Electrometallurgical Pathways Towards Profitable Sustainability
A sustainable future is a carbon-free electric future. Technologies that will usher in this new era include innovations in energy storage and in steelmaking. Invented at MIT, the liquid metal battery provides colossal power capability on demand and long service lifetime at very low cost and without threat of fire. As an alternative to today’s carbon-intensive thermochemical steelmaking process, molten oxide electrolysis, invented at MIT, produces liquid iron with oxygen as the by-product while delivering better metal at lower cost than the legacy technology while vitiating its negative environmental impacts. In the narratives of both these technologies which trace their origins to chemical metallurgy there are lessons more broadly applicable to innovation: how to pose the right question, how to engage young minds (not experts), how to establish a creative culture so as to invent technology while inventing inventors.
A sustainable future is a carbon-free electric future. Technologies that will usher in this new era include innovations in energy storage and in steelmaking. Invented at MIT, the liquid metal battery provides colossal power capability on demand and long service lifetime at very low cost and without threat of fire. As an alternative to today’s carbon-intensive thermochemical steelmaking process, molten oxide electrolysis, invented at MIT, produces liquid iron with oxygen as the by-product while delivering better metal at lower cost than the legacy technology while vitiating its negative environmental impacts. In the narratives of both these technologies which trace their origins to chemical metallurgy there are lessons more broadly applicable to innovation: how to pose the right question, how to engage young minds (not experts), how to establish a creative culture so as to invent technology while inventing inventors.