Item — HN Reader

They are trying, and Green Hydrogen will become a reality with a decade for ammonia production, but steel, cement, and other industrial products still have hard carbon fixation dependencies.

Based on dealflow and ongoing projects, most countries are basically assuming 2.1*C by 2050 is the reality and as such, they have an incentive to maximize capacity into the late 2030s and early 2040s.

Think of it like the NPT - those who rushed nuclear weapons capacity by 2000 succeeded with little-to-no ramifications.

You have to remember that we're halfway through 2026, so 2040 is only a little over 13 years away now, and any global consensus will only begin to seriously be negotiated around then add-subtract 5 years.

> When I run the numbers I don't see that. Ammonia is about 18% Hydrogen. Using green hydrogen would cost $500 per ton of ammonia. Putting it in perspective world production of ammonia is about 25kg per capita.

Green Ammonia is still 2x the cost of Grey (coal) Ammonia [0]. This difference is starting to fall (eg. in India the price difference is now 10% [1]), but it will stil take a decade for Green Ammonia to definitively become cheaper than Grey Ammonia, and most National Green Hydrogen strategies don't expect mass domestic capacity to finish being built out until the early-to-mid 2030s.

And this ignores the fact that non-alloy steel (which is the primary steel used for most domestic infra projects across the world from ASEAN to India to Iran to the GCC to Turkiye to Russia to China) cannot be forged without carbon, and the cheapest input for that is metallurgical grade coal.

Everyone is trying to rush as much production capacity as they can before everyone is forced to reach an agreement like the Montreal Protocol even though CFCs impact were know well before it.

[0] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...

[1] - https://jmkresearch.com/green-ammonia-is-only-10-costlier-th...

1 comments

Iron can be produced without coal, because hydrogen can be used for reduction of the iron oxide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_steel#Hydrogen_reduction

The IP is tightly held by a handful of European steelmakers who aren't interested in transferring it abroad as it would remove their CBAM advantage against Asian exporters and completely destroy them and Germany (ThyssenKrupp), Sweden (LKAB, HYBRIT), and Austria (Voestalpine) would lose their temporary competitive advantage.

And all the Asian countries I listed (excluding Australia - who is Asia's Chile) are planning on dramatically expanding domestic steel production over the next decade to help with their infrastructure buildouts, so are primarily using domestic non-alloy steel and cement.

The Asian steelmakers will eventually figure and scale it out, but that will take an additional decade because they also won't transfer IP to their competitors. By that point it will be the late 2030s and in some cases the 2040s.

Intellectual property in making green steel is not the big competitive advantage of European steelmakers. Green steel making is not ultra high-tech product like the ASML photolithography machines. If it would be a big competitive advantage then Thyssenkrupp would not need €2 billion German government state aid for its new green steel plant in Duisburg.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/thyssenkrupp-ad...

"Most of Asia's steelmaking capacity is blast furnace-based, accounting for around 90% of output in China, 73% of output in Japan, 69% in South Korea and 46% in India, according to World Steel. With many of the region's blast furnaces at an early stage in their life cycles, it is unlikely that they would be phased out soon, and so many of the decarbonization efforts are based on the continued use of this production route."

"Overall, the path to decarbonization in the Asian steel sector is fraught with challenges, requiring significant investment and regulatory support to ensure the transition to sustainable practices is both feasible and economically viable."

https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/blog/metals...

So steelmakers in Asia are concentrating on low production costs, steelmakers in Europe are concentrating on low carbon emissions.

> Intellectual property in making green steel is not the big competitive advantage of European steelmakers

It is for ThyssenKrupp (Germany), LKAB (Sweden), HYBRIT (Sweden), and Voestalpine (Austria). Chinese, India, Vietnamese, Saudi, and other steelmakers cannot export their steel and steel products competitively to Europe and their European operations were about to get hit by CBAM related violations (until the EU backed down on carbon emissions regulations a couple weeks ago), which made the EU-27 a captive market for those 4.

> steelmakers in Europe are concentrating on low carbon emissions

Only German, Swedish, and Austrian steelmakers can. Dutch, French, Luxembourgish, and Italian steelmakers (who are all now owned by Asian steelmakers) cannot.

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And this is why nothing will happen with regards to climate change - sovereign corporate interests will always trump global interests.