Everything's mini now, it goes to follow that they run on minibatteries as well. But there's no such thing as minibatteries... right? Wrong. MIT researchers have just created this breakthrough technology, and they used viruses for it.

Since virtually all American manufacturing has gone to Asia, it's really not an American issue.

It is, however becoming a big issue in China, where rapid industrialization has resulted in precipitous increases in air pollution, in fact it was reported earlier that one third of China is suffering from acid rain. And helping to solve the problem may give the U.S. a chance to revitalize its own industries.

The production of steel requires the smelting of iron, which is a very dirty process. Traditionally, iron ore is combined with a coal derivative known as "coke." It reacts with the iron, producing CO#@%!8
9#@%! and carbon monoxide as iron in its pure form is left behind. The bottom line: every ton of steel produced releases an equal amount of CO#@%!8
9#@%! into the air.

Donald Sadoway, a materials scientist at MIT is working on a method to produce iron using electrolysis to extract the metal from molten iron oxide.  A solvent of silicon dioxide  and calcium oxide is heated to 1600°C. Iron ore is then solved in this solution, then an electric current passes through it. Negatively-charged oxygen ions migrate to the positively charged anode, and the oxygen bubbles off.  Positively-charged iron ions migrate to the negatively-charged cathode where they are reduced to elemental iron which collects in a pool at the bottom of the cell and is siphoned off.

This method has long been used in aluminum production. So far, however, the steel industry has had little reason to use it. The difference lies in the way oxygen molecules bond with these respective metals. Because aluminum oxide is very stable,  the ore cannot be extracted by any other method, whereas iron is easily extracted from ore through the traditional heating method.

However, if world governments start imposing punitive taxes on polluting industries (something unlikely to happen in the U.S. under the current Administration), the world's steel industry may find it more cost-effective to switch to electrolysis. According to Lawrence Kavanagh of the American Iron and Steel Institute, "Things are going to take 10 to 15 years to develop and get to a commercial scale. Now is the time to be working on them."

There are several challenges to overcome, mostly economic. Finding a practical anode material is a problem, since graphite releases as much CO#@%!8
9#@%! into the air as conventional smelting, and platinum is too expensive to be practical for large scale operations.  The amount of electricity required is also huge - about a kilowatt hour per kilogram of iron produced. "The economics are just not there under the present circumstances. Carbon is cheap, and there's no [financial] cost associated with venting carbon dioxide. And electricity's expensive. So if you put those three factors on the table, this just isn't economically viable," Kavanagh
says.

Carbon taxes could change this, of course. Kavanagh also points out that electrolysis would eliminate the energy-intensive coke-making process, which requires baking coal at high temperatures. More research and development is needed before the iron industry can determine the economic feasibility of this method, however.