ArcelorMittal, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Engineering (MHIENG), BHP, along with Mitsubishi Development Pty Ltd are collaborating on a multi-year trial of MHIENG’s carbon capture technology with ArcelorMittal, following the signing of a funding agreement between the parties. The companies will also conduct a feasibility and design study to support progress to full scale deployment.
The agreement, which involves a trial at ArcelorMittal’s steel plant in Gent, Belgium and another site in North America, brings together the expertise of the various partners in identifying ways to enhance carbon capture and utilization and/or storage (CCUS) technologies in the hard-to-abate steelmaking industry. The industry is estimated to account for around seven-to-nine per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CCUS has the potential to be a key technology for reducing emissions from existing global blast furnaces, which are anticipated to remain a significant portion of steel production over coming decades. The IEA estimates CCUS technology needs to apply to more than 53 per cent of primary steel production by 2050, equivalent to 700 million tons/yr of CO2, for the Net Zero Emissions scenario.
There are no full scale operational CCUS facilities in blast furnace steelmaking operations at present, with only a limited number of small capacity carbon capture or utilisation pilots underway or in the planning phases globally. However, later this year ArcelorMittal Gent will commission its Steelanol project, a scale demonstration plant that will capture carbon-rich process gases from the blast furnace and convert them into ethanol.
To further understand how carbon capture technology can be incorporated into existing steel plants, ArcelorMittal is facilitating the trial at its five million-tonnes-a-year steel plant in Gent, Belgium, and at another location in North America, with MHIENG supplying its proprietary technology and supporting the engineering studies. BHP and Mitsubishi Development, as key suppliers of high-quality steelmaking raw materials to ArcelorMittal’s European operations, will fund the trial that is anticipated to run for multiple years. In Gent, the trial will have two phases. The first phase involves separating and capturing the CO2 top gas from the blast furnace at a rate of around 300 kg of CO2 a day – a technical challenge due to the differing levels of contaminants in the top gas. The second phase involves testing the separating and capture of CO2 from the offgases in the hot strip mill reheating furnace, which burns a mixture of industrial gases including coke gas, blast furnace gases and natural gas.
The parties plan to install the mobile test unit in one of ArcelorMittal’s North American Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) plants, to test MHIENG’s technology in this steelmaking route.