The iron and steel industries are among the biggest polluters in the world. Plenty of startups have tried to cut the industry’s emissions, mostly by developing new ways to make the metals. Helix Carbon thinks those startups have been going about it all wrong.
“Any attempt to decarbonize the steel industry without dealing with the blast furnace is not going to work,” David Brown, Helix Carbon’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. A blast furnace is the giant furnace that turns iron ore into the iron used to make steel. Rather than replace blast furnaces, Helix wants to clean them up. Its approach promises to slash the steel industry’s carbon emissions while boosting profit margins for iron producers, a rare win-win for a dirty industrial process.
