Still the Iron Age

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by Vaclav Smil




  Still the Iron Age

  Iron and Steel in the Modern World

  Vaclav Smil

  Table of Contents

  Cover image

  Title page

  Copyright

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Previous Works by The Author

  Chapter 1. Iron and Steel Before the Eighteenth Century: Slow Adoption, Artisanal Production, and Scaling-Up

  Abstract

  Bloomery Iron

  Blast Furnaces

  Charcoal

  Premodern Steel

  Chapter 2. Rise of Modern Ferrous Metallurgy, 1700–1850: Coke, Blast Furnaces, and Expensive Steel

  Abstract

  European and British Ironmaking before 1750

  British Transition to Coke

  Larger Furnaces and Hot Blast

  Wrought Iron

  Chapter 3. Iron and Steel Before WW I, 1850–1914: The Age of Affordable Steel

  Abstract

  Blast Furnaces

  Inexpensive Steel: Bessemer Converters and Open Hearths

  New Markets for Steel

  Steel in Transportation and Construction

  Chapter 4. A Century of Advances, 1914–2014: Changing Leadership in Iron and Steel Industry

  Abstract

  From WW I to the End of WW II

  America’s Postwar Retreat

  Japan in the Lead

  Chinese Dominance

  Chapter 5. Modern Ironmaking and Steelmaking: Furnaces, Processes, and Casting

  Abstract

  New Blast Furnaces

  Direct Reduced Iron

  Basic Oxygen Furnaces

  Electric Arc Furnaces

  Continuous Casting

  Diffusion and Improvements

  Chapter 6. Materials in Modern Iron and Steel Production: Ores, Coke, Fluxes, Scrap, and Other Inputs

  Abstract

  Materials for BFS and BOFS

  Material Balances of Integrated Steelmaking

  Steel Scrap

  Material Balances of EAFs

  Chapter 7. Energy Costs and Environmental Impacts of Iron and Steel Production: Fuels, Electricity, Atmospheric Emissions, and Waste Streams

  Abstract

  Energy Accounting

  Energy Cost of Steelmaking

  Air and Water Pollution and Solid Wastes

  Life Cycle Assessments

  Chapter 8. Ubiquitous Uses of Steel: Sectoral Consumption and the Quest for Quality

  Abstract

  Infrastructures and Buildings

  Fuels and Electricity

  Transportation

  Industrial Equipment and Consumer Products

  Chapter 9. Looking Back: Advances, Flows and Stocks

  Abstract

  A Century and a Half of Modern Steel

  Industry’s State

  Flows and Consumption Rates

  Steel Stocks

  Chapter 10. Looking Ahead: The Future of Iron and Steel

  Abstract

  Substitutions

  Dematerialization

  New Processes

  Future Requirements

  Appendix A. Units and Their Multiples and Submultiples

  Basic SI Units

  Other Units Used in the Text

  Multiples Used in the SI

  Submultiples Used in the SI

  Appendix B. Some Basic Terms

  Appendix C. Global and National Production of Pig Iron and Steel, 1800–2015

  Appendix D. Production of Crude Steel, 1900–2014 (All figures in Mt/year)

  References

  Index

  Copyright

  Butterworth-Heinemann is an imprint of Elsevier

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  This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein).

  Notices

  Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

  Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

  To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

  ISBN: 978-0-12-804233-5

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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  Preface and Acknowledgments

  My books are expressions of my preference for writing about fundamental realities, be they natural or anthropogenic, and their complex interactions. That is why I have written extensively on the Earth’s biosphere and its transformations by humans, on production of foods and changing diets, on energy resources and on material foundations of our civilization. Besides dealing with these matters in systematic, universal and generalized manner (the best example would be General Energetics, Global Ecology, Feeding the World, Energy in Nature and Society, Harvesting the Biosphere and Making the Modern World) I have taken some closer looks, writing books focusing on specific fundamentals of modern civilization: on wood and other biofuels (Biomass Energies), oil (Oil: A Beginner’s Guide), natural gas (Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century), ammonia (Enriching the Earth), Diesel engines and gas turbines (Prime Movers of Globalization), and meat (Should We Eat Meat?). This book is simply a continuation of my efforts to deal with such fundamental realities and it has been on my list of to do items since the early 1990s when I began to study the long history and remarkable accomplishments of iron smelting and steel making.

  Those who appreciate the physical foundations of modern societies do not need any convincing about the topic’s importance. Those who think that mobile phones and Facebook and Twitter accounts are the fundamentals as well as the pinnacles of modern civilization might find the book about iron and steel inexplicably antiquated: their realities appear to be purely silicon-based. But that, of course, demonstrates deep lack of understanding of how the world works. Modern civilization could exist quite well without mobile phones and “social media”; indeed, in the first instance it did so until the 1990s (beginning of large-scale adoption of cellphones) and in the second instance until the late 2000s (when the Facebook membership took off). In contrast, none of its great accomplishments—its surfeit of energ
y, its abundance of food, its high quality of life, its unprecedented longevity and mobility and, indeed, its electronic infatuations—would be possible without massive smelting of iron and production (and increasingly also recycling) of steel.

  In the 1830s Danish archeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) distinguished three great civilization eras based on their dominant hard materials, with the Bronze Age following the Stone Age and preceding the Iron Age (Thomsen, 1836). Transition from stone to bronze began about 3300 BCE in the Near East and just a bit later in Europe, the onset of Iron Age was around 1200 BCE but it took another 700–1000 years before the metal became dominant throughout Asia and Europe. When Thomsen made his division, the Iron Age was mostly 2000–2500 years old, but the time of the greatest dependence on the metal was still to come, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century no other material has emerged to end that dominance. Ours is—still and more than ever—the Iron Age although most of the metal is now deployed as many varieties of steel, alloys of iron and carbon (typically less than 2% C) and often of other metals that impart many desirable qualities absent in pure elemental iron.

  The great nineteenth-century surge in iron smelting and steel production continued during the twentieth century as the long-lasting US technical leadership shifted to Japan after 1960. Four decades later the rapid expansion of China’s economy brought the iron and steel output to unprecedented levels during the first decade of the twenty-first century. By 2015 iron ore extraction was more than 2 billion tonnes (Gt), the mass surpassed only by the annual output of fossil fuels and bulk construction materials; pig (cast) iron production (smelting of iron ores in blast furnaces) rose to more than 1 Gt; and the global steel output (from pig iron or from recycled metal) reached about 1.7 Gt. That output was about 60 times higher than in 1900, and roughly 20 times larger than the aggregate smelting of aluminum, copper, zinc, lead and tin. And in per capita terms worldwide steel output rose by an order of magnitude, from 20 kg/year in 1900 to about 230 kg/year by 2010.

  Perhaps the best way to stress the importance of steel in modern society is to note that so many components, parts, machines and assemblies are made of steel and that just about everything around us is made or moved with it. Although naked steel is not uncommon—ranging from such small items as needles, pins, nails, construction, laboratory and medical tools to slender broadcasting towers, wires, cables, rails and bridge spans and girders—most of the metal incorporated in modern products is hidden (inside structures as reinforcing bars in concrete, skeletons of large buildings, inside machines as engines and turbines or underground in piles, pipelines, tunnels and mine props) or covered by layers of paint (welded ship hulls, construction machinery, cars, appliances, storage tanks).

  The list of items and services whose reliability and affordability have been made possible by steel is nearly endless as critical components of virtually all mining, transportation and manufacturing machines and processes are made of the metal and hence a myriad of non-steel products ranging from ammonia (synthesized in large steel columns) to wooden furniture (cut by steel saws), and from plastic products (formed in steel molds) to textiles (woven on steel machines). And steel’s qualities have improved as its uses have spread. High strength steel forms the skeletons of skyscrapers and prevents ceilings from caving in in deep coal mines; when alloyed with Cr, Mn, Ni, V, and other metals specialty steels can be used in corrosive environment or operate under high temperatures and pressures, such as stainless steel blades of large steam turbines that are the world’s dominant generators of electricity. Woven steel cables suspend the world’s longest bridges and steel makes up the bulk of products ranging from oceangoing vessels, cars, refrigerators, and productive assemblies ranging from large refineries to massive offshore oil drilling rigs.

  The verdict is easy: although the last two generations have seen an enormous amount of attention paid to many admirable advances in electronics, affluent civilization without microchips and ubiquitous telecommunication is perfectly possible; in contrast, modern high-income, high-energy societies would be impossible without steel. First things first: ours is still very much the Iron Age, and this book will trace its genesis, slow pre-industrial progress, revolutionary advances during the nineteenth century and their further magnification during the past five generations. Afterwards I will look at the patterns of modern steel production, the metal’s ubiquitous uses, potential substitutions, advances in relative dematerialization and, without any counterproductive time-specific forecasting, I will close the book with a brief appraisal of steel’s possible futures.

  My thanks to six people who have taken care of this book’s illustrations: Anu Horsman and Ian Saunders arranged the rights for Corbis images; Hiroyuki Tezuka and Naoyuki Haraoka secured all Japanese photographs; and Evan Kuz and Neil Smalley took care of the graphs. I also thank to several anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to shape the book’s final content.

  Previous Works by The Author

  China’s Energy

  Energy in the Developing World (edited with W. Knowland)

  Energy Analysis in Agriculture (with P. Nachman and T. V. Long II)

  Biomass Energies

  The Bad Earth

  Carbon Nitrogen Sulfur

  Energy Food Environment

  Energy in China’s Modernization

  General Energetics

  China’s Environmental Crisis

  Global Ecology

  Energy in World History

  Cycles of Life

  Energies

  Feeding the World

  Enriching the Earth

  The Earth’s Biosphere

  Energy at the Crossroads

  China’s Past, China’s Future

  Creating the 20th Century

  Transforming the 20th Century

  Energy: A Beginner’s Guide

  Oil: A Beginner’s Guide

  Energy in Nature and Society

  Global Catastrophes and Trends

  Why America Is Not a New Rome

  Energy Transitions

  Energy Myths and Realities

  Prime Movers of Globalization

  Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts (with K. Kobayashi)

  Harvesting the Biosphere

  Should We Eat Meat?

  Power Densities

  Natural Gas

  Chapter 1

  Iron and Steel Before the Eighteenth Century

  Slow Adoption, Artisanal Production, and Scaling-Up

  Abstract

  We can only guess at the beginnings of metal smelting in Neolithic societies. Were the minerals containing metals with low melting points accidentally present in or near fire pits used for heat of for searing meat, and did their melting attract the attention of people tending the fires? Did curiosity lead people to throw colored minerals into fires to see what will happen? Or did the discoveries of naturally occurring nuggets, crystals, or lumps of native metals (copper, gold, silver, lead, tin) lead to deliberate experimentation with minerals (metallic ores) that contained small particles of those elements? And once melting of some materials was discovered, were not attempts at their deliberate smelting almost inevitable? Craddock (1995) thinks that was almost certainly the case.

  Keywords

  Charcoal making; bloomery iron; smelting; premodern steel; blast furnaces

  We can only guess at the beginnings of metal smelting in Neolithic societies. Were the minerals containing metals with low melting points accidentally present in or near fire pits used for heat or for searing meat, and did their melting attract the attention of people tending the fires? Did curiosity lead people to throw colored minerals into fires to see what will happen? Or did the discoveries of naturally occurring nuggets, crystals, or lumps of native metals (copper, gold, silver, lead, tin) lead to deliberate experimentation with minerals (metallic ores) that contained small particles of those elements? And once melting of some materials was discovered, were not attempts at their deliberate s
melting almost inevitable? Craddock (1995) thinks that was almost certainly the case.

  What we know for certain is that the earliest evidence of exploiting native metal—as beads of malachite and native copper in southeastern Turkey—goes as far back as 7250 BCE (Scott, 2002). Because copper often occurs with arsenic and the eutectic point (the lowest melting temperature) of Cu–As alloys is just 685°C, the first bronzes, encountered at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE in many settlements in Mesopotamia, were variants of this natural combination. Bronzes that eventually gave the name to the first metallic age were alloys of copper and tin (with the eutectic point at 910°C), and they were introduced throughout the region around 3500 BCE (De Ryck, Adriaens, & Adams, 2005).

  While the protometal cultures (up to the 5th millennium BCE) were confined to Mesopotamia and southeast Turkey, the copper age (5th millennium BCE) extended into the Nile Valley, Southeastern Europe, and the steppes north of the Black Sea, cultures of the early bronze age (4th millennium BCE) occupied large parts of southern and eastern Europe and reached eastward to the Indus Valley, the middle bronze age (3rd millennium BCE) included nearly all Europe except for Scandinavia as well as parts of China, and the societies of the late bronze age (2nd millennium BCE) were found across Eurasia, from Portugal to Korea and from southern Siberia to India and Ethiopia (Chernykh, 2014).

  But despite this lengthy smelting experience, the transition from the reliance on bronze to societies whose dominant metal was iron took typically many hundreds of years, in some cases an entire millennium. Again, the Middle Eastern civilizations pioneered the process, and again, the first manufactured iron objects were made from native iron: the oldest known iron artifacts are nine tubular Egyptian beads made from meteoritic iron (characterized by large crystal grain size and high nickel content), and reliably dated to about 3200 BCE (Rehren et al., 2013). The beads were discovered in 1911, and their shape was made by multiple cycles of rolling and annealing.

 

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