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Accueil Tous les numéros Volume 109 / Numéro 3-4 (2021) Matériaux & Techniques, 109 3-4 (2021) 307 Full HTML
Numéro
Matériaux & Techniques
Volume 109, Numéro 3-4, 2021
Special Issue on ‘Overview, state of the art, recent developments and future trends regarding Hydrogen route for a green steel making process’, edited by Ismael Matino and Valentina Colla
Numéro d'article 307
Nombre de pages 28
Section Environnement − recyclage / Environment − recycling
DOI https://doi.org/10.1051/mattech/2021023
Publié en ligne 24 février 2022

© SCF 2022

1 Introduction

The steel sector has been investigating low-carbon solutions for producing steel, including hydrogen-based ones, for the last 60 years at least [1,2]. Many programs were conducted during this period of time, including several large international ones: the ULCOS Program in Europe [3,4] and the CO2 Breakthrough Program at world scale [5,6] were the most important.

Recently, a host of new programs of various kinds has been launched, in phase with the Paris COP21 Agreement and the Green Deal commitment of the European Commission. The urgency related to Climate Change has become more widely understood and a concerted effort seems under way to find solutions to move forward effectively: they include political and financial solutions, reaching beyond simple technology explorations. The picture is that of an explosion of activities, even a kind of big bang.

The present article proposes an overview of the state of the art regarding steel, i.e., of the endeavors presently called “Net-Zero steel solutions”, with a special attention to hydrogen.

Attention will be paid particularly to electricity-based processes – of course green electricity, which are on the one hand hydrogen-direct reduction based on hydrogen generated by electrolysis of water and direct electrolysis of iron ore.

Then a series of questions, of a broader scope will be tackled: (1) Why is this hydrogen enthusiasm happening now? (2) How much hydrogen and green electricity would this call upon compared to traditional uses of the gas (NH3) and to the up-coming ones (e-mobility)? (3) What would be a comprehensive environmental footprint of the new H2-process route? (4) What about costs, including carbon cost, availability of green energy (green certificates?), and who will be paying for them? (5) How much development is still needed, what would be a schedule for climbing the TRL scale up to TRL 12, what kind of scenarios are likely, including the co-development of the various zero-carbon solutions? (6) Where should H2 and DRI production be located in the world, with respect to resources and markets, how much international trade of both, how would this affect the CO2 rent?

2 Steel production 101

Steel production is organized today along two major routes:

  • one route is based on the use of iron ores (oxides), which are chemically/metallurgically reduced at high temperature either in the presence of carbon (coal or coke) in a smelting-reduction (SR) reactor or of natural gas1 in a direct reduction reactor;

  • the other route is based on the reutilization of steel scrap, melted in an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF).

The iron ore route accounted for 71.9% of world production in 2019 and the EAF route for 27.7% [7]. The production of iron ore was 2228 Mt, of hot metal (pig iron) 12 807 Mt, of prereduced iron 107.6 Mt and of crude steel 1867.5 Mt.

From the standpoint of physical chemistry, there is a large number of options for organizing other routes and thus for imagining low or zero-carbon ones – which might involve breakthrough solutions.

Figure 1 presents the three main physical options for making steel, two of which are out of reach within our present technical paradigm, i.e., within the limits of achievable technologies: temperature decomposition (too high temperatures) and vacuum decomposition (too much of a vacuum) [8]. One solution is within reach, based on electricity and more particularly on electrolysis, in this case direct electrolysis of iron ore.

Figure 2 focuses on chemical solutions, i.e., solutions that remove oxygen from ores but form chemical compounds that require lower temperature than the physical solutions discussed before. This means using reducing agents, the most common one, readily available, being carbon. Hydrogen is another reducing agent, although, contrary to carbon, it is not a resource available from the geosphere (coal, coke), nor from the biosphere (biomass, charcoal). Electrons are also reducing agents, made available either by electricity – and we are back to electrolysis as before – and from living organisms such as bacteria (e.g., bioleaching, etc.) [9].

There are other reducing agents, such as hydrazine (H2N–NH2) or metals more electronegative than iron, such as aluminum, silicon, calcium, etc. We will not discuss them in this paper, as they raise practical or economic issues and are only used at the margin [8]. Both conceptual presentations are brought together in Figure 3.

thumbnail Fig. 1

Physical solutions for producing metallic iron from oxide ores.
thumbnail Fig. 2

Chemical/metallurgical routes for reducing iron oxides. Shown in black are the “elementary” reducing agents (carbon, hydrogen), in red the “composite” reducing agents Syngas, natural gas), in green triangles and red letters highlighted in yellow, existing or potential processes (smelting reduction, blast furnace). The red arrows show two major solution paths: decarbonization/decarbonatation and CCS/CCU.
thumbnail Fig. 3

Concatenation of the schemes shown in Figures 1 and 2 (courtesy of ArcelorMittal).

3 Comparing various options for low-carbon steel production

An extensive analysis of the possible options for low-carbon steel production was carried out as part of the ULCOS Program [10–13]: it involved detailed process and economic modeling of 46 routes selected among an initial list of about 80 of them.

This is the most extensive and exhaustive study of this kind published until today. It is based on a carefully crafted methodology, whereby scope I and scope II emissions are taken on board and the perimeter of the steel mill is defined in a coherent and inclusive way across the many different options (e.g., electricity generation from steelmill gases is included within the energy balance, but also cokemaking or the production of lime; the quantity of scrap added in the converter is also normalized across the routes, etc.). See the original publications for an exhaustive description of these assumptions.

The relevant comparisons are shown in Figures 4–9. The color code is black for the BF, red for the TGRBF, blue for smelting reduction, yellow for natural gas direct reduction, grey and purple for hydrogen direct reduction, rose for electrolysis and red again for BF variants with plasma injected at the tuyeres:

  • Figure 4 shows the energy requirement of the various routes. They are fairly coherent, at the level of 15 GJ/tHRC, with all the ULCOS routes performing slightly better than the benchmark/reference blast furnaces (the two black bars at the left). The best routes are 15 to 20% below the benchmark. Except for the direct reduction routes, one natural gas or all hydrogen ones, which are slightly higher. All processes are optimized in terms of energy needs, the BF of course, but also the “paper” routes, which have also been designed based on high efficiency. There is therefore not too much to expect in terms of energy efficiency improvement with the “new” breakthrough process routes!

  • Figures 5–7 show GHG emissions. Results are much more spread out, which is normal as this was the point intended when examining all the new process routes. Scope I emissions are in color and scope II emission (mostly electricity) are in green. The first two sets of simulations are relative to year 2000, the base year of the study, with the European energy intensity of the electricity grid then and a nuclear power based grid, 370 and 5 gCO2/kWh respectively. The differences are entirely driven by two factors: use of CCS on the one hand and use of electricity on the other, with scope II emissions vanishing in the second scenario. See the original publications for an interpretation of each bar. For example, the negative emissions correspond to a case where biomass (charcoal) is used along with CCS – a result widely acknowledged by now. The “best” results in terms of emissions are shown in Figure 7: they show a factor 4 scenario (75% reduction of emissions in 2050 vs. 2000), for which the grid carbon intensity was calculated at 144 gCO2/kWh.

  • Figures 8 and 9 show total costs (similar to an LCOS), a BAU scenario in 2000 and a factor 4 scenario in 2050. Today, most breakthrough routes are more expensive than the benchmark BF route: there are no low-hanging fruits to pick up today to cut GHG emissions. However, in 2050, the tables have turned completely around and the benchmark BF (of today) is much more expensive than most alternative solutions, especially breakthrough ones. Exceptions are smelting reduction processes without CCS.

The next question that comes up is that of ranking the various process routes with respect to each other. The full comparison is discussed in Appendix A and in Figures A1–A4 [14].

Here, in the main text, we will only compare electricity-based routes, i.e., hydrogen and electrolysis, as they are more relevant to the topic of this article, cf. Figure 10.

Figure 10 shows CO2 emission – in a grid with either 370 or 5 gCO2/kWh –, energy needs and total costs in 2000, focusing on direct reduction from hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water (or steam) and aqueous, alkaline electrolysis of iron ore (ULCOWIN and SIDERWIN). In all categories, electrolysis seems to fare better than hydrogen: a simple argument would suggest that in the case of electrolysis of iron ore, the process is one step, while in the case of hydrogen, there are 2 consecutive steps, electrolysis of water and then gas reduction of ore pellets. However, the differences are small, well within the uncertainties of such simulations, and therefore better data, collected on demonstrators or plants to come would be needed to arrive at a clear answer. The least that can be said today, is that electrolysis of iron ore is a serious contender to hydrogen steel production, in spite of the hype that would seem to favor the hydrogen route, hic et nunc.

As Appendix A and Figure 10 suggest, it would be somewhat presumptuous to believe that process route simulations can help identify which of the putative low-carbon routes will end up as winners. As we will stress in the conclusion, it is likely that several routes will actually develop in parallel, reach industrial implementation and survive, side by side. This is what is happening today in the steel sector, where 3 major routes, holding each other at arm’s length, coexist – integrated mill (IM), scrap-based electric arc furnace mill and DRI-based mill. In the not-so-distant past, there were even more production routes competing with each other.

Another approach is to explore the possible evolutions of the various breakthrough process routes without assuming that a single process will grab the whole market share. Rather, the sector’s futures would be a combination of all of them, which would develop in time depending on various factors which would privilege one and then another at some point in time. Figure 11 shows this type of scenario evolution for the various ULCOS technologies examined under a BAU scenario and one in which world emissions are divided by a factor 2 in 2050 (F2 World).

Various reviews of the ULCOS programs have been published, either by ULCOS partners [16–30] or by unrelated researchers [31–39]. Some of them have a wider scope than ULCOS and the steel sector. Moreover, further scenario studies were conducted beyond the ULCOS studies per se, e.g., [40–47]. A more detailed review paper would be needed to analyze all published information more extensively.

thumbnail Fig. 4

Energy requirements of 46 steel producing routes examined in the ULCOS Program.
thumbnail Fig. 5

CO2 emissions (kg CO2/tHRC), 370 g CO2/kWh, European grid value, 2000.
thumbnail Fig. 6

CO2 emissions, 5 g CO2/kWh, nuclear power plant, 2000.
thumbnail Fig. 7

CO2 emissions, “factor 4” scenario, 2050, 144CO2/kWh.
thumbnail Fig. 8

Cost calculations, BAU scenario, 2000. Y-axis figures ought to be considered as an index.
thumbnail Fig. 9

Cost calculations, “factor 4 scenario”, 2050. Y-axis figures ought to be considered as an index.
thumbnail Fig. 10

Comparison of electricity-based hydrogen reduction and aqueous electrolysis [15].
thumbnail Fig. 11

Evolution of world steel production as a function of breakthrough technologies for a BAU scenario (left) and a World F2 scenario (right). Source [12]. See original article and list of acronyms for the definition of the various process routes, the proportion of which are followed as a function of time.

4 Research and development work on low-carbon steelmaking and hydrogen-based processes

Table 1 gives an overview of the efforts devoted to low-carbon steelmaking, including hydrogen routes, since the first experiments conducted in the 1950s in the US. Exhaustively, however, is out of reach given the dynamics of the trend and the almost daily announcement of new projects.

We have organized the timeline in four periods:

  • the period of historical experiments, H-Iron [48] and CIRCORED, driven by curiosity about hydrogen reduction and fluidized beds;

  • the early 2000s research effort, devoted to decoding what low-carbon solutions were possible to tackle the climate change challenge, already recognized as a threat at the time. This period led to the development of large international programs, wherein the efforts were mutualized among steel producers with substantial financial support from national or regional organizations. This period ended with the economic crisis, between 2010 and 2012: it saw the freezing of the most advanced and most promising of the ULCOS sub-project, the ULCOS-Blast Furnace or TGRBF.

  • the piteous years2, when the R&I efforts slowed down significantly, both because of the crisis and of the need for financing institutions to reexamine and refocus their support (e.g., the NER 300 program of the EU [49] has become the Innovation Fund [50]). Most previous efforts continued, although at a reduced pace. This period stretched until the end of the 2010s.

  • more recently, a consensus emerged about the need to act with determination to control climate change: the COP21 Paris agreement and the Green Deal Strategy of the European Commission, soon duplicated in other regions of the world, were the major reasons for a change of speed. This led to an explosion of project proposals, in response to financing opportunities for research and further industrial implementation opening on this topic, especially in the EU (HEU Program, Innovation Fund, etc.).

The expression “low-carbon” steelmaking changed over to “zero-carbon steelmaking” to mirror the vocabulary of the EC and now to Net-Zero. Business unions, such as EUROFER or ESTEP, declared almost overnight that their target was carbon neutrality by 2050. Business, especially the steel sector as a whole, came up with crafted declarations adopting the same carbon neutrality target as the EC for 2050, sometimes a bit earlier, something a bit later (Japan, China). Hydrogen, which had remained low-key until then, came to the forefront and became the darling of strategic planners and policymakers, with Germany and France calling the shots.

Content-wise, beyond the historical timeline, we distinguished a series of business ventures, focused either on hydrogen steelmaking (Recent steel endeavors – Industrial scale) or on the production of hydrogen, with large hydrogen-guzzling potential applications as steelmaking in mind (Hydrogen production ventures). Finally, a large number of studies have started to come out to paint the scenarios for the switch over from today’s steelmaking to future, breakthrough steelmaking, with sufficient room given to hydrogen (Other initiatives). A mention to silicon is added there, although it does not strictly belong to a discussion on steel, as the approach is very similar (carbon neutrality by 2050, CCS applied to a smelting furnace) [51].

Table 1

Projects and programs regarding low-carbon and especially hydrogen steelmaking since the 1950s.

5 Comparison of hydrogen markets to come

Present or future users of hydrogen have tended to function in silos: for example, interaction between users in fuel cells and in steel direct reduction have been rather limited. Beyond these two areas, for example the refining or the chemical sectors, or the future concept of incorporating hydrogen with CO2 captured from industrial processes, the interaction has been even more diaphanous!

The world production of hydrogen in 2018 was 74 Mt/year. 44% was used in the oil refining industry (to cut the molecular weight of heavy oil), 38% to make ammonia (and, further on, fertilizers), 8% to make other chemicals (amines, methanol, hydrogen peroxide) and 10% for miscellaneous applications (space, glass industry, food industry) [63].

Among the emerging uses of hydrogen, the most emblematic ones are transport and steel production. However, there are further options being considered, like transporting hydrogen overseas to fire power plants or for other uses (Japan, from Australia).

H2-transport means one or several electric motors coupled to a fuel cell and powering automobiles, heavy-duty vehicles, ships, trains and even aircrafts. There are 1.2 billion vehicles in the world, renewed at the rate of 90 million per year. A light vehicle runs for 100 km with 1 kg of hydrogen. Assume 20 000 km/year for each one of them. If 10% of the world fleet ran on hydrogen, then the need would be for 24.1 Mt/year. At 30%, the total present volume of hydrogen production would be needed for transportation. Converting the whole fleet to hydrogen would need 3 times the world production today.

Steel needs between 590 and 700 Nm3H2/tFe. Producing 10% of the steel world’s production (1867.5 Mt in 2019) by hydrogen direct reduction would require 11.75 MtH2/year, the total steel production 95.7 MtH2/year [64].

Figure 12 shows the distribution of usage in the present scenario and in the future one, where hydrogen is assumed to account for 30% of transport needs and 50% of steel production needs.

Both estimates are rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations3. However, they show that transport and steel under such circumstances would require the same order of magnitude of hydrogen amount and that this number compares with the world production today. This demonstrates the magnitude of the foreseen applications and the major transformation of the hydrogen sector that this would involve.

Today, 96% of hydrogen is produced by steam reforming (SR) of fossil resources (49% from natural gas, 29% from oil and 18% from coal), the rest being natural H2 trapped in geological reservoirs4. In the future, the vision is to use green or renewable hydrogen, mostly generated by electrolysis of water using green or renewable electricity. Assuming a conservative ratio of 60 MWh/tH2, this means, for the steel production taken on board in Figure 12, 2 871 106 GWh/year or the equivalent of 470 EPR nuclear power plants (1700 Mw) or 80 000 offshore wind turbines (OFWT).

Whether this scenario is possible from various standpoints (financing, erection calendar, social acceptance) remains an open issue: in particular, it should be weighed against competing technologies and, for example, CCS, the importance of which is often minimized by the claim that CCS would not encounter social acceptance [65].

It is also raising the issue of the massive electrification of the economy, that would be required if this solution was chosen as a privileged path towards introducing large amounts of renewable energy in the energy mix.

thumbnail Fig. 12

Proportion of hydrogen (%) used today (left) and projection assuming use in transport (30%) and in steel production (50% – 700 Nm3H2/tFe) (right).

6 LCA of hydrogen production – LCA of H2-based steel production

The criteria used in this paper to estimate the impact of the use of hydrogen have been focused on GHG emissions and energy use in ULCOS. A more thorough analysis would have to use the LCA framework – thus extending the number of criteria taken on board – and possibly other methodologies like MFA.

Bhandari et al. carried out a literature review of 21 LCA studies [66]. They provide the balanced view that is expected of LCA methodology.

Figure 13 shows that the GWP of hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water depends much on the carbon footprint of electricity. For example, using the European grid at the time, the footprint is more than twice as much as the contemporary technological state-of-the-art benchmark of SMR. On the other hand, green electricity, nuclear power or (sustainable) biomass does perform at much lower levels, as was to be expected.

Figure 14 shows that the Acidification Potential (AP) is similarly better with low-carbon electricity, except for biomass-based generation, which is definitely worse.

These results match the intuitive view that hydrogen stemming from green electricity should itself be greener. The contribution is mainly from wind turbines (solar was not included in that rather old study) rather than the electrolyzer. However, other indicators do not necessarily concur, but Bhandari did not review them.

For example, Simons and Bauer [67] study hydrogen in connection with transport in light-weight vehicles and states that: “An exception would be with regard to the emissions of PM10 for which all H2 pathways perform worse than the ICE fuels”. Reviewing more recent work describing PM0.5 emissions would be helpful.

This caveat is a serious matter, as green hydrogen production might seem to be facing a conundrum due to particulate emission, in addition to the material paradox. PM emissions have a very strong impact on human health (premature deaths) [30] and therefore are worthy of attention.

If one looks at hydrogen for steel production, a lot of LCA studies are underway, as they are required by funding organizations, but very few have been published yet [68]. And they may be mostly taken for granted, as a kind of footnote to the study: not too many authors seem to have factored in the fact that LCA might flash red lights at some particular technology.

thumbnail Fig. 13

A range of GWP for different hydrogen production schemes [66]. The black region shows the spread of data.
thumbnail Fig. 14

A range of AP for different hydrogen production schemes [66].

7 A vision of future hydrogen steel production (and other zero-carbon routes)

7.1 A vision of hydrogen steel production and other routes in the future

There are various issues that need discussing about hydrogen steel production: they are related to scale, disciplinary-wise. Indeed, there is:

  • the microscale of physical chemistry phenomenology,

  • the mesoscale of process engineering, at reactor level,

  • the macroscale of technology development expressed in TRLs, with TRL 12 standing for industrial production plants and being the final target,

  • and then the megascale of rolling out the technology (-ies) until it makes a measurable difference and actually reaches the zero-emission final target for the whole European steel sector by 2050.

The microscale analysis is left out of the present discussion. See specialized articles [21].

What is expected from authors in this area is to estimate expected progress in terms of energy (and exergy) efficiency and hydrogen consumption/ton of H2-DRI-HBI. They should also formulate advice regarding the design of the reactor, especially of the shaft furnace.

7.2 Process reactors for hydrogen reduction in the steel sector (mesoscale)

The mesoscale is also out of scope for the present article, at the granularity that experts in the field would need. See the same references as in the previous paragraph. However, one might make a list of possible process reactors and stress some of their features:

  • the shaft reactor, similar to what is most commonly used in the direct reduction processes based on natural gas (MIDREX-NG [69] or ENERGIRON, formerly HYLSA [70]). Not surprisingly, Midrex is collaborating for example with ArcelorMittal to erect a demonstration plant in Hamburg, Germany, called MIDREX-H2, where the design duplicates that of the NG reactor. It is not completely clear, yet, if the reactor will indeed work on pure hydrogen or on a mixture of H2 and natural gas, i.e., syngas. According to Patisson [21], a pure H2 operation could rely on the better reducibility of H2 and therefore implement a squatter design, both shorter and thinner. HYBRIT is also planning to rely on a shaft reactor [71–73]. This is probably the most likely personification of H2 direct reduction in the future, because the shaft reactor has proven to be the most reliable process technology, with the largest number of industrial references for gas reduction.

  • the fluidized bed reactor, either bubbling or recirculating bed, was used in the early attempts at developing hydrogen reduction in the laboratory [2,47]. A complex technology, difficult to fine-tune, the fluidized bed is likely to continue sparkling interest in the research community but not with investors or decision makers.

  • the flash reactor, quite common in copper production but hardly used in the world of steel, is at the core of the technology developed at Utah University. It is still a research tool, attractive because of the high kinetics that the operation at very high temperatures makes possible.

  • the smelting reduction process studied in Austria is intermediary between flash smelting and in-bath smelting (such as the HIsarna process). Like the previous reactor, it should still be considered as a concept under investigation by research.

7.3 Long-term scenarios for hydrogen prereduction and competing processes (macro- & mega-scale)

The macro- and mega-scales examine foresight scenarios, such as Figure 11 [12].

First, what is most likely is that there will not be a single technology route that will pick up the whole deal: a basket of solutions will remain at the core of these future scenarios. Therefore, there will remain the distinction between ore and scrap-based routes, but the ore-based route will be split among a series of technologies, electrolysis, hydrogen and blast furnace (with CCS and therefore most likely with CCS and top-gas recycling, TGRBF). An educated guess, published in [74], gives the following distribution: 70% for the EAF route, 30% for the iron ore route, within which 10% will come from the TGRBF, 10% from hydrogen direct reduction and 10% from electrolysis.

Note that the requirement for hydrogen is much less than what was envisioned in Section 5 (10% vs. 50%). This also holds true for electricity needs.

A more detailed scenario evolution is shown in Figure 15. It is a simple extrapolation of the intuitive 2100 targets given above. The scrap fraction evolves linearly with time and is assumed to be identical to the EAF route, which, by 2050, will have become carbon-neutral because the electric grid will be. All routes are supposed to be carbon neutral by 2050, so that the driver for scenario evolution is the availability of steel scrap. By 2030, the economy is assumed to be 2/3 of the way towards carbon neutrality. This explains the kicks in the curves in 2030 and 2050. Electrolysis and hydrogen are assumed to progress in parallel, exactly at the same fraction. Some natural gas production (Direct Reduction) has been introduced in the scenarios and adjusted to roughly 10% of the BF route. By 2050, both BF and DR have turned carbon-neutral by the implementation of CCS with geological storage of CO2.

thumbnail Fig. 15

Scenario for steel production in the 21st century. Carbon neutrality is reached in 2050, but scrap generation keeps replacing the iron ore routes to reach 70% capacity by 2100. Note that the lines for electrolysis and hydrogen reduction are superimposed. Source: own work.

7.4 Financing for zero-carbon steel production

How to finance research, up to TRL 9 and then 12, is the next issue related to macro and megascale analyses. The timeline for the scale up, scenario-wise, is also part of this step.

Financing issues are discussed extensively, especially in Regional contexts like the EU. There are projects looking specifically at this issue, for example the “Green Steel for Europe” project commissioned by the EC [75].

Financing is needed for research, for first industrial implementation and for deployment of technologies.

Some of the financing ought to involve subventions and loans from government and regional organizations like the EU (RFCS, HEU, Innovation Fund, IPCEI projects, national funding) and from other sources like banks and private investors, providing either loans, equity participation or green bonds, etc. A certain amount of fuzziness is related to the fact that whereas support to R&I is considered as normal, support for industrial implementation is not, even though the matter of financing low-carbon solutions is not settled and therefore requests for indefinite subventions might be on the table5. The talk is about an evanescent business model for running these experiments and market uptake. The financing scale ranges from a few billion euros for R&I to several hundred for implementation.

7.5 Sources of hydrogen and of electricity

Where does electricity originate from in the scenarios examined here? Or, more generally, where does hydrogen originate from?

There is a tradition of attributing colors to both of them, which comes in handy, cf. Figure 16, although the habit seems to be waning [76].

Let’s concentrate first on processes for producing hydrogen [77].

The most common method, today, is the steam reforming of natural gas (SMR), the technology used in direct reduction by Midrex for example, which generates hydrogen at a cost of 1.5 €/kgH2 at the plant’s gate [69]. The second one is the pyrolysis of fossil fuels, natural gas, oil and also coal: this takes place in a POx reactor, for Partial Oxidation. Both belong to the category of reformers, where a hydrocarbon molecule is broken by heat. Hydrogen can also be produced from biomass, which under controlled condition can be considered as renewable, and by electrolysis of water (or steam), a minority process today because of the price of electricity, but which is expected to become the major route to produce green hydrogen in the future due to the drop of REN prices (solar power and off-shore wind farms). Emerging technologies include the production of hydrogen by microalgae or bacteria and water splitting using thermochemical cycles.

Most on-going industrial projects and research articles emphasize the use of renewable energy in the sense of REN electricity, while a few do low-carbon sources, like nuclear power, i.e., fission power plants. Last, there is some native hydrogen, already available and exploited by the gas industry, but possibly more to come [78]: projections still seem unclear.

One topic however, which is often dismissed, is fusion power generation: the 2050 roadmap for decarbonizing the US economy, however, takes it fully into account [79]. The wager consists in positing that the ITER project will be successfully completed by 2030 and therefore that the deployment of that technology will by then be in order, with all the advantages of fission nuclear power and none of its drawbacks. Note that smaller, privately-funded fusion projects are also being launched [80]. Fission would be a game changer, calling for a radical reformulation of the thinking about zero-carbon and hydrogen economies.

Let’s discuss for a while the assumption that renewable electricity is indeed available and can be appropriated by hydrogen producers. It is an easy assumption to make in economic simulations, but, in practice, what is available from a power line is grid electricity, the carbon intensity of which is rarely zero [81]. Thus, examples by country is: Norway 11 gCO2/kWh, Sweden 12, Austria 14, France 47, UK 277, USA 432, Germany 469, Poland 846, Japan 492, China 624, India 743, etc. The spread of actual values of emissions, over the whole year 2018, is shown in Figure 17 as a function of power output, country and mode of production according to its color (grey, yellow, blue, brown, purple, green, orange, cyan, pink and red).

Can the assumption of access to REN be taken for granted or should it be seen as a sleight of hand? There is the rare case where a small grid, entirely fed from RENs and not interconnected to a larger one, would be devoted to making hydrogen: then the assumption would be strictly correct. Refereeing to a national grid might look like a more reasonable assumption: however, the grids are strongly interconnected in Europe so that the regional carbon footprint is 275 gCO2/kWh [82]. Another layer of uncertainty is related to the fact that emissions are usually accounted at the gates of the production facilities, while it might be more meaningful to use an LCA estimate (see Sect. 6).

A solution proposed to solve this conundrum, green certificates (GC) (Renewable Energy Certificates or REC, Guarantees of origin) [71], i.e., financial instruments designed to “sell” green electricity to users who are prepared to pay an extra price beyond the market price of the local grid electricity. Prices on the US market have been fluctuating between 15 and 50 $/MWh, which would in effect as much as double the price of electricity6 [85]. Note that green certificates for hydrogen are also proposed.

How well can this mechanism work? Can it really induce change, i.e., foster the development of renewables and accelerate it beyond BAU? This is clearly the objective, but the effectiveness of the instrument still needs to be demonstrated even though GC have been on the table for at least 20 years [86].

There are also ethical issues, due to the fact that the scheme allows for the appropriation of low-carbon power in connection with GC but does not say anything regarding how new power is generated elsewhere to meet demand, especially if it is not willing to pay for green GC: brown energy can replace green energy to meet the overall demand – at least there is no provision in the GC mechanism to alleviate that risk. This difficulty could be handled by a consequential LCA approach, but such studies are not common!

thumbnail Fig. 16

“Colors of hydrogen”, according to the sources of energy used for its production. The focus is on renewable or non-renewable energy and high or low-carbon footprint of the kWh.
thumbnail Fig. 17

Relative CO2eq emissions per kWh of national grid in Europe, showing actual emission over a 1-year period (2018) [83].

7.6 Who will pay for hydrogen-based steel production and other zero-carbon production technologies?

The literature that discusses technology hardly ever tackles costs and the question of how much H2-solutions differ in this area from benchmark steelmaking routes. This information is hidden in the grey literature, outside of the public eye, or in a few papers, either presenting a cost modeling exercise [45] or originating from high-level consultants [41]. See Table 2 and Figure 18, where the numbers are not necessarily comparable (IEAGHG, which was rather transparent, looks only at direct emissions; McKinsey looks at a broader range of process routes, but only at those where the abatement cost (similar to the avoidance cost) is less than 60 €/tCO2; time horizons are different, 2010 and 2030; breakthrough solutions are not included to the same extend as in the present paper, because their avoidance/abatement cost would be higher).

We will not try to extract more intelligible information from these publications, but rather use a rule of thumb estimating the cost of avoidance at 50–100 €/tCO2 – which is in line with these publications, as a matter of fact.

Complete avoidance, i.e., the zero-carbon target of 2050, would thus most likely add between 100 and 200 €/tsteel.

Table 2

CO2 avoidance cost (€/tHRC). Source: IEAGHG [42].

thumbnail Fig. 18

Global GHG abatement curve for the Iron and Steel sector [38]. Projection for 2030. Source: McKinsey.

7.7 How reasonable or incongruous is this carbon price?

We will refer to the document of France Stratégie [87], which estimates what it calls the shadow or normative value of carbon (valeur tutélaire du carbone), i.e., the value of cutting emissions calculated with various econometric models (TIMES, POLES, IMACLIM, ThreeME, NEMESIS) where a thorough, country-wide abatement is taken on board. The rationale is that, if a technology can offer a similar carbon cut at a lower cost than this normative value, then it will be adopted. Figure 19 shows the model estimates and Figure 20 the costs related to various abatement technologies. Readers may remember the Stern Report [88], which proposed a somewhat similar approach in 2007, and the ULCOS paper where carbon value of 400 €/tCO2 were considered as one scenario for the global economy [12]. This work has been expanded and is available in [89,90].

Our rule-of-thumb abatement value, even in its higher bracket, would easily fit below that normative value of carbon.

This discussion also answers our initial question: who will pay for the extra-cost of avoiding carbon emissions? Everyone will, or nobody will, whichever! By 2050 (and probably earlier), the price of carbon will be paid by every player in society, industry, consumers, tax payers, etc.

Another important likely direction of change is the reduction expected in the price of renewable energy, particularly VRE. Figure 21 shows LCOS projection in India by 2035, which show a 25% decline against the grid value [27]. The methodology followed by Armijo and Philibert is explained in [91].

thumbnail Fig. 19

Carbon values calculated by the various econometric model [87].
thumbnail Fig. 20

Cost of deployment of various abatement technologies [87].
thumbnail Fig. 21

LCOS produced by hydrogen direct reduction in India, in 2035, ex-VRE [27]. Courtesy of IEA.

8 More holistic approaches and considerations

The Green Deal policy of the European Union has been adopted by all business and industry associations. It does not simply target zero-carbon but also a fully circular economy.

The vision of ArcelorMittal, focused on specific solutions for zero-carbon steel production, is shown in Figure 22 [92]. Its full strategy and agenda for reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 is shown in Figure 23. Some of the process and project names mentioned in Section 4 (IGAR, Blue Hydrogen generation, Green Hydrogen generation, Torero, Carbalyst, CCS, etc.) are articulated in terms of temporality. The company’s approach is coherent with its core business of making steel and thus with reducing the specific emissions of its steels. A more recent statement is in [61].

LKAB is a mining company, the largest iron ore miner in Europe [93]. Its focus in the ReeMAP project is on mining waste, which, as a matter of fact, is part of steel’s waste from a life cycle or a value-chain perspective [30] (Fig. 24). The project aims at recovering rare earth elements from mining waste, but also phosphorous for fertilizer applications and gypsum: the first minerals are rare and therefore recovering them from waste is clearly part of the circular economy concept.

Another example of a similar trend is Michelin’s initiative, whereby the company “is accelerating its drive toward 100 percent sustainability, pledging recently that by 2050 all of its tires will be made entirely from renewable, bio-sourced or otherwise sustainable materials” [94].

Resources are thus stamped as renewable, whether they relate to energy or to materials.

Now, these announcements are part of the storytelling of corporate communication [95]. They relate to Sustainability, an aspirational, kind of moral compass adopted by many society’s stakeholders, although, in its “hard” acceptation, it is no more than an oxymoron. There is a continuum between true commitment and green washing. This topic has been handled in the case of plastics in [96], with arguments that can be transposed to steel, mutatis mutandis.

There is also a geopolitical dimension to hydrogen and visions of international trade, either of hydrogen or of ammonia NH3, into which H2 can easily be converted and thus more easily transported: at the end of the pipe or of the sea lane, NH3 can be converted back to H2 or used as such, as it is also an energy carrier with a broad scope of possible applications, including for producing steel [97,98].

The overarching issue is the choice of the energy carrier, of its transport across the world, of the geolocation of GHG emissions and of the appropriation of the rent associated to emissions rights.

Large oil producing regions, like the Middle East, have been shipping oil or gas across the world: producers pocket a fossil fuel rent, while the carbon market creates another rent which is localized in the oil-consuming regions. The idea of transforming oil or gas at the fields into hydrogen, with storage of the resulting CO2 locally or using it as a means for EOR, was proposed in [99]: this would thoroughly redefine GHG emissions in terms of their geographical origin.

Another option would be to process the hydrogen locally and to ship it as iron units (DRI or HBI) across the world: this option is discussed in [100] and the Hybrit project, in Sweden, is proposing a similar concept, although at a practical, operational level – the HBI produced by Hybrit would in effect export REN from Sweden [71].

China, Korea and Japan would be keen to receive hydrogen from abroad – as part of an International Hydrogen supply chain already under organization7, cf. Figure 25 – as well as DRI [101].

thumbnail Fig. 22

ArcelorMittal’s strategy regarding Climate Change: the “Smart Carbon route” (2020).
thumbnail Fig. 23

ArcelorMittal’s zero-carbon strategy and agenda (2020).
thumbnail Fig. 24

LKAB’s vision for zero-waste mining: the ReeMAP project and the ReeMAP Industrial Park.
thumbnail Fig. 25

The Suiso Frontier8 transports brown liquid hydrogen from Australia to Japan. Source: Reuters [102].

9 Conclusions

An explosion of programs related to low-carbon steelmaking has flourished in the last few years. It includes research, but also announcements of investment in new H2-DRI and hydrogen generation plants. The search for Green Steel is on, an echo of the EC’s Green Deal policy, driven by every stakeholder in the steel value chain, from customers, shareholders, steel companies themselves and their business organizations.

This is new, given that “green steel” [103] was not emphasized so strongly by many of these stakeholders in the not-so-distant past and that the question of who will pay for the extra-costs incurred by the new technologies, as new investments and extra operating costs, is still unresolved.

Listing all ventures, since the historical days in the 1950s when the first pilot experiment of hydrogen direct reduction were run, is fairly easy, except that new items are popping up weekly: the list of projects just passed the 100 mark!

However, this is an account of what happened, not of why it happened!

Engineers and researchers were first given the lead, as there were no simple solutions to cut greenhouse emissions in the steel sector. Indeed, it had already converted into a lean, energy-efficient industry, due to the importance of energy in its conversion costs (25%). Therefore, only new breakthrough technologies, operating along significant paradigm shifts, could deliver the expected outcome.

Solutions to cut emissions from the iron ore route can be organized in terms of capturing carbon emissions for storage or use, thus fossil-fuel based processes (BF, DR, SR) with CCS/CCU, or of substituting carbon as a reducing agent by hydrogen, electricity and possibly other methods. This is similar to the recent presentations of EUROFER which speak of Carbon Direct Avoidance (CDA) and Smart Carbon Use (SCE). An emphasis on using steel scrap (Circular Economy) is also important, although not a strong lever to cut emissions, as steel is fully recovered at end of life (at the level of 85–95%) and the available amount will grow in the future, but slowly (characteristic time = residence time of steel in the economy, around 40–45 years): in clear wording, it means that scrap recovery should not be allowed to drop below present levels.

Hydrogen, hic et nunc, seems to have a privileged position. Why? The upside and the downside of the concept is that it means getting a series of economic players on board as hydrogen DR means a dichotomy of technologies, thus generating hydrogen (green, pink or blue) and carrying out H2-Direct Reduction. This can generate cooperation and accelerate the emergence of solutions or, on the contrary, create confusion and prevent finding solutions quickly. The future will tell what mechanism will be operating!

One should however note that the steel sector does not put all its eggs in the same basket: work on the BF with top gas recycling is still on (IGAR, 3D project, TGRBF project at AM-Dunkerque plant with CCS at Equinor’s site in the North Sea), smelting reduction from coal is continuing at a large scale at the HIsarna demonstrator and electrolysis of iron ore is well and alive (SIDERWIN, MOE).

Back to the question of paying for breakthrough solutions, the enthusiasm of players in the field and their desire for Green Steel still needs some sinews of war to cover the extra-cost of new solutions. Green certificates, which are akin to emissions rights and add an extra “tax/value/cost” to the use of hydrogen, may be one solution but the most likely one is a carbon value: at 50–100 €/tCO2, it would stay below the normative value of carbon. Now who will pay that extra cost? Society as a whole, in all sectors, most probably: however, technology may still be able to cut cost, in the production of hydrogen from RENs and the production of RENs themselves, and in DR technology.

The work and effort reported in this article stems mostly from the STEM community. When investors step in and announce the creation of new plants or mills, this is entering the separate field of business and finance, perhaps economics. However, there is definitely a standpoint missing, that of the SSH community [104].

In the netherworld between STEM and SSH, LCA articles are also lacking: this refers particularly to H2-DR and to the use of consequential LCA to check if solutions indeed will be able to deliver what they claim in terms of GHG emission reduction. Note that the few papers that deal with the issue seem to point at higher emissions of particulate matter from H2-routes: given the impact of PM on human health, it is a matter that cannot be left unresolved.

Indeed, it constitutes a paradox, akin to the material paradox: whereby all the issues discussed in the paper are meant to alleviate GHG emissions drastically, they may have a deleterious effect on human health and they call on rare and scarce materials.

Another important matter is left unanswered: where should hydrogen be produced? Where should CO2 emissions take place? Where should DR plants be built? Almost all the literature reviewed considers that existing steel mills should be replaced, wherever they are located, by H2-DR. This is far from obvious and countries like Japan or China envision importing H2 from Australia or the Middle East. This is a much more complex matter than selecting some new piece of technology, as it is of a geopolitical and strategic nature: the present article has hinted at some solutions in Section 8.

List of acronyms

AP: Acidification Potential

BAU: Business As Usual

BF: Blast Furnace

BFA: BF – Advanced #1 (pure oxygen + CCS)

BFB: BF – Advanced #2 (+ Biomass)

BFR: Blast Furnace (+ BOF)

CDA: Carbon Direct Avoidance

CCS: Carbon Capture and Storage

CCU: Carbon Capture and Usage

CCUS: Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage

CIRCORED: name of a direct reduction process technology

CSP: Clean Steel Partnership

DRA: DR Advanced (+CCS)

DR: Direct Reduction

DRP: Direct Reduction

EAF: Electric Arc Furnace

EEA: European Environment Agency

EGHAC: European Green Hydrogen Acceleration Center (flagship project of the EIT InnoEnergy)

EHT: Electrolysis at High Temperature (Electrolysis)

ELA: Electrolysis Alkaline (dedicated nuclear grid)

ELB: Electrolysis Alkaline, ULCOWIN (electrical grid mix)

ENERGIRON: name of a direct reduction process technology, formerly known as Hylsa

EOR: Enhanced Oil Recovery

EPR: Evolutionary Reactor, formerly: European Pressurized Reactor

EU: European Union

FIT: (novel) Flash Ironmaking Technology

FOAK: First Of A Kind (industrial plant, sometimes called TRL 11)

GC: Green Certificate

GES: gaz à effet de serre

GWP: Global Warming Potential

H2-DRI-HBI: Direct Reduced Iron & Hot Bricketed Iron, produced from hydrogen

H-IRON: name of a direct reduction process technology experimented in the 1950s

HEU: Horizon Europe, R&I Framework Program

HIsarna: name of a smelting reduction process technology

HYBRIT: HYdrogen BReakthrough Ironmaking Technology, name of a direct reduction process technology

HYLSA: a Mexican Steel Company, which developed a direct reduction technology and gave it its name

IM: Integrated Mill

IPCEI: Important Project of Common European Interest

LCA: Life-Cycle Assessment

LCOS: Levelized Cost of Steel

LCOE: Levelized Cost of Electricity

LCOH: Levelized Cost of Hydrogen

LKAB: Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag, name of a Swedish mining company

MFA: Material Flow Analysis

MIDREX: name of a direct reduction process technology

NER: New Entrants’ Reserve, name of financing instruments proposed by the European Commission for financing low-carbon endeavors

OFWT: OFfshore Wind Turbines

ReeMAP: Rare Earth Elements and Mono-Ammonium Phosphate, Swedish project carried by LKAB

REC: Renewable Energy Certificates

REN: Renewable ENergy

RFCS: Research Fund for Coal and Steel

SCE: Smart Carbon Use

SIDERWIN: Development of new methodologieS for InDustrial CO2-freE steel pRoduction by electroWINning

SMR: Steam Methane Reforming

SR: Smelting Reduction

SRP: Smelting Reduction Process

SSH: Social Sciences and Humanities

STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics

TGRBF: Top-Gas-Recycling Blast Furnace

TRL: Technology Readiness Level

ULCOS: ULtra-low-CO2 Steelmaking

ULCOWIN: ULCOs electroWINning

VRE: Variable Renewable Energy

Appendix A Comparison between the “ULCOS solutions”

Below, we present a clearer analysis of the various “ULCOS solutions” (cf. their definition in [3]), which, however, did not include a hydrogen DR route.

Where energy is concerned (Fig. A1), 15 to 25% improvement is brought about by all routes, with NG direct reduction and electrolysis performing at the best level.

thumbnail Fig. A1

Energy needs of the ULCOS Solutions (GJ/tHRC).

In terms of GHG emissions, all solutions perform better than the benchmark, cf. Figure A2.

thumbnail Fig. A2

CO2 emissions per ton of Hot Rolled Coil (HTC) of the ULCOS Solutions.

In terms of operating costs, all solutions are regret solutions, except for HIsarna, which did not exist at the time when these simulations were run – thus not quite a true regret solution as a new technology had still to be developed at the time (Fig. A3). Since time would need to be factored in the economic modeling to take this point on board, the conclusions of Figure A4 would have to be followed.

thumbnail Fig. A3

Operating costs in 2010 of the ULCOS Solutions (index).
thumbnail Fig. A4

Cost of avoided CO2 of the ULCOS Solutions.

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1

The reducing agents are, respectively, CO and syngas (CO + H2 mixture). Direct reduction by carbon is fairly rare.

2

This expression is usually used in connection with the 40 years that followed the high growth period, in Europe, called the (30) Glorious Years. It is used here to suggest a historical analogy, not to be derogatory in its meaning.

3

The estimate is not exactly a projection into the future: new market for H2 are assumed, but the context is kept identical to today’s.

4

It is actually a kind of fossil fuel, wherein carbon and hydrogen got separated.

5

The issue is hardly discussed in the STEM community in which the author is functioning, except as innuendos. There is a tension between an economic liberal vision, where business is supposed to be run according to standard neo-classical economics, which delivers “optimal” solutions automatically, and another one where government intervention is demanded by most players, including business, through either subventions or the setting of rules that would internalize the climate constraint.

6

A GC avoids GHG emissions and, therefore, there is a connection between the price of GC and that of CO2 emission trading rights.

7

A first green hydrogen shipment of hydrogen was sent from Queensland, Australia, to Japan in March 2019 in a trial experiment. Japan is targeting to introduce 3 Mt/an of hydrogen by 2030 and 20 Mt/an by 2050, as part of its Green Growth Strategy for 2050 Carbon Neutral, a copycat of the EU Green Deal strategy.

8

水素、すいそ means hydrogen in Japanese.

Cite this article as: Jean-Pierre Birat, Fabrice Patisson, Olivier Mirgaux, Hydrogen steelmaking, part 2: competition with other net-zero steelmaking solutions – geopolitical issues, Matériaux & Techniques 109, 307 (2021)

All Tables

Table 1

Projects and programs regarding low-carbon and especially hydrogen steelmaking since the 1950s.

In the text
Table 2

CO2 avoidance cost (€/tHRC). Source: IEAGHG [42].

In the text

All Figures

thumbnail Fig. 1

Physical solutions for producing metallic iron from oxide ores.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 2

Chemical/metallurgical routes for reducing iron oxides. Shown in black are the “elementary” reducing agents (carbon, hydrogen), in red the “composite” reducing agents Syngas, natural gas), in green triangles and red letters highlighted in yellow, existing or potential processes (smelting reduction, blast furnace). The red arrows show two major solution paths: decarbonization/decarbonatation and CCS/CCU.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 3

Concatenation of the schemes shown in Figures 1 and 2 (courtesy of ArcelorMittal).
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 4

Energy requirements of 46 steel producing routes examined in the ULCOS Program.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 5

CO2 emissions (kg CO2/tHRC), 370 g CO2/kWh, European grid value, 2000.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 6

CO2 emissions, 5 g CO2/kWh, nuclear power plant, 2000.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 7

CO2 emissions, “factor 4” scenario, 2050, 144CO2/kWh.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 8

Cost calculations, BAU scenario, 2000. Y-axis figures ought to be considered as an index.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 9

Cost calculations, “factor 4 scenario”, 2050. Y-axis figures ought to be considered as an index.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 10

Comparison of electricity-based hydrogen reduction and aqueous electrolysis [15].
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 11

Evolution of world steel production as a function of breakthrough technologies for a BAU scenario (left) and a World F2 scenario (right). Source [12]. See original article and list of acronyms for the definition of the various process routes, the proportion of which are followed as a function of time.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 12

Proportion of hydrogen (%) used today (left) and projection assuming use in transport (30%) and in steel production (50% – 700 Nm3H2/tFe) (right).
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 13

A range of GWP for different hydrogen production schemes [66]. The black region shows the spread of data.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 14

A range of AP for different hydrogen production schemes [66].
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 15

Scenario for steel production in the 21st century. Carbon neutrality is reached in 2050, but scrap generation keeps replacing the iron ore routes to reach 70% capacity by 2100. Note that the lines for electrolysis and hydrogen reduction are superimposed. Source: own work.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 16

“Colors of hydrogen”, according to the sources of energy used for its production. The focus is on renewable or non-renewable energy and high or low-carbon footprint of the kWh.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 17

Relative CO2eq emissions per kWh of national grid in Europe, showing actual emission over a 1-year period (2018) [83].
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 18

Global GHG abatement curve for the Iron and Steel sector [38]. Projection for 2030. Source: McKinsey.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 19

Carbon values calculated by the various econometric model [87].
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 20

Cost of deployment of various abatement technologies [87].
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 21

LCOS produced by hydrogen direct reduction in India, in 2035, ex-VRE [27]. Courtesy of IEA.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 22

ArcelorMittal’s strategy regarding Climate Change: the “Smart Carbon route” (2020).
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 23

ArcelorMittal’s zero-carbon strategy and agenda (2020).
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 24

LKAB’s vision for zero-waste mining: the ReeMAP project and the ReeMAP Industrial Park.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. 25

The Suiso Frontier8 transports brown liquid hydrogen from Australia to Japan. Source: Reuters [102].
In the text
thumbnail Fig. A1

Energy needs of the ULCOS Solutions (GJ/tHRC).
In the text
thumbnail Fig. A2

CO2 emissions per ton of Hot Rolled Coil (HTC) of the ULCOS Solutions.
In the text
thumbnail Fig. A3

Operating costs in 2010 of the ULCOS Solutions (index).
In the text
thumbnail Fig. A4

Cost of avoided CO2 of the ULCOS Solutions.
In the text

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