Each year the EU steel sector generates several million tons of metal and mineral containing residues that are currently largely under-exploited and are often sent to landfills with an enormous waste of resources that could replace virgin materials. ReMFra main objective is the development and validation of highly efficient pyrometallurgic melting and reduction demonstration plant at relevant industrial scale for recovering metals and minerals contained in a wide range of steelmaking residues. The ReMFra process will allow to valorise steelmaking residues, such as filter dust, scale, sludge and slags, to obtain pig iron, iron rich oxides, a highly concentrated zinc oxide and an inert slag. ReMFra comprises two main parts to be developed, improved and tested at industrial scale: Plasma Reactor and RecoDust. The first will be dedicated to recover the coarse residues (scale, sludge, slag), while the second will focus on fine-grained dusts. The project will allow the improvement of iron yield using recovered pig iron instead of new pig iron and replacing the iron ore with the iron rich oxide. The recovery of concentrated ZnO and inert slag as by-products will provide a significant source of income and will contribute to the overall carbon neutrality. To reach the full circularity, the process foresees the use, as reducing agent, of secondary carbon sources (i.e. waste plastics). Energy recovery solutions will also be integrated in the metal recovery process starting from enabling the use of molten pig iron. ReMFra consortium comprises: 5 steelmaking companies, 4 RTOs as technology providers with large experience in steel sector, 1 university and the European Steel Technology Platform. To conclude, ReMFra is expected not only to enable technological advances in the demonstrators involved but will also contribute to the development of new standards, training programmes, adaptation and certification of industrial processes thus facilitating the replication of the project.

Over the past decade, the steel industry in Europe has been spending a lot of effort in Research and Development of technologies that help in achieving the EU’s CO2 emissions targets and reduce the cost of EU ETS compliance. That has been done through a combination of large scale projects which were part publicly funded with European funding and partly through smaller privately funded research activities. From the initial stages of feasibility studies, several technologies were put forward for further development, one of which is the HIsarna smelting reduction process The objective for the current proposal is to prove the capability of the HIsarna ironmaking technology to achieve at least 35% reduction in CO2 emission intensity, compared to blast furnace operated site based on Best Available Technology Currently Installed. This will be achieved through: -Change operation parameters in order to achieve at least 35% CO2 intensity reduction per tonne of hot rolled coil compared to the conventional blast furnace – BOF route through: >Combined iron ore and scrap operation with a scrap rate of 350kg/thm; >Partially replacing coal injection with sustainable biomass injection (at least 40%); >Minimising coal rate by maximising energy use in the reactor, through balancing the energy between the upper and lower part of the reactor (Using limestone instead of burnt lime as a fluxing agent; >Quantifying potential for energy recovery from hot off-gas by installing boiler test panels; >Making the process ‘CCS ready’ by having process gas suitable for CCS with little or no processing by replacing compressed air and N2 carrier gasses with CO2 and CH4 as carrier gas; -Operation of the HIsarna pilot plant for several months continuously in order to establish process and equipment stability; -Test process conditions and validate for scale up to 0.8 Mtpa plant

The FReSMe project, From Residual Steel gases to Methanol, will produce a methanol that will be demonstrated in ship transportation. This green fuel will be produced from CO2, recovered from an industrial Blast Furnace, and H2 recovered both from the blast furnace gas itself, as well as H2 produced by electrolysis. The two different sources of H2 will enable (i) maximum use of the current residual energy content of blast furnace gas, while at the same time (ii) demonstrating a forward technology path where low carbon or renewable H2 become more ubiquitous. The project will make use of the existing equipment from two pilot plants, one for the energy efficient separation of H2 and CO2 from blast furnace gas, and one for the production of methanol from a CO2-H2 syngas stream. This can be realised with a small amount of extra equipment, including supplemental H2 production from an electrolyser and a H2/N2 separation unit from commercially available equipment. Methanol is a high volume platform chemical of universal use in chemical industry as well as applicable for fuelling internal combustion engines. As such it provides a promising pathway for the large scale re-use of CO2 to decarbonize the transportation and chemical sectors in Europe and decrease the dependence on fossil fuel imports. Production of methanol from CO2 offers the unique combination of scale, efficiency and economic value necessary to achieve large scale carbon reduction targets. The pilot plant will run for a total of three months divided over three different runs with a nominal production rate of up to 50 kg/hr from an input of 800 m3/hr blast furnace gas. This size is commensurate with operation at TRL6, where all the essential steps in the process must be joined together in an industrial environment. The project will address the new integration options that this technology has within the Iron and Steel industry and contains supplementary and supporting research of underlying phenomena.

H2-enriched direct reduction (DR) is the key decarbonisation technology for integrated steelworks mentioned in pathways of all major steel producers. Natural gas driven DR is established in industry mostly outside Europe but there are no experiences with high H2 enrichment > 80%. H2 based reduction is no principal issue but endothermic and the influences on morphology, diffusion and effective kinetics are not known. Also properties and movement of particles in the reactor are not know and issues like sticking cannot be excluded. Probably, temperature distribution and flow of solids and gas will be clearly different. No reliable prognosis is possible yet, in particular with regard to local permeability, process stability and product quality of industrial size furnaces with higher loads on the particles and larger local differences. Many activities are initiated for first industrial demonstration of H2-enriched DR but they will not close many of these knowledge gaps. MaxH2DR provides missing knowledge and data of reduction processes. A world-first test rig determines pellet properties at conditions of industrial H2 enriched DR furnaces and a physical demonstrator shows the linked solid and gas flow in shaft furnaces. This will be combined with digitals models including the key technology DEM-CFD to provide a hybrid demonstrator able to investigate scale-up and to optimise DR furnace design and operating point. This sound basis will be used to optimise the process integration into existing process chains. Simulation tools will be combined to a toolkits that covers impacts of product properties on downstream processes as well as impacts on gas and energy cycles. Thus, promising process chains, sustainable and flexible, will be achieved for different steps along the road to decarbonisation. The digital toolkits will support industrial demonstration and implementation and strengthen digitisation and competitiveness of the European steel industry.