Wednesday 14 October 2020

ArcelorMittal Europe to deliver first tonnes of ‘green steel’ this year

The European arm of the steel manufacturing corporation ArcelorMittal, ArcelorMittal Europe has unveiled plans to produce and offer 'green steel' in the coming months.

It says hydrogen will play a central role in these plans.

ArcelorMittal Europe is developing a series of industrial-scale hydrogen projects for use in blast furnace-based steelmaking that will start to deliver substantial carbon dioxide emissions savings even within the next five years - blast furnaces are used for smelting to produce industrial metals.

One of these projects involves the installation of an electrolyser at the steelmaker's facility in Bremen, Germany, which is expected to help inject hydrogen in large volumes.

The project is forecast to reduce the volumes of coal needed in the iron ore reduction process and therefore ultimately cut carbon dioxide emissions of the operations.

The firm is also working on progressing a project to test the ability of hydrogen to reduce iron ore and form direct reduced iron (DRI) on an industrial scale.

In addition, ArcelorMittal plans to expand its use of the 'Smart Carbon' technology - this involves carbon capture from the blast furnace waste gas, and biologically converting it into ethanol for use as a biofuel or recycled carbon feedstock for the chemical industry.

Aditya Mittal, President and Chief Executive Officer of ArcelorMittal Europe, said: "Our plans to offer greener and more circular steel will support our customers in their circular economy objectives.

"We are pleased to be able to offer our first green tonnes this year and look forward to being able to provide customers with larger volumes of this steel as our decarbonisation projects are ramped up and rolled out across Europe."