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University of Minnesota's breakthrough reduces CO2 in steel production process.

Nanotechnology

BusinessHonor - UMN Breakthrough Cuts CO2 in Steel Production

Business Honor
01 October, 2025

New hydrogen plasma technique to revolutionize steel-making with lower emissions and energy use.

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities study has presented a revolutionary technique for making iron, the crucial ingredient in steel. For the first time, scientists imaged real-time iron formation at the nanoscale, an advance with the potential to significantly enhance the energy efficiency and environmental impact of steel production. The work appeared recently in Nature Communications and has the potential to revolutionize the international steel-making industry.

The iron and steel sector is the largest industrial source of carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for about 7% of global CO2 emissions. The age-old process of making iron uses coke—a form of coal—to drive off oxygen from iron ore. This process has not changed much in centuries. It is a very dirty process and accounts for a large proportion of global emissions. But the new process that the researchers devised employs hydrogen gas plasma, an ionized gas that breaks down hydrogen molecules into highly reactive hydrogen atoms. When hydrogen atoms are brought into contact with iron ore, they remove oxygen, forming pure iron and water vapor, removing CO2 emissions altogether.

This revolution is not a theoretical advance—it's been achieved in practice. The research team collaborated with Hummingbird Scientific to create a dedicated holder for application in a transmission electron microscope, which enabled them to see at the nanometer scale the interaction between plasma and materials. The previous measures were restricted by the optical resolutions of hundreds of nanometers, roughly a thousand times smaller than the human hair diameter. This new method has an incredible 100 times higher resolution than previously used methods. The technology has the potential to dramatically lower the amount of energy needed to produce steel, reducing the cost and environmental impact of making the metal. It could revolutionize the future of steel manufacturing by encouraging sustainable and efficient practices, with a chance at large-scale industrial use.