Still the Iron Age
Page 1
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
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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.