Environmental Impact of Alternative Blast Furnace Ironmaking Materials

SUSTAIN (www.sustainsteel.ac.uk) is an exciting £35M collaborative project between the Universities of Swansea, Warwick and Sheffield working in partnership with the UK steel industry. This EngD project will link to the first grand challenge in the SUSTAIN Hub of 'Zero Waste, Carbon Neutral Iron and Steelmaking' with the aim of decarbonizing iron and steel manufacturing, and so aligns closely to the Advanced Metallics DTC.

Ironmaking uses large amounts of coal & natural gas fossil fuel to sinter iron oxides along with coke and injected coal in the blast furnace. Whilst there are significant commercial & environmental drivers to reduce fossil fuel use, there are also technical challenges related to the use of replacing fossil fuels with alternative materials. Possible alternative materials include biomass, plastics, by-products from other parts of the steel production process, and waste material from other industries.

A key part of assessing the suitability of replacement raw materials in the ironmaking process is an assessment of the environmental impact of the substitute material. The most widely used and accepted technique to assess this type of impact is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). An LCA is a systematic technique used to analyse the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product at all stages across the life cycle chain.

LCA techniques will be employed to compare environmental assessments of current versus proposed blast furnace ironmaking processes with substituted materials in a series of different scenarios. In this way, the impact of replacement materials will be calculated, and so the most promising replacement materials can be identified. Process models will be included to provide information of the environmental impact and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) will be used to test the technical data to provide an analysis of the potential cost benefits of replacing current raw materials. The new work proposed here will focus on the environmental assessment related to changing carbon usage within ironmaking along with the potential impacts on the changing by-products and their fate.

The successful applicant for this PhD will work closely with the research team at Swansea, who are conducting a programme of experimental studies on raw material processing and behaviour under simulated blast furnace conditions, and as such the LCA work in this project will link strongly with the experimental studies. The successful applicant for this post will also have the opportunity to work closely with the wider UK steel industry, in particular the environmental research group at Tata Steel UK, as well as the ironmaking groups at Tata and British Steel.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Advanced Metallic Systems was established to address the metallurgical skills
gap, highlighted in several reports [1-3] as a threat to the competitiveness of UK industry, by training non-materials
graduates from chemistry, physics and engineering in a multidisciplinary environment. Although we will have supplied ~140
highly capable metallurgical scientists and engineers into industry and academia by the end of our existing programme,
there remains a demonstrable need for doctoral-level training to continue and evolve to meet future industry needs. We
therefore propose to train a further 14 UK based PhD and EngD students per cohort as well as 5 Irish students per
cohort through I-Form.

Manufacturing contributes over 10% of UK GVA with the metals sector contributing 12% of this (£10.7BN [4,5]) and
employing ~230,000 people directly and 750,000 indirectly. It is estimated that ~2300 graduates are required annually to
meet present and future growth [5]. A sizeable portion of these graduates will require metallurgical expertise and current
numbers fall far short. From UK-wide HESA data, we estimate there are ~330 home UG/PGT qualifiers in materials and
~35 home doctoral graduates in metallurgy annually, including existing AMSCDT graduates, so it is unsurprising that
industry continues to report difficulties in recruiting staff with the required specialist metallurgical knowledge and
professional competencies.

As well as addressing this shortfall, the CDT will also impact directly on the companies with which it collaborates, on the
wider high value manufacturing sector and on the UK economy as a whole, as follows:

1. Collaborating companies, across a wide range of businesses in the supply chain including SMEs and research
organisations will benefit directly from the CDT through:

- Targeted projects in direct support of their business and its future development and competitiveness.
- Access to the expertise and facilities of the host institutions.
- Involvement in the training of the next generation of potential employees with advanced technical and leadership skills
who can add value to their organisations.

2. The UK High-Value Manufacturing Community will benefit as the CDT will:

- Develop the underpinning science and advanced-level knowledge base required by future high technology areas, where
there is high expectation of gross added value.
- Provide an enhanced route to exploitation, by covering the full spectrum of technology readiness levels.
- Ensure dissemination of knowledge to the sector, through student-led SME consultancy projects, the National Student
Conference in Metallic Materials and industry events.

3. The wider UK economy will benefit as the CDT will:

- Promote materials science and engineering and encourage future generations to enter the field, through outreach
activities developed by the students that will increase public awareness of the discipline and its contribution to modern
life, and highlight its importance to future innovation and technologies.
- Develop and exploit new technologies and products which will help to maintain a competitive UK advanced
manufacturing sector, ensure an internationally competitive and balanced UK economy for future generations and
contribute to technical challenges in key societal issues such as energy and sustainability.

References:
1. Materials UK Structural Materials Report 2009
2. EPSRC Materials International Review 2008
3. EPSRC Materially Better Call 2013
4. The state of engineering, Engineering UK 2017
5. Vision 2030: The UK Metals Industry's New Strategic Approach, Metals Forum