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

Under the coordination of VERBUND, VOESTALPINE, a steel manufacturer, and SIEMENS, a PEM electrolyser manufacturer, propose a 26 month demonstration of the 6MW electrolysis power plant installed at the VOESTALPINE LINZ plant (Austria). After pilot plant commissioning, the electrolyser is prequalified with the support of APG, the transmission operator of Austria, in order to provide grid-balancing services such as primary, secondary or tertiary reserves while utilising the commercial pools of VERBUND. The demonstration is split into five pilot tests and the quasi-commercial operation to show that the PEM electrolyser is able both to use timely power price opportunities (in order to provide affordable hydrogen for current uses of the steel making processes), and to attract extra revenues from grid services which improves the hydrogen price attractiveness from a two-carrier utility like VERBUND. Replicability of the experimental results at larger scales in EU28 for the steel industry (with inputs from TSOs in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) is studied under the coordination of ECN. It involves a technical, economic and environmental assessment of the experimental results using the CertifHY tools. The roll out of each result is provided by ECN, together with policy and regulatory recommendations to accelerate the deployment in the steel and fertilizer industry, with low CO2 hydrogen streams provided also by electrolysing units using renewable electricity. The plausibility of this roadmap is reinforced at the on-start of the demonstration by the creation of an exploitation company involving the core industrial partners, which starts commercial operations of the Linz pilot plant right after the end of the demonstration. Dissemination targeting the European stakeholders of the electricity, steel and fertilizer value chain nourishes the preparation of the practical implementation of the results in the 10 years following the demonstration’s end.

The main objective of H2PlasmaRed is to develop hydrogen plasma smelting reduction (HPSR) technology for the reduction of iron ores and steelmaking sidestreams to meet the targets of the European Green Deal for reducing CO2 emissions and supporting the circular economy in the steel industry across Europe. Our ambition is to introduce a near CO2-free reduction process to support the goal of the Paris Agreement - a 90% reduction in the carbon intensity of steel production by 2050. To achieve this, H2PlasmaRed will develop HPSR from TRL5 to TRL7 by demonstrating the HPSR in a pilot-HPSR reactor (hundred-kilogram-scale) that is an integrated part of a steel plant, and in a pilot-scale DC electric arc furnace (5-ton scale) by retrofitting the existing furnace. The project's end goal is to establish a way to upscale the process from pilot-scale into industrial practice. To support this goal, the novel sensors and models developed and implemented in the project are used for HPSR process optimization from a reduction, resource, and energy efficiency standpoint.

The objective of the project PURESCRAP is to increase the use of low-quality scrap grades (post-consumer scrap) by deploying and applying best available technologies to reduce impurities. This is achieved through novel sensor combinations and analysis supported by artificial intelligence. A key part is the connection between scrap sorter and the steel industry which are the consumers of the scrap. This ensures that there is a demand for the enhanced purification and valorisation methods. The steel industry also enables the industrial scale verification of the PURESCRAP methods, where sorted scrap is used for steelmaking in semi-industrial and industrial scale. The shredding process is identified as the most promising method leading to impurity liberation and later removal, for which the site of the Swedish scrap supplier STENA is chosen for demonstration. With a better analysis of the scrap material after the sorting and preparation chain, appropriate material handling can be optimised for desired outputs. During the project, sensor stations will be integrated in the two separate processing chains for heavy (cut) and shredded scrap. The proposed innovation of PURESCRAP has the ambition to go far beyond industrial state-of-the-art to achieve a higher recycling rate of post-consumer scrap (increased share of low-quality scrap over the total scrap input by at least 40% or more) compared to the usual practice for a specific steel quality, whereas realistic grades are e.g., rail steel R260 (1.0623; EN13674) and engineering steel 42CrMo4 (1.7225; DIN EN10083). This clearly contributes to the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA ) of the Clean Steel Partnership, and to the achievement of the European Green Deal goals regarding circular economy as well as to the reduction of CO2 emissions. The outstanding performance of the proposed PURESCRAP sensor stations will be demonstrated through the implementation at industrial scale at a scrap supplier site.