The European steel industry aims at a CO2 reduction of 80–95% by 2050, ensuring that Europe will meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement. As the reduction potentials of the current steelmaking routes are low, the transfer toward breakthrough‐technologies is essential to reach these goals. Hydrogen‐based steelmaking is one approach to realize CO2‐lean steelmaking. Therefore, the natural gas (NG)‐based direct reduction (DR) acts as a basis for the first step of this transition. The high flexibility of this route allows the gradual addition of hydrogen and, in a long‐term view, runs the process with pure hydrogen. Model‐based calculations are performed to assess the possibilities for injecting hydrogen. Therefore, NG‐ and hydrogen‐based DR models are developed to create new process know‐how and enable an evaluation of these processes in terms of energy demand, CO2‐reduction potentials, and so on. The examinations show that the hydrogen‐based route offers a huge potential for green steelmaking which is strongly depending on the carbon footprint of the electricity used for the production of hydrogen. Only if the carbon intensity is less than about 120 g CO2 kWh−1, the hydrogen‐based process emits less CO2 than the NG‐based DR process.

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This work represents an extended abstract of a study presented at the PRES 2016 conference. Despite the fact that alternative processes such as Corex® and Finex® have already been established on industrial scale, the blast furnace route continues to be the most important process used to produce pig iron. Due to its importance, a variety of models of the blast furnace process have been developed in the past decades. In addition to this, a wellestablished analogue representation of blast furnace operation is given by the Rist operating diagram. The target of this work was to create a comprehensive blast furnace model in the process simulation platform of gPROMS ModelBuilder®, which enables the description of interdependencies between the main blast furnace process, raceway conditions as well as the overall thermodynamic process conditions within a single mathematical model. As an example of possible applications of the developed model, a detailed analysis of the model behaviour under varying coke substitution scenarios was carried out in order to evaluate their CO2 abatement potentials.

A substantial CO2-emmissions abatement from the steel sector seems to be a challenging task without support of so-called “breakthrough technologies”, such as the hydrogen-based direct reduction process. The scope of this work is to evaluate both the potential for the implementation of green hydrogen, generated via electrolysis in the direct reduction process as well as the constraints. The results for this process route are compared with both the well-established blast furnace route as well as the natural gas-based direct reduction, which is considered as a bridge technology towards decarbonization, as it already operates with H2 and CO as main reducing agents. The outcomes obtained from the operation of a 6-MW PEM electrolysis system installed as part of the H2FUTURE project provide a basis for this analysis. The CO2 reduction potential for the various routes together with an economic study are the main results of this analysis. Additionally, the corresponding hydrogen- and electricity demands for large-scale adoption across Europe are presented in order to rate possible scenarios for the future of steelmaking towards a carbon-lean industry.

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