A hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.
Its future, however, may hinge upon $500 million in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.
In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.
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When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”
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I had the same skepticism, so I looked into it. The TL;DR is that this isn’t that. It’s not using the hydrogen as a fuel source; it’s using it as reactant in the reduction reaction that produces metallic iron from iron oxide, so that it does { FexOy + H2 ⟶ Fe + H2O } instead of { FexOy + CO ⟶ Fe + CO2 }.
(For the record: I completely agree with everything you wrote, except for the small mistake of assuming “hydrogen powered shit” was an accurate description of this particular project.)
TIL!
Thanks for the links