It was supposed to be the United States’ grand entry to the global race to make green steel — a symbol of a return to American innovation and of revival in the nation’s rusting industrial heartland.

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to replace coal-based blast furnaces with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio — the same mill that Vice President JD Vance described as his grandparents’ ​“economic savior” in his ​“Hillbilly Elegy” memoir — now risks being swept away in the undercurrent of Washington’s shifting partisan tides.

From my latest piece on Canary Media:

It was supposed to be the United States’ grand entry to the global race to make green steel — a symbol of a return to American innovation and of revival in the nation’s rusting industrial heartland.

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to replace coal-based blast furnaces with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio — the same mill that Vice President JD Vance described as his grandparents’ ​“economic savior” in his ​“Hillbilly Elegy” memoir — now risks being swept away in the undercurrent of Washington’s shifting partisan tides.

From my latest piece on Canary Media: 
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/green-steel/cleveland-cliffs-middletown-trump

Reporter and writer. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.substack.com.

I think the most logical approach is a phased introduction that lets you build in steps, starting with a relatively economically feasible technology - even the $455/ton option could work, assuming that there are actually consumers in the US that are willing to pay what is ultimately a small premium for greener steel (my admittedly limited understanding is that there might be more such customers in Europe than the US in the current prevailing political environment) - and making sure to use technologies that can benefit from the addition of things like hydrogen as it becomes more economically viable