This startup just hit a big milestone for green steel production

The latest milestone means that Boston Metal just got one step closer to commercializing its technology. The company’s process uses electricity to make steel, and depending on the source of that electricity, it could mean cleaning up production of one of the most polluting materials on the planet. The world produces about 2 billion metric tons of steel each year, emitting over 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the process. While there are still a lot of milestones left before reaching the scale needed to make a dent in the steel industry, the latest run shows that the company can scale up its process. Boston Metal started up its industrial reactor for steelmaking in January, and after it had run for several weeks, the company siphoned out roughly a ton of material on February 17. (You can see a video of the molten metal here. It’s really cool.) Work on this reactor has been underway for a while. I got to visit the facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 2022, when constructio ... Read full article.