The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Dell: No steel company is commercializing large-scale blast furnace carbon capture
“There's very little going on in the world of carbon capture in the steel industry right now. There are a there are no large-scale efforts to commercialize this technology. Like, there isn't a single steel company anywhere in the world that's like, we're gonna …”
Dell: Urea Production Should Not Count as Meaningful CO2 Utilization
“A lot of people point to this as, like, the most important CO₂ utilization that is already commercialized in our economy, but that's actually a really problematic way of thinking about it, because the way you make urea, you start with a pure concentrated point…”
Dell: Steelmaking emits more greenhouse gases than anything except electricity
“Making steel emits more greenhouse gases than anything else except making electricity.”
Dell: Almost Every Steel Mill Produces More CO2 Than Steel
“So if you look at, like, the total process Of the iron making and the steel making together for a vet, just like a very typical conventional blast furnace facility, you're usually going to end up with more than two tons of CO two per ton of steel, which is kin…”
Dell: Electrifying a single standard steel mill requires four gigawatts of power
“If you were to fully electrify this process, that might be something like four gigawatts of electricity. Average load. Not peak load. Average load. So we're talking about, like, four nuclear power stations to run one normie steel mill.”
Dell: Boston Metal's commercial iron cell should deploy in one to two years
“We're still waiting for the commercial deployment of the sort of the actual iron-making cell, which should come in the next, I think, year or two, but honestly, you would know better than me.”
Dell: Mass timber substitution is viable only in North America and Northern Europe
“Really, like, North America and maybe some small parts of Northern Europe are the only places in the world that, like, have the trees. And Everywhere else, if you did that, you would be driving deforestation that would make the whole thing counterproductive.”
Dell: Every metal requires more energy to manufacture than steel
“Every metal besides steel requires more energy to make it than steel does”
Dell: Plastics Lifecycle Emissions Could Quadruple to 6.8 Gigatons by 2050
“Current trajectory estimates are that, that, that 1.7 billion tons of CO two that we're emitting today, that might quadruple by 20 50 if something doesn't change.”
Dell: Membrane Separations Could Cut Chemical Process Energy Demand by 90%
“If we could use membranes or non-thermal processes to separate out different chemicals we could potentially cut the total energy demand of those separation processes by 80 to 90%.”
Replacing Chemical Feedstocks Requires Half of the Global Sustainable Biomass Supply
“Currently the chemical industry uses something like 30 exajoules of energy, of fossil energy, for feedstocks, just for feedstocks. And the International Energy Agency estimates that the total amount of biomass available for use for energy everywhere on Earth i…”
Dell: A Decarbonized Chemical Industry Will Have to Charge Higher Prices
“I think that the future chemical industry is just going to have to sell its products at higher prices than they are currently.”
Dell: Plastic Prevents Organic Waste Decomposition in Landfills, Causing Methane Emissions
“What we actually do is we mix the plastic in with organic waste and put that in the landfill, and because there's all this plastic mixed in with the organic waste doesn't have any access to oxygen, and so it decomposes anaerobically and emits all of its carbon…”
Dell: Steel is the most recycled material in the world
“Steel is actually the most recycled material of all, full stop.”
Dell: Rich countries recycle about 85% of end-of-life steel
“In places where we have good statistics, which tend to be higher income countries, we usually find something like 85% of end-of-life steel Is collected and recycled. That's probably pretty close to a practical limit. We might be able to push that up to 90%, bu…”
Dell: Steel demand saturates once countries reach high-income status
“Demand for steel tends to saturate. So, you know, of all the things that I listed, like, ah, you know, buildings, infrastructure, vehicles, ah, equipment, those are things that, like, when a country moves from being low income to being middle income, They're b…”
Dell: Existing DRI furnaces can handle up to 70% hydrogen without changes
“The companies that make these furnaces, they all say that, like, basically you can get up to 70% hydrogen with no changes. You can just keep operating your furnace as normal with up to 70% hydrogen”
Dell: The steel industry universally believes hydrogen DRI is technically viable
“I have talked to at least dozens of people in the steel industry over the years, and I've literally never heard anybody be like, I don't think hydrogen DRI is going to work. Everybody believes it will work.”
Dell: Six large-scale hydrogen DRI steel projects are under development globally
“Now maybe we can claim that there are six, kind of, Serious, large-scale hydrogen DRI projects that are underdeveloped development, underdevelopment development around the world. There's two in Sweden, two in Germany, and two in the U.S.”
Dell: Buildings use 50% to 100% more structural material than codes require
“When people do studies on these type of thing, they typically find that buildings use between 50 and a hundred percent more structural material than is required to comply with building codes, and they do that because the structural material, mainly steel and c…”
Dell: Fertilizer and Plastics Cause 80% of Chemical Sector Emissions
“Depending on exactly how you count it, fertilizer and plastic usually comes out to be like between 75 and 80% of all the GHGs from the whole sector.”
Dell: Global Ammonia Production Generates 1.5% of Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions
“Ammonia is the chemical, the single chemical product that we make in the largest quantity. We make almost two hundred million tons a year of ammonia globally, and it's responsible for like one and a half percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, just ammonia.”
Dell: US Upstream Methane Leakage Doubles Climate Impact of Fossil Inputs
“In the U.S., that's like two and a half percent average leakage rates. That can, over a 20 or 30 year lifetime, that can double the climate impact of your fossil fuel inputs, which is, so if we don't talk about the upstream leakage and we don't account for tha…”
Dell: 60% of Chemical Fossil Inputs Become Products, Not Atmospheric Emissions
“We're only burning about 40% of it for energy. The other 60% of it, we're actually converting into the products themselves. So plastics are carbon-based chemicals. Where do we get all those carbon atoms? We get them from the fossil fuel inputs. And so this is …”
Dell: Commercial Electric Crackers Do Not Exist Due to High Electricity Costs
“Nobody's bothered to commercialize a Electric cracker because right now electricity is way more expensive, and so it wouldn't be cost effective even if it worked. And there are, like, while the process technologies exist, they are not mature because nobody's e…”
Dell: 50% Green Ethylene Premium Adds Under One Cent Per Beverage Bottle
“Even if we're talking about a 50% premium on the, you know, for green ethylene, that still works out to be less than a penny on your bottle of you know, your beverage in a PET bottle.”
Dell: Only 8% of All Historically Produced Plastic Has Been Recycled
“So we think that, like, over the whole history of the world, we've made about six and a half billion tons of plastic. About five billion of those tons are still around. And they are either in landfills or just, like, dispersed in the environment. They are plas…”
Dell: Only 4% of US Post-Consumer Plastic Is Actually Recycled
“Here in the U.S., The EPA estimates that only eight or nine percent of plastic is collected for recycling at the end of its life, and then only about half of that actually gets recycled, and the thing and the product that we get at, out of the end, at the end …”
Dell: Germany Uses More Disposable Plastic Packaging Than Most EU Nations
“Germany uses more disposable plastic packaging per capita than almost any other country in Europe.”
Dell: Plastics Industry Lags Behind Metals in Climate Tech Readiness
“And I do think that the plastics industry is, like, Less advanced than, for example, the metals industries. In terms of how far we have to go to get to a climate safe solution.”
Dell: Seven Precursor Chemicals Account for 75% of Sector Greenhouse Gas Emissions
“Seven chemicals in Gets you three quarters of the greenhouse gas emissions. And so, sure, there's a lot of other, a lot of things, a lot of products, a lot of things that the chemical industry does, but if we can make substantial progress on seven chemicals, t…”
Dell: Global steel emissions exceed four billion tons of CO2 equivalent annually
“The total emissions of the global steel industry from all sources is a bit more than four billion tons of CO₂ equivalent every year, which means that it's, you know, maybe like eight-ish percent of, ah, greenhouse gas emissions, depending on exactly how you co…”
Dell: Over 90% of Virgin Iron Is Made in Blast Furnaces
“So, the iron making process, that's really where the major driver of all the greenhouse gas emissions from the, ah, the steel industry come from, and more than 90% of iron made today is made with a single piece of equipment, which is called the blast furnace.”
Dell: Current DRI Technology Requires Higher-Grade Iron Ore Than Blast Furnaces
“The current DRI technology requires a higher quality iron ore than a blast furnace does, and so it, we could not take, if we were just gonna use the iron ore that we are currently mining, we can't straightforwardly just put all of that in a shaft furnace”
Dell: Electrolysis to hydrogen incurs a 25% to 30% energy conversion loss
“If we can save the, like, 25 or 30% of the electricity that we would lose converting to hydrogen in the middle, that would be very valuable.”
Dell: Half of global steel is produced in China
“Geographically, half of all the steel in the world is made in China.”
Dell: Germany pledged €3B in subsidies for Thyssenkrupp and Salzgitter hydrogen DRI
“And so they have pledged three billion euros of support to these two German companies a combination of both capital support and hydrogen subsidies for them to do commercial scale hydrogen DRI projects.”
Dell: The Global Plastics Lifecycle Emits 1.7 Gigatons of CO2 Annually
“If you look at just the production phase of plastics around the world, we are talking about, you know, something in the neighborhood of Nine hundred million tons of CO₂ that's getting emitted, but if you look at the whole life cycle, estimates are more like 1.…”
Dell: Electricity Supplies Only 10% of Total Chemical Sector Inputs
“40% of the total inputs are being used for energy, so 10% of the total inputs, so a quarter of the energy, is, today it's electricity.”
Dell: Producing One Ton of Plastic Precursor Requires Four Tons of Biomass
“To make one ton of these high-value chemicals that we've been talking about, these plastic precursor chemicals, is going to require between three and four tons of dry biomass. It's only gonna require, like, 1.2 tons of petroleum product.”