Green Steel production
How does it work?
Producing green steel in a fully integrated, digitalized and automated greenfield steel plant.
Today, steel production accounts for 25 percent of Europe’s industrial CO2 emissions. Decarbonization of the industry is a must, and disruptive technology will be the key enabler. By producing green steel in a fully integrated production process, using end-to-end digitalization, electricity from fossil-free sources and green hydrogen instead of coal, we are committed to set state-of-the-art technologies to work and bring emissions down.
Giga-scale electrolysis
Electrolysis, which is the process of decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity, is the starting point for our green steel production process. Our giga-scale electrolysis will be an integrated part of the plant, using fossil-free electricity to produce the hydrogen needed to bring 5 million tonnes of high-quality steel to the market by 2030.
Input: Fossil-free electricity, Water (H20)
Output: Hydrogen, Oxygen
DR reactor
Our DR reactor refines iron ore to direct-reduced iron (DRI). This is done by exposing iron ore to hydrogen, which reacts with the oxygen in the ore to form steam as a residual. Using our green hydrogen produced in our electrolysis for reduction instead of coal, typically used in integrated steel plants, allows us to reduce CO2 emissions from the reduction process by more than 95 percent.
The majority of DRI is transported in the hot state inside the plant to the Electric Arc Furnace, while the rest is briquetted into hot briquetted iron, HBI, for storage and later use.
Input: Hydrogen, Iron ore
Output: Hot DRI, HBI, Slag, Water (H2O)
Electric Arc Furnace
The Electric Arc Furnace is the first step in our electric meltshop. In the Electric Arc Furnace, fossil-free electricity will be used to heat a combination of DRI and steel scrap to a homogenous melt of liquid steel. In the melting process, carbon plays an important role in lowering electricity consumption, forming protective properties of the slag on top of the melt and enabling the transformation of iron to steel.
From the Electric Arc Furnace, the melt is transferred to our ladle furnace and RH degasser, where alloys are added to the melt to refine chemistries.
Input: Hot DRI, Fossil-free electricity, Oxygen, Scrap metal, Carbon
Output: Hot liquid steel, Slag
Continuous casting and rolling
We turn liquid steel into solid products in an integrated process called “continuous casting and rolling,” allowing us to keep the steel warm all the way from the Electric Arc Furnace to finished product. The integrated process enables us to reduce energy consumption by 70 percent and replace natural gas typically used in the traditional process. The steel strip is wound into a so-called “hot roll coil,” which is the initial product of the green steel facility.
Input: Liquid steel
Output: Hot rolled coil
Downstream finishing
After continuous casting and rolling, some hot rolled coils are transferred to our fully electrified downstream finishing lines. Depending on end customer requirements, the products undergo various treatments including cold rolling to change thickness, annealing to create the right mechanical properties and hot dip galvanization to reach the desired corrosion resistance.
The finished steel is then packaged to be shipped to customers all over the world, to become dishwashers, cars and much more – jointly accelerating decarbonisation.
Input: Hot rolled coil
Output: Finished steel products