Tata Steel wants to transfer to green steel manufacturing in a clean environment as fast as possible.
Mumbai: Tata Steel Nederland, a wholly-owned foreign subsidiary of Tata Steel Limited, has signed contracts with three companies – McDermott, Danieli, and Hatch – for hydrogen-based steel manufacturing in the Netherlands.
Tata Steel wants to transfer to green steel manufacturing in a clean environment as fast as possible. All three companies have their own specific expertise that collectively is needed to help Tata Steel shape and deliver the hydrogen-based steel manufacturing, Tata Steel said in a regulatory filing to the stock exchanges on Friday. The cost for this first development step is in excess of 65 million euros and will result in an engineering package that forms the basis for a final permitting and project planning, it said.
The overall project is led by the Tata Steel internal project and sustainability team, in close support of the main delivery partners.
McDermott is responsible for the construction input and support of the technical project management. Danieli is responsible for the engineering design for the plant and technology that delivers the Direct Reduced Iron (DRI), the 1st step in the iron-making process. Hatch is the technology licensor of the electric furnaces (REF) that melt the DRI and help to reduce the oxygen content further thereby improving the final steel quality. The REF and DRI plants are closely coupled to form an integrated production system.
“We recently signed agreements about our future with two ministries and the province of North Holland. In doing so, we have committed to being CO2 neutral before 2045 and emit between 35 to 40 per cent less CO2 before 2030. This will primarily be achieved via the hydrogen route where the blast furnaces are replaced with modern clean steel-making technology that uses hydrogen or gas instead of coal,” said Hans van den Berg, CEO of Tata Steel Nederland.
“What we do is a complicated and unique operation,” said Annemarie Manger, sustainability director of Tata Steel.
“The new plants will be built on our site while all the current plants will remain in operation until the new installations are up and running. That requires intense integration between facilities and close collaboration between all parties and our people. The coalition that is now formed with McDermott, Danieli and Hatch marks the start of the basic engineering to define our plans more specifically,” Manger said.
The switch to green steel is the biggest change in the company’s more than 100-year history. It is a technological tour de force with many deep consequences.
In the past year, a lot of hard work has been done in various areas to prepare for this transition. For example, Tata Steel has signed an agreement with the national grid operator TenneT for a direct connection to the national electricity grid in order to be able to use green energy in its future operations. The layout of the new facilities and the physical integration inside the existing plant as especially challenging, and has a strong impact on the project execution, the overall operational logistics and the environmental impact.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by HW News staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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