Ironmaking for steel is a full 8% of global emissions, and is considered a "hard to abate" emissions source by many. A year ago @calvinfo challenged me to make fossil-free iron in my back yard using bio-oil in just 4 days. I laughed at him: making iron isn't like making software. What a hardware n00b. But then I took him seriously for a minute. And it turns out Amazon has propane furnaces available next-day. Ditto crucibles. And ditto iron ore sold as pigment. Also, I know a little place named @CharmIndustrial where I could snag some bio-oil. That's the full shopping list to try to make iron, so to hell with it, let's do it! It ended up taking a few weeks of experimentation. You gotta get the right bake time (faster than you'd think!), you gotta get the right temperature curve (hot fast, but not too hot), and you need the right ratio of bio-oil and iron ore (just guess-and-check across an order of magnitude!) But—and you're not going to believe this—this janky little backyard setup produces 90%+ metallic iron! Verified and repeated by third party labs thanks to Brian Jamieson, our Principal Metallurgist at Charm. Commercial processes yield 92-95%. Now, it's not a scalable process as-is by any stretch of the imagination. And, so back at Charm we're comparing it with other established ironmaking processes that could be modified to run on bio-oil as well. The backyard-inspired version will probably lose on sheer inefficiency. But we learned a lot. And Calvin's point still stands, despite my initial mockery: at least sometimes, you can try novel industrial processes for carbon mitigation right in your own back yard.

On the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), we interviewed Karen Zelmar of @ENERGY. Karen manages the $8.5 billion home efficiency and electrification projects. mailchi.mp/theadhocgroup/ins…