rich to be able to afford not only to get the ore, to make the iron, to have the people then pound it all together and make this, and it's a decorative piece. But the interesting thing is this pillar is still here, never actually corroded away. And for a long time it wasn't known why, but it turns out this high phosphorus content ends up with a phosphate coating on the surface that retards oxidation amazingly. So it's also an early stainless steel in a different way. So this is the developments as we went on. So as I said, we're really following the development of the high-temperature furnace to get to these temperatures. And the fact is that as we did this, and we could form liquid iron, all of a sudden we had a process that could produce iron carbon alloys in bulk. And eventually this became the blast furnace. And here's the blast furnace. And the history of the blast furnace is straightforward. When they started doing shaft furnaces, feeding material in at the top, you put the iron ore in, you'd put the coal in, you'd put some calcium-bearing materials in, and then do it in levels. And you'd blow the gas through it. You would burn the gas at the bottom, get it hot. You'd have a tall enough material so that as it went down, it got hotter and hotter. And then you had a liquid at the bottom. You get two liquids. You get the liquid iron, carbon alloy. And then you get the gang material, which is now reacted with carbon, with calcium, sorry, to form a calcium silicate, a liquid slag. And you could pour the liquid slag off one side. You could pour the liquid metal off the other. And now you had a continuous process. The early days, the problem was actually getting this massive material not to crush. You had to have something that would hold the burden up. And when they discovered that if you would make coke, which is just basically taking the certain coals and heating them up under an atmosphere where there's not enough oxygen, you drive off the volatiles and you end up with a very hard material that actually has the strength to hold the burden above it. So large production capacity came when they had coke. So you're blowing lots of gas in, and you're putting material in, and you're draining things out at the bottom. And then you have this liquid cast iron called hot metal in the industry. And then you cast it into small ingots, which they're called pigs. Therefore, the material that's coming out of this is called pig iron. It's coming from the actual casting process itself. So now you have pig iron. And you can see this is an interesting material. It's 92% iron, 3% to 4% carbon, but it also contains silicon in manganese and phosphorus and sulfur. So it's now an alloy. And this is a starting point to make steel grates. If you look at hydrogen production and where hydrogen can fit in here, well, you really need to have someone produce hydrogen first before you could use hydrogen. So until we get to really the 1800s, there was no obvious ways of getting bulk hydrogen. So no one was working with hydrogen as a process to make steel. But when all of a sudden you could decompose water by catalysis, when you could make hydrogen by putting water onto hot iron, and then eventually when you could make syngas from methane, where you'd end up with a carbon-oxide-hydrogen mixture, you know how to source material to start thinking about processes to make iron that would be reasonable. Obviously, what do you need? You need something that is at the same cost of a process coming from carbon. So the actual development of bulk syngas or bulk hydrogen at a reasonable cost was necessary to go to the next level to make iron in a different way from the blast furnace. And the problem you had, as you always have with all these processes, to start, you had to try and get something that was economically competitive with the current process. And until you do that, you don't have anything. So technical feasibility isn't enough. Economic feasibility is necessary. So that led us to where we are today, where you have two options here. You can have DRI, direct reduced iron, using syngas or hydrogen. Or you can have liquid-iron carbon alloys. That's your two. If you're going to make iron from the ore, this is your options. So this is the mid-rex process, who takes methane, makes syngas, and then reduces iron oxide to form pellets of iron. And then what they do is, at the bottom of the material, they go into something similar to a pinging machine. It's called a briquette machine. And they make what they call HBI, now hot briquetted iron. So you can buy HBI on the market. This is DRI at temperature, just to get an idea. It's little pellets of iron. And these are the ones that are just compacted together to form HBI. Or you buy it this way. Now, one major problem with DRI, it's not stable in air. It's exothermic in reduction. Therefore, transportation of DRI is a major problem. In fact, you have to go through very special permitting to be allowed to transport this stuff because it can self-ignite. And there have been boats sunk by DRI self-igniting in the holds of boats transporting DRI. So that's an interesting issue that you have with DRI. And the amount of iron you have depends on how long it's sitting. So it's 98% iron when you get it. Two weeks later, it might be 97%. A month later, it might be 93%, et cetera. So transportation of this is important if you're a steel maker because you're losing it by it reverting to its natural form because it's a lot of surface area. And then it starts to heat up, it reacts faster. So this is a problem with DRI. So here's HBI, the kind that you can get. I was recently down in Texas at Corpus Christi where Midrex has a plant. And there, they actually take the DRI hot directly to the steel plant that's the new SDI plant. They're in Sinton, Texas. And they get it still hot from the HBI plant and put it into the electric furnace. So there's some issues that I've just gone through for pig iron and DRI. But why is so much interest in this? Because you've got iron. You don't have steel. And you have to eventually make steel. Well, the interest in this is quite straightforward. As we made steel, this is if you have pig iron and you blow air into it first, as Bessemer did, it turns out it's exothermic when you do that. You can take the temperature up and you can take the carbon out and you can form bulk iron. And this was the beginning of the modern iron making and the ability to make bulk steel. And as this was dominating, and Bessemer was an amazing guy, by the way, he invented this in his own. Not a steel maker when he did it, but came up with this whole situation which then eventually they realized you couldn't blow air because you're getting too much nitrogen. And then you blow oxygen so you needed bulk oxygen so you could have the ability to blow oxygen into it. Now, while this is going on, the DRI is not useful to you other than as a feedstock into this pneumatic steel making process if you wanted to add some in. And you could add it into the blast furnace because you could use the blast furnace as a heat source and melt it along with everything else. So there's a potential for doing that. But the other development that's necessary is the electric art furnace. And this is using electricity to heat the material you have. And this led to the ability to recycle. So if you look at this, you're in the 1900s now and actually the first electric art furnace was in Syracuse and this was the first time and all of a sudden there's another way of thinking about steel and that's recycling. You can just remelt it and you can remelt it fairly quickly this way. The problem with remelting before is it was very slow so you could remelt things quickly. So you ended up with two routes and this is the Indiana story of two routes you have the integrated route and you have the UAF production route. And the question is what's going to predominate? Well, that's an economic question first. And it's also a scrap supply question and it's an electricity price question. So when is EF steel dominant? Cheap scrap, cheap electricity. Which countries have cheap electricity in the United States? Which other countries have cheap electricity in the United States? So where is melting dominant as production in the road country? Here in the United States. So there's a scrap availability and there's a cheap electrical source. Therefore, remelting makes sense. But what's the problem with remelting? The problem with remelting is you're remelting scrap which isn't a defined material. And when you remel to everything that's in the scrap ends up in the steel or ends up in the dust or the slag. So the problems that the remelters run into with time is that many grades cannot tolerate copper or nickel. Copper and nickel are very common in the scrap streams. So the only way that they can deal with this is to add clean iron units. So what are the clean iron units? DRI or pig iron. So what do you see happening in electric furnace shops? The need for them to buy DRI and pig iron in order to dilute copper and nickel contents. So here's your electric art furnace. It's carbon rods that go into the steel. Large potential difference, end up with an arc. You press current through it and you have extreme temperature that allows you to melt everything. So that's, and you can melt things very quickly. So when I was at SDI the other week, they were doing 200 tons of steel in 20 minutes. Melting 200 tons of steel in 20 minutes. Think about that. And if you look at these electric furnaces, you're putting scrap and alloys in, you're putting dolomite in to make the slag. You're blowing air or oxygen and also because another heat source is oxidizing iron. That's an exothermic reaction. So you can actually just oxidize some of the iron you're making to get heat. And then you have slag coming off, you have metal coming off, and then you have dust going out the top. So if we look at this, you have these different production technologies. Now obviously, as long as you're getting electricity that doesn't come from carbon, you have a good program with electric art furnaces. So you want to reduce the carbon usage in steel, then remelting if you have scrap availability or you have availability DRI from Zingas is certainly a much lower carbon footprint than you would have any other way. If you're in the integrated process using carbon as your source, you have no choice. There isn't much you can really do to reduce the carbon you're using. And then we look at the industry itself and say, okay, there are these two routes we can remel. If we have the right electricity from the right source, we can have a low carbon impact or we're going to use carbon to actually heat everything up and reduce it. And look at this, how much steel are we actually using? Almost two billion tons here. And now we run into the problem. We're making two billion tons because the world needs two billion tons. And what does it need it for? Infrastructure. China is the largest steel making country in the world. In the last 20 years added the equivalent of the US steel industry's production capacity each year. Think of that. Each year because of the need it had in its own country to build infrastructure. Everyone should know that China went through an amazing thing. The biggest migration of population from the countryside to the city that's ever happened. It will now happen in India. It's happening in India. And then it will happen in Africa. This means that the need for steel to build infrastructure is not going away. Unless we're going to decide that there's somehow this massive amount of cash that's going to use something else to build infrastructure. By the way, it's not obvious what the something else would be. So we're stuck with the industry because humanity needs it. And now we have this problem of how do we actually reduce the carbon content? Well, that's a very difficult thing. Here's what's going on in the world. And we'll look at China predominantly, the integrated route. And very little in the recycling, why? Well, China is building infrastructure. You don't have anything to recycle. It's all new. It's not that they want to do anything. That's just where they are. If you went to the 1930s in the United States, this is what we would have been. Building infrastructure, building roads, building skyscrapers, building everything for people as the population grew and our need for different types of living grew. And that's where China is. And then you can see others. And if you go down them, United States, here we are at the stage where everyone will get to where your integrated route is smaller than your recycle route. But it's a matter of, where are you in the development of infrastructure? Where are you in the recycling of cars? Where are you in the recycling of all of the uses of steel? So this becomes a very difficult problem because you have a situation you need to steal. It's not an option not to have the steel. But you'd like to decrease the carbon. And how do you balance this? The issue is that the balance would perhaps happen if China had more steel to recycle, which will happen in maybe 10 years. This will slowly increase and slowly you'll see China doing much more recycling. But then the question is, do they have the electrical capacity? Do they have the power plants to actually supply the electricity? So this is another issue. For any of you here who's ever worked in electric furnace plants during the summer, you'll find that often they don't actually produce at certain times of the day because the electricity's too expensive. Or because the electricity companies will not supply it to them because they can't supply enough for air conditioning. So even in this country, we have a problem with electrical supply. Think of Texas the other year, two years ago when all of a sudden they didn't have enough electricity because they had gone to a lot of wind energy and it wasn't blowing and they'd gone to a lot of sun power and it wasn't that sunny. And all of a sudden in the winter time they couldn't heat houses. Think of the human problem there. So this is not a straightforward issue to actually reduce it. If we could reduce our need for steel, we could certainly do something. But it's not clear how you do that and still build infrastructure. And there are imports, exports, I think I'll just miss this, to say that we're a net importing country. By purpose. The steel industry decided that it would not satisfy its own internal market. So it could keep its plants running more to higher capacities. Therefore it would accept amount of steel coming into the country. I know there's a lot of discussion goes on about pricing. I'm not talking about pricing. I'm just talking about strategy. The fact is we are a net importing country and always will be unless we change the dynamic, we don't have the ability to actually make enough steel in this country to actually satisfy the market. So what can be done? Well, our friends in Europe have been studying this for a long time and they're saying, how do we reduce it? Well, the first thing they come up with, no surprise, increase recycling. And then you say, what's happening in Europe? Are you increasing recycling? Yes, slowly. And you say, well, why aren't you doing it faster? Well, we don't have the scrap capability. We haven't really built the infrastructure. By the way, electricity is really expensive here. And the other thing is if you remelt steel and it costs more than the integrated route, you won't be doing that long because you can't sell it for more because it was recycled. And the old steel adage is, if you're losing by the ton, you can't make up for it in volume. So you have to be careful here. So this is an interesting dynamic. The dynamic between the primary production and the recycle is in every metal, copper. You can watch the copper mines open and close with the price of scrap. It's an amazing thing. It's the dynamic between scrap pricing and copper and primary production. Steel's the same. Now, the other thing that the Europeans have told us which is pretty obvious is, well, if we have to use carbon, we should collect all the gas. And we should collect all the gas and do something with it. But think about this. This is a lot of gas. A billion, two billion tons of steel being made. This is a tremendous volume of gas that you're going to capture. And it's also hot. So maybe you could do something there to retrieve the energy into electricity, but it's dirty. It's not just CO2, it's COCO2. It's sulfur and it's got other things. You've got to cool it down and then you've got to do something with the gas. And then once you have the gas, you have to decide what process are we going to use to turn the gas into a product? Or are we going to inject it back into the ground so it can leak out? You know, I think this injection stuff's ridiculous. It's coming back out. Come on. Just look at California where we have vibrations all the time from earth tremors. All you need is a tremor of the right size and then it's all back out once you inject it in. So this is going on in Europe. There are plants that are trying to collect all the gas and do something with it. But again, this is an enormous cost in addition to what the cost is now. Not that we shouldn't do it that way. I don't mean that, but we have to realize there's an implication here. And the implication is that now steel is going to be a lot more expensive. And you say to me, well, what does that mean? Well, a pound of steel today is depending on which grade you have is between 40 cents and a dollar. A loaf of bread costs what? Depending on which ones you buy. Maybe the stale stuff you can get for two bucks. Maybe. I know the stuff I buy, you know, it looks as if it's more like 450. So we're talking about a material that's cheaper than bread and made in bulk. And if you change the price of that material locally, you just end up with more imports. If you change it globally, you change the rate of progress of humanity because you can't build infrastructure. This is a difficult problem. The design people call these gnarly problems, which also makes me laugh because gnarly has no meaning, you know, but these are very difficult problems for engineers. How to solve this? It would be easy to say that everyone should just use less, less iron, less steel. Easy, impossible to implement. I mean, let's face it, in this country, we can get people to put a pool over on in the winter and turn the thermostats down. What is the chance we're gonna have to do? And that's simple. And that's really what we're saying is every individual would have to accept they're gonna have less steel in the world and they're not going to supplement it with something else that's worse. It's not easy problems. So as the steel makers come up, the thing is increase DRI, HBI. Okay, so if we look at this, if we're going to significant amounts of DRI and HBI, we now have a problem of investment. Now, we're nowhere near, let's, if we can jump back, look at where we are, you know, for the world. We're 72% of the world is from the integrated route and 28% coming from, you know, the electric art furnace. So to change this and use significant amounts of DRI, we'd have to be building, you know, the capacity for another, at least, the equivalent of what we have, which would mean we'd have to have the equivalent again in DRI facilities, enormous investment. And the question is, where's that coming from? Then you have another problem. The fact is that these steel plants that exist have never gone away in the Great Lakes. They may have changed their name. None of them have gone away. Because fundamentally, the sunk cost of building those is so large, no one's willing to give up the sunk cost. Someone else always thinks they can come in and run the facility better to make money because they're already bought for, they're already paid for, they've already been bought. And this is a major problem in the world is how do you give up on sunk cost? So economics is a major issue here in how we solve this. And actually, I could talk for a lot longer, but I know I meant to stop here. And maybe I'll just stop at this point by saying, yes, we can decrease carbon by recycling, by making HBI, by making DRI. But it's not going to be the quick solution to anything in the steel industry. It is a solution, but not a fast solution. Because it takes a long while to build these plants, it takes a long while to get them permitted. Okay, so it takes a long while to get communities to accept them. I know in Chicago where I am, big problems over where the steel plants were, the US Steel South Works, which is now an empty land and probably will be forever, because of the issues of actually remediation of the site. And then the fact is that most people have built plants in areas where they were underrepresented. And this is not fair and not right. And now we're seeing health issues of these underrepresented communities, much worse than other communities. And that's just a fact. So it's very difficult to find out where you're going to site these. In a cornfield, it looks good until the people round about start realizing what you're doing. So anyway, I'll stop here and take some questions if there are for anyone. And thank you very much. We have time for a couple of questions and then we're going to do a quick polly staff panel. We're going to lean towards students first. Thank you, sir, for this interesting lecture. So my question is, are we ever going to see a time where we use other reducing agent other than carbon, like hydrogen or anything else? Well, I think hydrogen is being used just now. That's where you're getting the DRI from. And there is a plant in one of the Caribbean islands using not just syngas, but hydrogen directly. So yeah, I mean, the other issue is there are other ways of using electricity. You know, you could put everything in an aqueous solution and then reduce it by, you know, the usual electroplating type of technologies. That's possible also, but very slow. You could try to think of developing a technology using electricity in a similar way they produce aluminum. But the problem is aluminum is running plants, you know, 1,000, 1,100 degrees centigrade. Now you're talking about running one because if you're going to make liquid arm at 1,500 degrees centigrade, now you have enormous issues of materials to do that. So I mean, there are people working on these things, you know, so these are options. There were people working before and instead of oxides, making them more sulfides and then reducing the sulfides at low temperatures, which is possible also. So that there are options done, but nothing has reached commercial. This is the world where, you know, let's face it, if we look at any metal that's more stable than iron oxide, we can reduce iron oxide with it. So there are many options. There are just very few options to do in bulk at the scale where we just need the steel for and at a price that's happening with carbon. That's simple. So the answer is very cheap electricity could change everything. Is then you'd have very cheap hydrogen. And then that would maybe develop other technologies also. Okay, yeah. Thank you, great talk. So given that we are using EAF furnace, electric furnaces, then what is the number that the electricity production should not be from coal-based processes for it to be sustainable or for it to make a change in the... Oh, in this country, it already is. And it's an entirely economic issue, right? So the fact is the scraps cheapen off, the electricity's cheapen off the production cost to make steel with electric furnaces at this moment in time, cheaper than from the integrated producers. So the only issue now in growth is, is the scrap supply, is there energy supply? So you have to go to places where there are both, which isn't everywhere. And then do you have the investment capital to build the facilities? And these are, so the new facility that SBI just built, I think is a billion and a half dollars. So these are not small investments because it's not just the reduction you have to build in the post-processing also, the rolling mills, et cetera, and the coating stands. So it's there, it can be done. It's a matter of priority of investment and a matter of local economics. If that answers your question.