8th International Congress on Science and Technology of Ironmaking - ICSTI 2018

The future of the European steel industry demands solutions for carbon free production routes to fulfil the challenging goals of today‘s climate policies. In terms of CO2-emissions, the reduction process is the most relevant process – be it in a blast furnace or in a direct reduction plant. One solution to this issue could be the transition from fossil-based to hydrogen-based reduction of iron ore. If the hydrogen is produced with electrolysers by means of renewable energies, the new process would be free of carbon dioxide. In a cooperation of the Hamburg University of Applied Science (Department of Process Engineering) and ArcelorMittal Hamburg, a concept of a new hydrogen-based process is evaluated. ArcelorMittal Hamburg operates the only direct reduction plant in Western Europe, which uses already up to 60% of hydrogen for the reduction of iron ore. It thus has a deep process understanding and experience in low-CO2-reduction of iron ore. For the development of a new process, a concept study was conducted with in-house simulation tools. The results show the energy-demand to be in the same range as for today’s direct reduction process. Nevertheless, the energy has to be delivered by renewable energies, which will lead to much higher costs compared to natural gas. Though the transition from natural gas to hydrogen is possible from a technical point of view, there are big obstacles concerning the economics of such a new process. The investment costs as well as the operating costs for such a new plant would be much higher than those of a conventional process. On the other hand, the hydrogen-based process has to be tested in a pilot plant to show “proof of concept”, for which ArcelorMittal Hamburg would be the ideal location.