Helix Carbon says it can make iron cheaper by recycling blast furnace pollution

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The iron and steel industries are among the biggest polluters in the world. Plenty of startups have tried to cut the industry’s emissions, mostly by developing new ways to make the metals. Helix Carbon thinks those startups have been going about it all wrong.

“Any attempt to decarbonize the steel industry without dealing with the blast furnace is not going to work,” David Brown, Helix Carbon’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. A blast furnace is the giant furnace that turns iron ore into the iron used to make steel. Rather than replace blast furnaces, Helix wants to clean them up. Its approach promises to slash the steel industry’s carbon emissions while boosting profit margins for iron producers, a rare win-win for a dirty industrial process.

Blast furnaces have made iron for centuries, using coke, a processed form of coal, to help turn raw iron ore (iron bound up with oxygen) into metallic iron. The burning coke supplies heat for the reaction but doesn’t take part in it directly. Instead, carbon monoxide produced from the combustion does the work of reducing the iron, meaning stripping away its oxygen atoms.

The process releases tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, or CO2, which is normally dumped straight into the atmosphere. But Helix Carbon has devised a way to turn that waste carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and recycle it back into the blast furnace.