A hard look at steel
5/14/202614 min
From cars and ships to bridges and skyscrapers, steel forms the landscape of modern life. At the same time, steelmaking is one of the world’s biggest industrial sources of climate-warming carbon dioxide. Antoine Allanore, a professor of metallurgy at MIT, explains how CO2 became so entrenched in the chemistry of steelmaking—and the creative ways scientists and engineers are trying to get it out.
We gratefully acknowledge Katie Daehn, postdoctoral associate, and Matthew Michalek, Ph.D. student and research assistant, of the Allanore Group for additional assistance and participation in this episode.
For a deeper dive and additional resources related to this episode, visit: https://climate.mit.edu/podcasts/e7-hard-look-steel
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First 90 secondsMadison Goldberg· Host0:01
[music] Last year, the mining industry extracted over two and a half billion tons of iron ore from the earth. Most of that ore was used to make steel, and that steel, about 500 pounds for every person on the planet, became the cars and buildings and bridges that form the landscape of modern life. Welcome to Ask MIT Climate. I'm Madison Goldberg. And this morning, I rode a 60-ton steel train car to work without once thinking about the material that made that trip possible. Today's guest, however, thinks about steel a lot.
Antoine Allanore· Guest0:41
I'm Antoine Allanore. I'm a professor of metallurgy in the MIT Department of Material Science and Engineering. Steel is a product that has a unique [instrumental music] mechanical performance, corrosion performance. It can sustain high temperature, low temperature, uh, magnetic field, electric field. It's also very easy to join. I mean, if you look at the building construction in any modern, uh, city, the rate at which, uh, steel can be erected and welded together is so fast. I mean, it has basically this, uh, versatility that makes it really a unreplaceable material.
Madison Goldberg· Host1:24
It's not an exaggeration to say that without steel, we couldn't live the way