About 15 years ago a major engineering firm developed an alternative ironmaking technology that was supposed to help steelmakers overcome the inherent costs and liabilities of their front-end processes. It would have allowed electric furnace operators to wean themselves from scrap steel, and allowed oxygen furnace operators to produce iron without depending on coke. More important at that time was that it was seen as a cost-effective, clean alternative to blast furnaces, which are expensive to operate and maintain.

The process I'm describing works perfectly well, by the way, and it has been adopted by a handful of big steelmakers overseas. But, despite lots of talk it was never adopted in the U.S., and the reason is that it produced too much surplus natural gas.

Mind you, that gas was supposed by the process developers to be an advantage. Their proposals involved co-generating plants to convert the gas to heat and/or electricity, but domestic steelmakers didn’t see the advantage. Too much trouble handling all that "surplus energy." Perhaps they would have a different reaction today, but the've moved on. Their blast furnaces are still operating, mostly very efficiently thanks to other approaches.

I thought of all this when I read this article in a so-called "mainstream" outlet, which makes some assumptions and takes a few whacks at industrial operations for wasting energy. A follow-on blogger theorized, interestingly, that regulatory hassles inhibit manufacturers from adopting more energy-recovery tactics.

Without conceding the premise that "energy recovery" is not happening, I can think of several more immediate reasons why foundries and steelmakers don’t engage in more of it:
• It’s not the business they’re in, and they don’t have the capital resources to devote to what amounts a secondary line of business. If they have that capital, there is a long list of more pressing needs.
• Likewise, foundries and steelmakers typically don’t have the human resources to devote to a secondary business line.
• Finally, there’s no certainty that the utilities with which foundries and steelmakers work will want to buy the energy that may be generated (to them, it’s a comparatively small amount, and not always reliable), or credit it back to their industrial customers.

Defining wasted process energy as a problem because of some environmental concern is no way to get manufacturers to effectuate solutions. They have a different perspective on  "the problem."

There is a lot to be accomplished in optimizing energy usage, however — we’ve covered that subject, by the way — which is a much more direct approach to a perceived problem. More to the point, there are companies working on this, and when there are partners willing to work with manufacturers to recover and or convert process energy in responsible and efficient ways, they’ve shown a willingness to do it. But, everyone ought to understand what business they are in.