Many Green Cement Roads Lead Through Electric Arc Steel Furnaces

ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image of an electric arc furnace cauldron with slag forming on the surface, while a cement truck is standing by

The main ingredients in Portland cement are calcium from limestone, iron oxide, silica from sand, and alumina from clay. That should clarify why a lot of cement nerds are looking at EAF slag and EAF furnaces with appreciative eyes. This popped for me with the trigger for my personal cement week, news of a Cambridge UK academic team’s use of EAF furnaces to somehow recycle concrete. It’s taken me a while to get back to them, but today is the day.

They mix this powder with the melted steel instead of limestone. When the slag forms and is cooled off, it’s effectively just chunks of activated cement that can be ground like clinker out of a clinker kiln. No limestone with its surplus-to-requirements carbon, so no additional process carbon dioxide. This process, where it could be used, would eliminate process limestone emissions from EAF steel, bringing its carbon debt down to a more manageable 0.02 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of steel.

To be clear, that would displace 85 million tons of carbon dioxide from cement manufacturing and another 37 million tons from EAF steel manufacturing, around 120 million tons or 0.3% of total global emissions of carbon dioxide. That’s 2% of cement manufacturing emissions. That’s pretty good, but it’s an order of magnitude off of what the Cambridge team is claiming. It’s unclear how they worked up those numbers.

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