The Story of Steel Part #1. “The Creation of Iron

When you hook up your welding equipment, grab your gun and begin to join two pieces of steel together, do you ever give much thought to how those pieces of steel got there? Right there in front of you there are two pieces of steel, where do these pieces of steel come from? Well not just from the steel supplier because they, like everyone else, are in a supply chain and they have to source the steel from somewhere.

The steel we are working with is an alloy of iron and iron is a very significant ingredient in steel and thus is an essential building block in many things. Iron is the chemical element, identified as Fe, and is amongst the most abundant of the elements we find on earth. So where is the beginning of the supply chain, where does this iron come from? 

It comes from the stars; it begins its life in those stars we see in the sky. Those stars, light years away from us, are in fact the incubation sites for the steel you are about to work with! So, “The story of Steel”, and of iron's origins, begins literarily in the stars that you look at in a clear night time sky as depicted in Figure 1 below

 The Night Sky, the Origin of Iron and thus Steel

The incubation and creation of iron is a very violent process and it begins when a type of star known as a red giant, which has a core of hydrogen, begins to turn this hydrogen into other elements in a fusion chain.  Hydrogen fuses with helium to form heavier elements, this process continues up the periodic table to form carbon, neon, oxygen, then silicon and, finally it forms iron as an end product. Figure 2. below illustrates the cross section of a so called “multi shell red giant” star.

Figure 2 Cross. Section of a Multi-Layer Red Giant Star with Iron in the Core

The iron atoms are the heaviest atom the star can produce and, when most of a star's atoms become iron, it explodes in a powerful, luminous stellar explosion, showering space with iron, oxygen and carbon atoms far and wide similar to the depiction in Figure 3. From here, gravity takes over, forming the atoms into meteors and planets such as Earth.

Figure 3 Depiction of an Exploding Star.

Iron, one of the most abundant elements on Earth, has been a significant piece in the rise of civilization as we know it today because it is a key ingredient in steel. Without iron, and subsequently steel, many of our modern structures would not be standing. It is truly a “wonder metal” as we shall see and, because we have it, we should be thanking our “lucky stars”. 

This iron is deposited on Earth in combination with other elements and is known as iron ore. It is not pure iron. Iron ores are rocks and minerals from which metallic iron can be extracted. There are four main types of iron ore deposit: hematite, which is the most commonly mined, magnetite, titanomagnetite, and pisolitic ironstone. These ores vary in colour from dark grey, bright yellow, or deep purple to rusty red.

Again, as luck would have it, Canada has been a repository of a lot of iron ore holding about 6 billion tonnes of it. This is enough to rank 6th in the world after Australia, Brazil, Russia, China and the Ukraine. 

Figure 4 Percentages of iron ore and location in Canada.

The majority of the country’s iron ore resources are located in the Labrador Trough region, along the border between Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as from Nunavut and, therefore, the major iron ore mines in Canada are located in these regions. Percentages of iron ore deposits are given in Figure 4 above.

Canada's is the ninth leading producer of iron ore globally. The top three iron ore-producing countries (Australia, Brazil and China) account for approximately 70% of global production.  As stated earlier, iron is one of the most abundant minerals on Earth, contained in both the Earth’s surface and in its shallow crust.  

However, the iron ore is in the form of its oxide with a chemical composition of Fe2O3. As a consequence, when mined, the iron ore must be processed to get rid of the oxygen and give us iron, one of the stages we must go through to end up with steel. We shall see in Part 2 of this article that the production of steel falls into a category that both excites and causes worry for the future. The exciting part is that steel is 100% recyclable but its traditional production from the ore has not been green, it can be a dirty process producing greenhouse gases. 

However, serious and significant steps are being taken toward making the production of greener steel, both here in North America and with other steel makers across the globe. These efforts will also be touched upon in Part 2 of “the Story of Steel” when we address the making of steel from  both the iron ore and recycled scrap.