Green Steel - Vertical Challenge

Why steel first

Steel is in everything CTMP builds: penstocks, turbines, tunnel boring machines, factories, ports, HVDC towers, housing. If steel is externally priced, every cost compounds. One war, one tariff, one drought in the Rhine, and your city's rent jumps, your clinic's MRI sits dark, your farm's irrigation pump dies mid-season.

Today, steel is hostage to coke ovens in China, gas pipelines in Russia, scrap yards in Turkey, and interest payments in London. Green Steel kills that hostage crisis in one move.

We take sub-cent-per-kWh electrons (our own, internal, locked behind a fence) and turn them into hydrogen, then pure iron, then steel that costs exactly what it costs to make. No debt. No middlemen. No markup. No surprise.

The logic chain ?

1

Cheap electrons

Platform delivers baseload electricity at 0.08 cents/kWh ($0.0008/kWh) internally. This is the feedstock for everything.

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2

Green hydrogen

Electrons split water into H₂ and O₂. The hydrogen becomes the reducing agent that replaces coking coal.

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3

Direct Reduced Iron (DRI/HBI)

Hydrogen strips oxygen from iron ore pellets, producing pure iron without a blast furnace and without coal. Chemistry-locked by the Sovereign Logic Engine.

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4

Electric Arc Furnace (EAF)

DRI goes into an EAF powered by the same cheap electrons. Steel is melted, alloyed, cast. Energy intensity: approximately 4 MWh per tonne via DRI-EAF.

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5

Finished steel at cost

Steel ships to TBM factory, turbine factory, penstock shop, concrete plant, HVDC yard, housing, at the cost of production plus published handling. No margin. No inflation hiding place.

The core insight: Incumbents pay $40 to $80 per MWh for electricity. CTMP delivers at about $0.80/MWh. That 50 to 100x difference cascades through every tonne of steel, every penstock, every turbine casing, every metre of tunnel lining.

The arithmetic ?

Adjust the inputs. Watch the economics cascade. These are the real numbers.

Energy cost ?

¢/kWh

Energy intensity ?

MWh/t

Incumbent price

$/t

Our discount

% below

All-in cost ?

$/t

Year-one production

Mt

Kept internal

Mt

Energy cost per tonne
$0
Our sale price (discount below incumbent)
$0

Open market volume

0 Mt

Revenue (market sales)

$0

Gross profit

$0

Gross margin

0%

Read it: At $0.80/MWh, energy cost per tonne of steel is just $3.20. Incumbents pay $160 to $320 per tonne just for energy. That is the delta. That is why this works.

10% compounding per annum ?

50% of revenue goes back into expansion every year. At 10% annual growth from a 1.72 Mt base:

Year	Output (Mt)	Revenue ($B)	Profit ($B)
0	1.72	2.58	1.89
5	2.77	4.16	3.00
10	4.46	6.69	4.91
15	7.19	10.79	7.91
20	11.57	17.36	12.73

At $1,500/t sale price, $400/t all-in cost. 20-year cumulative profit: approximately $108B to $132B depending on starting base.

Where Green Steel goes

Year-one finished steel: approximately 1.72 Mt. Every tonne is allocated, tracked by the Sovereign Logic Engine from heat to delivery.

TBMs ~165 kt Cutterheads, shields, backup gantries. 300 machines.

Turbines ~350 kt Runners, shafts, casings, stay/guide rings, stator frames. 200 units at ~1.5 GW each.

Penstocks & liners ~250 kt Heavy plate, rolled and welded. 100% NDT-mapped.

Factories & equipment ~230 kt Cranes (200 to 500 t class), fixture systems, jigs, test rigs, proof stands.

Critical civils ~570 kt Foundations, rails, portals, pedestals. Rebar, plate, sections.

H₂ starter block ~80 kt Process and structural steel for the hydrogen plant.

Desalination starter ~25 kt DI water and pretreatment systems.

Spares & buffers ~40 kt Process steel, consumables, strategic reserve.

Metallurgy and quality assurance ?

Primary iron: DRI/HBI from green H₂ and DR-grade pellets. No coal. No coke.
Curated scrap: Provenance-locked by SLE. Chemistry windows protected. No contamination drift.
Water: DI from the desalination starter. Greater than 90% reuse in EAF and casting loops.
Testing: UT, RT, MT, PMI by route card. Charpy, tensile, and impact by lot. Penstock plate notch-toughness windows enforced.
Traceability: Heat-to-street ledger. Every penstock plate and TBM ring is cryptographically traceable from melt to installation.
Enforcement: Out-of-spec steel cannot ship. SLE lockouts are automatic. Quality is enforced, not promised.

Platform integration ?

Inputs from platformupstream

Baseload electricity at 0.08 cents/kWh ($0.0008/kWh). Green hydrogen from the Molecules vertical. Process water from desalination. Iron ore via the logistics vertical.

Outputs to platformdownstream

Steel at cost to TBM factory, turbine factory, penstock shop, concrete plant, HVDC yard, housing, ports. Schedules hold because we control cadence.

Byproductscircularity

Slag becomes GGBS for low-clinker concrete (durability up, CO₂ per cubic metre down). Mill scale and baghouse dusts return to DRI/EAF. Refractory skulls sized for shotcrete aggregates. Waste heat cascades to preheat, drying, and curing in adjacent processes.

GovernanceSPE/SPV

Green Steel operates as its own Special Purpose Entity. Sells externally while feeding internal demand. Resale of core power above 5 cents/kWh triggers a feed cut. Transparency or termination.

Failure modecascades

If Green Steel is delayed, externally priced, or captured: schedule slip and cost inflation propagate into every other vertical. No Green Steel, no schedule. No schedule, no sovereignty. This is why it is first.

Workforce ?

Green Steel is approximately 10% of total program headcount (operations, validated against EMP frameworks):

Year	Green Steel ops headcount (median)	Range (±10%)
0	44,852	40,367 to 49,337
5	72,235	65,012 to 79,458
10	116,336	104,702 to 127,970
15	187,360	168,624 to 206,096
20	301,745	271,570 to 331,920

24/7 operations on four-crew rotation. Operator to maintainer ratio approximately 1:1. Includes melt, cast, roll, utilities, QA, NDT, refractory, crane/gantry, planning, and shared services allocated by SLE activity drivers.

Carbon impact

Each tonne of Green Steel avoids approximately 2 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent versus conventional coke-based routes. Year-one at 1.72 Mt finished steel removes approximately 3 to 4 Mt CO₂e, roughly equivalent to a megacity's car exhaust for a year, while we are still building the machine that builds the machine.

What happens to legacy steel ?

Margin collapse: BF-BOF incumbents with all-in costs above $800/t lose operating margin when our price anchor compresses the market clearing price toward $400 to $560/t.
Stranded blast furnaces: Approximately 70% of global BF capacity needs reinvestment by about 2030. Our timing hits the replacement window head-on. Expect impairments and "convert or close" decisions.
Coking coal demand cracks: As orders swing to DRI/EAF, metallurgical coal producers lose long-term contracts and pricing power.
Forced EAF pivots at higher cost: Legacy players rush to EAF or gas-DRI. But without 1-cent electrons, their unit costs remain higher. Power price is destiny.
Policy tailwind: EU CBAM (carbon border duties on steel imports, operative from 2026/27) clears the way for green tonnes and penalises coal tonnes. Copycat regimes follow.

Bottom line: Legacy steel does not "compete" with tariff-governed, at-cost steel powered by 1-cent electrons. It de-levers, consolidates, or plugs into the loop. The market will meet our price or retire its furnaces.

Doctrine

Internal power = 0.08 cents/kWh ($0.0008/kWh). Electrons are the universal feedstock.
Everything transfers at cost. Steel to TBM, turbine, concrete, HVDC, data, housing.
Public, posted rules. SLE enforces quality. Out-of-spec cannot ship.
Resale above 5 cents/kWh triggers feed cut. No exceptions.
No Green Steel, no schedule. No schedule, no sovereignty.

Contribute

Now that you understand the exemplar, submit improvements to any aspect of the Green Steel vertical.

Design CapEx Circularity