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Titanium Metals Company, higher generally known as Timet, is establishing a brand new manufacturing unit on the positioning of a former aluminum smelter in West Virginia. Ordinarily, a brand new enterprise like that might notify the native utility firm that its wants a considerable amount of electrical energy to energy its furnaces, and the utility firm would take it from there. However Timet is doing issues in a different way. It’s working with BHE Renewables to put in a photo voltaic and battery storage system subsequent door. Each Trimet and BHE Renewables are Berkshire Hathaway corporations. Because the Trimet operation expands, the photo voltaic and battery set up will develop proper together with it to provide its electrical wants within the years forward.
There are a number of issues occurring right here. One, this association is among the many first within the US to straight energy a big industrial facility utilizing photo voltaic plus storage know-how. Builders say they hope the setup can function a mannequin for future manufacturing vegetation as the US ramps up home manufacturing of electrical automobiles, photo voltaic panels, batteries, and the metal, aluminum, and different important supplies used to make them. Two, it’s a shot throughout the bow of the utility trade, a warning that their enterprise mannequin is weak to new concepts.
Native Versus Distant Energy
Initially of the so-called Industrial Revolution, water wheels had been the supply of energy for mills. Later, steam took over. Each had been strictly native energy sources. However electrical energy is completely different. It may be transmitted by wires over lengthy distances, which provides some folks the concept that we may energy New York Metropolis with solar energy from California. Whereas that’s technically doable, it means constructing 1000’s of miles of recent transmission strains. Not solely is doing so frightfully costly, it raises the hackles of individuals close to these transmission strains who don’t a lot look after the concept of seeing towers and wires out their home windows. Getting renewable power tasks to {the electrical} grid can be a torturous course of that may take years.
Creating electrical energy proper subsequent to the place it’s wanted solves a variety of these points. It additionally offers massive customers of electrical energy the satisfaction of understanding the value they pay for it is going to be steady for 20 years or extra. Dan Winters, vice chairman of communications and public relations for BHE Renewables, instructed Canary Media the Timet challenge in West Virginia “demonstrates the ability of a microgrid to meet industrial customers’ demands, including … delivering renewables where and when they are needed, and driving economic revitalization through manufacturing backed by clean energy. He added that building an on-site microgrid improves “time to power,” that means the period of time it takes to construct and join power assets. At present, connecting photo voltaic, wind, and storage tasks on to {the electrical} grid sometimes takes greater than three years, owing to the rising backlog of recent power tasks looking for transmission connections.
Native photo voltaic for native clients. What an idea! In fact, it helps that the Timet manufacturing unit is situated on 2000 acres of a former industrial web site. Not each producer may have that luxurious. Timet mentioned its new plant will embrace two forms of electricity-driven furnaces to generate intense warmth for melting titanium sponge and scrap. Initially, the melting plant is anticipated to wish round 18 megawatts of energy to function, earlier than ramping as much as its full capability of 106 MW by the top of 2027. The photo voltaic microgrid will scale up in lockstep with Timet’s operations.
When absolutely constructed, the BHE Renewables challenge will embrace a 106 MW photo voltaic array and a battery power storage system with the capability of to ship 50 MW of electrical energy for 5 hours. The batteries are anticipated to make use of lithium iron phosphate know-how. The provider of the batteries has not be introduced. The photo voltaic plus battery system will present the “consistent, reliable power supply” that melting furnaces require at a value that’s akin to conventional energy sources,” mentioned David Dugan, director of company communications for Timet’s guardian firm, Precision Castparts Corp.
The Titanium Conundrum
As a metallic, titanium is twice as sturdy as aluminum. It’s practically as sturdy as metal however weights solely half as a lot. So why isn’t it used extra? Primarily as a result of making titanium requires monumental quantities of electrical energy, which makes it too costly for many potential functions. “Titanium should be used a lot more in our daily lives and in the industry,” given its constructive qualities, in line with Zhigang Fang, an skilled in titanium metallurgy and a professor on the College of Utah in Salt Lake Metropolis. “But it’s only a tiny fraction compared to steel, and that’s because it is very expensive.” He estimated {that a} kilogram of major titanium metallic prices about 20 instances greater than a kilogram of metal.
Titanium happens within the earth’s crust primarily within the type of ilmenite, a heavy, opaque mineral that’s primarily mined in China, Mozambique, South Africa, and Canada. As a chemical aspect, titanium quickly reacts with oxygen within the air, which creates the compound titanium dioxide. To take away the oxygen, corporations use what’s generally known as the Kroll course of. To begin, titanium ore is heated to 1,800 levels Fahrenheit and reacted with chlorine fuel and carbon-rich petroleum “coke.” This step yields a liquid chemical, titanium tetrachloride, and in addition produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct in a lot the identical manner as blast furnaces used for making iron do. The liquid chemical then undergoes one other therapy utilizing molten magnesium, which ends up in porous, sponge-like pure titanium metallic.
The US has not produced its personal titanium sponge since 2020, when Timet closed the nation’s final remaining manufacturing line in Henderson, Nevada, although the corporate nonetheless melts titanium there. At present, the U.S. imports most of its titanium sponge provide from Japan and, to a lesser extent, from Kazakhstan.
Competitors from lower-cost imports and slumping metallic costs globally made it troublesome for US producers to maintain making sponge domestically. Rising power prices additionally strained operations, as they’ve for different energy-intensive industries, together with home aluminum manufacturing. When Century Aluminum lastly shuttered its smelter in West Virginia in 2015, the corporate cited excessive electrical energy costs as one of many essential causes. Timet is constructing its titanium facility on the previous Century Aluminum web site.
Discovering cleaner sources of electrical energy to energy titanium services may assist to manage and probably scale back prices related to producing titanium merchandise. However corporations and researchers are additionally creating different methods for making titanium that intention to dramatically scale back power use and curb carbon dioxide emissions throughout the availability chain. On the College of Utah, Fang developed a novel thermo-chemical course of that makes use of hydrogen to separate titanium from oxygen at comparatively low temperatures and in a fraction of the time that typical strategies require. That course of can use scrap metallic to supply excessive purity titanium, which eliminates a number of different power intensive steps.
On a life cycle foundation, the hydrogen-assisted metallothermic discount (HAMR) course of can scale back CO2 emissions from titanium manufacturing by 50 to 95%. Fang’s analysis group acquired round $7 million in whole federal funding to develop the HAMR course of, together with from the Division of Power’s Superior Analysis Tasks Company –Power. The North Carolina–primarily based firm IperionX later acquired each the know-how and a pilot plant in Utah, which might produce about 2 metric tons of titanium per 12 months, primarily for prototypes.
Dominic Allen, chief business officer for IperionX, mentioned the corporate is working to “reshore” U.S. titanium manufacturing partly for nationwide safety causes. At present, China and Russia management about 70% of the world’s marketplace for major titanium. IperionX additionally hopes that by making much less power intensive and cheaper titanium domestically, the metallic can increase into new markets, probably changing aluminum and stainless-steel in automobiles and constructing supplies.
“The titanium market is around $4 billion globally,” Allen mentioned, including that the worldwide markets for aluminum and stainless-steel are round $170 billion and $200 billion, respectively. “So if you can just take a fraction of those markets just on price alone, it’s going to be enormous growth in the titanium market from where it is today.”
The Takeaway
Digging into the main points of how titanium is made illustrates simply how energy-intensive the method is and the way it entails vital carbon emissions. Producing the electrical energy for making titanium on-site will assist tame a few of these emissions. New applied sciences such because the HAMR course of could get rid of extra of these emissions. For many years we ignored emissions from trade — they had been simply one thing we needed to put up with if we wished cement, metal, or titanium. The truth that some folks immediately are pondering of how to curb these emissions is welcome information.
