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

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.

Helix Carbon’s process relies on an electrolyzer, a device that uses electricity and a catalyst to break off an oxygen atom from the carbon dioxide. Electrolyzers aren’t new, but Brown said the startup’s design can handle the entire exhaust stream from the blast furnace. Most electrolyzers are too delicate for raw exhaust like that. They work only on purified, concentrated carbon dioxide, so the exhaust typically has to be processed before they can use it.

By injecting carbon monoxide into a blast furnace, iron producers can use less coke. How much, exactly, is still debated, Brown said. Some scientific papers suggest as much as 90% of the coke can be eliminated, while other studies suggest it’s more like 30% to 40%. 

Helix Carbon is proposing that iron producers start by replacing 33% of their coke. The company says using its technology to do so would save them $14 per ton of iron. “That may not seem like a lot, but margins in the iron industry are famously thin,” Brown said.

The iron and steel industries are a combined $2 trillion market, according to Grand View Research, which makes the sector an appealing target for a young startup to chase. But it also moves slowly, in part because its equipment lasts so long. “There are blast furnaces that have lived for over 100 years,” Brown said.

To bring in revenue earlier, Helix Carbon plans to court the specialty chemicals industry first. “We don’t need to capture the CO₂ first,” Brown said. “We just utilize it, and that opens up the door of making chemicals on-site right out of waste streams.”

Helix Carbon presented live onstage on Tuesday in the Startup Battlefield pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, taking place this week from October 13-15. Join us this week to watch as the rest of Startup Battlefield unfolds.