Green Steel Fires Up at Commercial Scale
Steel is one of the hardest sectors to clean up, responsible for somewhere around 7 to 8% of global emissions, because conventional steelmaking burns coal both for heat and to strip the oxygen out of iron ore. Sweden's Stegra is about to show another way: its plant in Boden begins commercial production this year, running a 690-megawatt electrolyser that makes green hydrogen from renewable power and using it in place of coal, which cuts the carbon per tonne of steel by up to 95%. It is the first large-scale green steel plant in the world, built to scale to 5 million tonnes a year by 2030, and the significance is less any single factory than the proof that a hard-to-abate sector can be rebuilt with technology that exists today. If the economics hold at Boden, the template travels to every mill that has to decarbonise next.Steel is one of the hardest sectors to clean up, responsible for somewhere around 7 to 8% of global emissions, because conventional steelmaking burns coal both for heat and to strip the oxygen out of iron ore. Sweden's Stegra is about to show another way: its plant in Boden begins commercial production this year, running a 690-megawatt electrolyser that makes green hydrogen from renewable power and using it in place of coal, which cuts the carbon per tonne of steel by up to 95%. It is the first large-scale green steel plant in the world, built to scale to 5 million tonnes a year by 2030, and the significance is less any single factory than the proof that a hard-to-abate sector can be rebuilt with technology that exists today. If the economics hold at Boden, the template travels to every mill that has to decarbonise next.Expert summary pending. Showing the newcomer version.