- Maddy Savage
- BBC News, Stockholm
image source, Maddy Savage
A small town in northern Sweden is about to produce Europe’s first commercial green steel.
On the outskirts of Boden, a town some 900 km north of Stockholm, giant excavators push through layers of mud, ice and snow to complete a new steel plant.
At 9am, when the sun has just risen, the temperature is -8C and some of the workers are wearing three or four jackets and working on heated seats in their vehicles.
Steel is generally made in a process that begins with blast furnaces which, fueled with metallurgical coal and iron ore, emit large amounts of carbon dioxide and contribute to global warming.
Steel production is responsible for around 7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
But the new plant in Boden will use hydrogen technology, designed to reduce emissions by up to 95%.
Although the first buildings in this remote town have yet to be completed, the company behind the project, H2 Green Steel, believes it will have its first batches of steel ready by 2025.
image source, H2 Green Steel
The new plant should be producing green steel by 2025
If completed successfully, this will be Europe’s first large-scale green steel plant, and its products will be used in the same way as traditional steel to build everything from cars and cargo ships. to buildings and bridges.
Although much of the European steel industry was built centuries ago, H2 Green Steel is a start-up that didn’t even exist before the pandemic.
When Northvolt opened Sweden’s first giant electric battery factory south of Boden, they wanted to find a greener way to produce the steel needed to make batteries, and H2 Green Steel emerged as a spin-off with funding from two of Northvolt’s founders. .
“A unique place to start”
The centerpiece of the new steel plant will be a tall structure known as the DRI tower.
Inside the structure, hydrogen will react with iron ore to create a type of iron that can be used to make steel.
Unlike metallurgical coal, which generates carbon emissions, the reaction in the DRI tower generates steam.
All hydrogen used in the new green steel plant will be produced by H2Green Steel.
The electricity used to produce hydrogen and power the plant comes from local fossil-free energy sources, such as hydroelectric power from the nearby Lule River, as well as wind farms in the region.
image source, Maddy Savage
Boden is a “unique” location for the production of green steel, according to Ida-Linn Näzelius.
“This is a unique place to start because it has the space and it has green electricity,” says Ida-Linn Näzelius, H2 Green Steel’s vice president of environment.
This company has already signed an agreement with the Spanish energy company Iberdrola to build a solar-powered green steel plant on the Iberian Peninsula and says that is exploring other opportunities in Brazil.
It is up against another Swedish steel company, Hybrit, which plans to open a similar fossil fuel-free steel plant in northern Sweden by 2026.
Hybrit is a joint venture between the Nordic steel company SSAB, the mining company LKAB and the energy company Vattenfall, which was launched thanks to state funding from the Swedish Energy Agency and the European Union Innovation fund.
a drop in the sea
While Sweden is leading when it comes to low-carbon steel production in Europe, it’s important to put its potential impact in context, says Katinka Lund Waagsaether, senior policy adviser at climate think tank E3G based in Brussels.
H2 Green Steel expects to produce five million tons of green steel per year by 2030. Annual world production is currently around 2 billion tonsaccording to figures from the World Steel Association.
“Production capacity in Sweden will be a drop in the bucket,” explains Lund Waagsaether.
image source, H2 Green Steel
A key part of the steel production process occurs in the DRI tower, where hydrogen reacts with iron ore.
But other companies should help increase the proportion of green steel available in Europe.
The GravitHy company, for example, plans to open a hydrogen-based plant in France in 2027.
Competitive in Europe
For its part, German steel giant Thyssenkrupp recently announced it aims to introduce carbon-neutral production at all its plants by 2045, while Europe’s largest steelmaker ArcelorMittal and the Spanish government are also investing in green steel projects in the north of Spain.
Meanwhile, the European Union is in the process of finalizing a new strategy called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, designed to make it more expensive for European companies to import cheaper non-green steel from other parts of the world.
“I think it’s important because it will give the industry the confidence to investbecause they can see that, at least in the European context, their steel will be competitive,” Lund Waagsaether estimates.
She also points to a “critical window of action” between now and 2030, a period when around 70% of the world’s steel mills need to make repairs and reinvestments.
The blast furnaces could be replaced or relined to extend their useful life, but a smarter long-term strategy, according to Lund Waagsaether, would be to invest in cSwitch to low carbon production processes.
“The next eight years are crucial to ensure that companies and investors globally make decisions about the production of green steel.”
But it’s hard to predict whether most of the big steelmakers will go down this path, Lundberg says. “I would say I’m hopeful, but we have to keep up the pressure.”
image source, Getty Images
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