Let’s face it: pyro-metallurgical operations are among the most polluting industrial activities on earth. Iron and steelmaking alone are responsible for about 7-8% (by volume) of all the anthropogenic emissions every year. Most of the actual processes in operation (such as blast furnaces, Hall-Heroult electrolysis cells, copper smelters, etc.) have been developed in the past century by brilliant scientists and engineers who wanted to make earth a better place. Unfortunately, the constraints imposed on their innovation at that time were driven by economics and productivity, in a world viewed as having infinite natural resources.
Humanity now realizes that this set of constraints in the development of industrial processes led to the massive use of cheap and available reactants such as carbonaceous materials to heat and reduce, air to oxidize, carbonates to produce cement as well as oxide and sulfides to extract valuable metals. As a direct consequence, CO2, SO2, NOx and other gaseous species have been dejected to the atmosphere in massive amounts, leading to the actual climate crisis.
In 2022, can we still constrain our brilliant scientists and engineers by economics and productivity hoping they would get different results? In this context, Human intelligence (HI) and Human creativity (HC) should be used to define new sets of constraints for driving paradigm shifts in the design of greener pyrometallurgical processes.
This talk explores the different actions and technologies that could be integrated in the future to reduce the footprint of pyrometallurgical activities with a particular focus on the iron and steel industry. Computational thermochemistry tools built in our group (the Centre for Research in Computational Thermochemistry) to assist in the development of these new processes are also presented.
Biography
Jean-Philippe Harvey is an associate professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at Polytechnique Montréal with an expertise in material sciences and computational thermochemistry. He started his academic career in the department in 2016 after his journey as a postdoctoral fellow at CALTECH and Mcgill respectively. He currently holds a Philanthropic Chair in Material Sciences at Polytechnique Montreal thanks to the Lecuyer’s family. This philanthropic chair focuses on the recycling of metals and glass, as well as on the valorization of residual heat from pyrometallurgical processes. He is also collaborating, via other governmental fundings, with important international actors in the pyrometallurgical field such as ArcelorMittal, Constellium, Rio Tinto, Alcoa, Hydro-Aluminum and Elysis.
