Car Science: Cara Delevingne's Face Mist
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Hey,
Sorry, I know it's Monday but let's be honest: there's every chance I'll forget to send either Wednesday or Friday's edition and also I was gripped by the sort of urgency a middle aged woman normally only experiences needing to pee at 3am. Yes, you may have gathered from the subject line, this one is about a face mist being advertised by Cara Delevingne that's made from the industrial emissions of steel manufacturing.
No, that is a real sentence that I intended to type.
What is a face mist?
It's just stuff in a bottle you spray on your face, some of it's meant to be micellar or have vitamins in or whatever but it comes down to being stuff in a bottle you spray on your face, like a thirsty little fern. I'm the type of person who knows a lot more about epoxy than exfoliants so I can't really tell you much more than that but I gather there's a lot of detail out there if you want to get into it.
If you've lived your whole life without using a face mist or use them every day, it doesn't really matter: they're things people buy and they've got loads of valid uses like cooling and also just because they feel nice and are mostly water. If, like me, you get hot flushes but unlike me, do not wear criminal amounts of eyeliner then they're probably really nice on warm days or just for the hell of it. We're not really here to critique the spray bottle industry.
So why's this in Car Science?
Well. I was minding my own business on the internet forming a plan to extract lithium carbonate from vape batteries when I stumbled across one of the more insane press releases I've ever read, which is that green steel makers Vattenfall have collaborated with Cara Delevingne on a face mist that's made from industrial runoff.
Delevingne (who's a climate advocate and generally not a heel about it, as celebrities go) is fronting the campaign in order to explain how clean hydrogen can make steel production. The runoff from combusting hydrogen is water, which this face mist claims to be made from - direct from the blast furnace.
There's definitely some handwaving going on here but Vattenfall are a credible company that genuinely makes clean energy and decarbonisation technologies and it's definitely not total bull. The runoff from hydrogen combustion very much is water but there's also all kinds of other stuff like NOx depending on what temperature you burn it at - which in a blast furnace is, inevitably, rather hot. It's also intensely expensive, in energy terms.
Remember the iron ore pellets from the last edition? They become steel via going through a blast furnace, which as I mentioned that time out requires a lot of fuel. Up until now, that's basically always been some kind of fossil; natural gas is the lowest-carbon option but quite a lot of steel mills worldwide are still running on coal. In fact, so much so that steel production is the largest industrial consumer of coal, worldwide. Which is why the low-carbon steel industry has become a thing and one of the latest focusses for Our Lovely Hydrogen Future that a lot of people are desperately trying to make happen.
Construction has enormous carbon emissions (it accounts for 25% of the UK's total CO2 emissions) and a significant part of that is due to the materials involved. Steel is a very popular construction material, especially to reinforce concrete and it's also a vital part of making cars, from crash structures to suspension and it's not something there's a workaround to avoid using, yet. Even most race cars, outside Formula 1, use steel where they can to reduce costs compared to carbon fibre.
Steel refineries in Europe started seriously looking into using hydrogen last summer, whether they had been before or not, under pressure from natural gas shortages. There's ways of using a 50-50 mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide or fully going over to hydrogen but this does not, as with anything, come cheap; financially or in energy terms.
The estimate is it costs €7 billion to convert a plant to hydrogen. Which given how much the steel industry is worth is the sort of money it can find down the back of the sofa but also requires a lot more cooperation to make it happen. 370 TWh of extra energy would be needed to generate the hydrogen for all of Europe's refineries to run their furnaces on it, which is a mindboggling amount and definitely nothing anyone has going spare right now, especially from renewables.
Which is always the problem with hydrogen. It's the perfect fix, in terms of industrial emissions, we just can't make enough of it - 95% (and honestly, that always seems like a rather lowball figure) of industrial hydrogen currently used comes from cracking natural gas, with electrolysis barely accounting for 5%.
The EU published quite an accessible report about the potential for hydrogen to help decarbonise the iron and steel industry that discusses the issues pretty well: it's an amazing fix for the industrial nightmare and it does work but you need 20% (according to the EU's calculations) more energy than is currently being generated, just to produce the hydrogen for steel production.
We're currently very energy-poor, as a planet. Renewables are out there but underexploited and we're at the crunch of fossil fuels. Even with facilities like (Vattenfall collaborator) SSAB's vast, underground hydrogen storage facility to try to balance demand, hydrogen's price tag remains designer-level premium. It's difficult to store (it escapes anything but the most absolutely rigid tanks) and piping it anywhere, let alone on a national scale, is the sort of madness only the current UK government would suggest with a straight face.
So if you're a steelworks that wants to use hydrogen you need the green energy on site, the hydrogen storage on site and to invest in both those things and a conversion of your blast furnace. I think, for what it's worth, that's absolutely worth it: steel is a global nightmare on the scale of concrete, in carbon terms and extremely profitable industries should be the first to be making the investments to decarbonise.
They've obviously spent a long time not exactly shouting about their pollutant ways, however. And there's a remarkable lack of scrutiny on industrial processes, even the ones we still do a lot of in the west, compared to the fortnightly obligation for a reputable-sounding newspaper to publish "but are electric cars really cleaner?"
Which is why Cara Delevingne is showing you a face mist.
Ironfluencing
To their credit, Vattenfall and Delevingne are blunt about what they're doing here: this is a publicity campaign to talk about the benefits of green hydrogen to the steel industry. As Delevingne puts it at the start of the promotional video: people listen to celebrities over experts, which is why she's willing to put her face to it and be involved. (you can watch the video on the campaign website)
Vattenfall have come under scrutiny for using woody biomass in heating, which they argue is part of a decarbonisation process to move away from fossil fuels but otherwise generally do seem to be on the right side of this. Assuming hydrogen is the right side, which for some industrial processes you have to assume it is.
Do I seriously think water comes out of any kind of blast furnace clean enough to spray on your face? No. Given iron ore pellets have all kinds of other stuff in them, including coal, the steam would be carrying all kinds of weird particulates even if the smelting was somehow completely clean. But it is interesting that for a company like Vattenfall, collaborating with someone like Delevingne is worth it.
Normally celebrities are used to sell products you want a lot of people to buy. A lot of us, it's gotta be said, are not going to rush out and buy new blast furnace equipment or convert a steel mill to green hydrogen power after seeing this campaign.
But clearly Vattenfall want to reach a wide audience with this. Delevingne's done environmental or environmental-adjacent gigs before with mixed impact; if I'm 100% honest even I didn't quite twig she did a show run at Formula E (pictured) and I was there.
So will many people take notice of this? I don't know yet but it's an interesting new development, celebrities being used to endorse green(er, ish) industrial processes.
That's about it, for something I just typed in an absolute blazing panic because I saw the press release and lost my marbles.
See you on Friday,
Hazel
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Ps: are you a scientist or engineer or work with them? Do you do something interesting that might be relevant to Car Science? Feel free to email me on southwellhazel@gmail.com.