European Union considers hydrogen as means of climate control

EIA reports that  the European Commission (EC) published a document titled A hydrogen strategy for a climate-neutral Europe. In this paper, the EC discusses the potential for hydrogen to support zero-carbon steel making. This strategy follows the March 13, 2020, EC publication of A New Industrial Strategy for Europe, which recognized that some industrial sectors will have to make a “bigger and more transformative change than most” and expressed support for breakthrough technologies leading to a zero-carbon steel making process. The 27 member states of the European Union (EU-27) aim to be greenhouse gas (GHG)-neutral by 2050, which is a European Green Deal objective and also supports the EU’s commitment under the Paris Agreement.

Iron and steel production accounted for 4% of EU-27’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2018, according to the latest data from Eurostat. Although aggregate EU-27 emissions have been declining on average by 1% per year, GHG emissions have remained fairly flat in the iron and steel industry, which requires process heat and combusted fuels that are difficult to displace with carbon-free alternatives.

The EU iron and steel industry consumed 2.3 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of energy in 2018, according to Eurostat. Of this, 65% was solid fuels, almost exclusively coal. Both coal and natural gas serve as fuel for the smelting of iron ore in basic oxygen furnaces (BOFs) to produce virgin steel. Fossil fuels serve as a source of process heat and also as a reducing agent to process iron from iron ore. Compared with the BOF process that uses only some scrap steel, electric arc furnaces (EAF) are solely dependent on scrap steel to manufacture steel and special steel alloys. Although the EAF process is electric and could be decarbonized with the use of renewably generated electricity, it does require scrap steel that is currently produced exclusively with the use of fossil fuels.

The EC hydrogen strategy sets a goal to produce 10 million metric tons (approximately 1.2 quadrillion Btu) of hydrogen annually by 2030, to be deployed across various industries, including iron and steel. Some European companies are moving toward hydrogen ahead of the 2030 target, however. In Sweden and Austria, companies are building pilot plants that will employ a hydrogen-fed direct reduced iron (DRI) process that will yield iron suitable for use in an EAF, resulting in steel produced without the use of a blast furnace and without direct consumption of fossil fuels. Both the SSAB plant in Sweden and the Primetals Technologies plant in Austria are expected to be completed by the end of 2020. In April 2020 Swedish steel manufacturer Ovako successfully used hydrogen in its steel hot-rolling process—the last step in steel production before the steel is delivered to consumers such as automobile or appliance manufacturers.

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