“Many reactions that were previously run sequentially though a conventional steelmaking process are now occurring simultaneously, within a single furnace,” Laureen Meroueh explains.
A new way to make steel could reduce America’s reliance on imports
Courtesy of Hertha
Hertha Metals, founded by Laureen Meroueh SM ’18, PhD ’20, uses natural gas and electricity to produce steel and high-purity iron for magnets.
Across the globe, most of today's steel is made in enormous, multi-billion-dollar plants that use a coal-based process that has changed little in 300 years. Meanwhile, the United States is the world’s largest steel importer.
Laureen Meroueh SM ’18, PhD ’20, a MITEI Energy Scholar from 2018-2020, is founder and CEO of a company scaling a new cost-competitive steel production system here in the United States that is powered by natural gas and electricity. MIT-startup Hertha Metals' innovation, which can also run on hydrogen, utilizes a single step steelmaking process. This allows for reductions in both cost and emissions compared to traditional systems. As a MITEI Energy Scholar, Meroueh conducted research on hydrogen fuel.
Read more about this work via MIT News.
