Hydreams project to use clean hydrogen in steel production

The steel industry is one of the world’s largest emitters of CO₂, contributing around 8% of global CO₂ emissions, with the thermal steel processes’s use of natural gas combustion responsible for up to 39 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions globally in 2021. So, can hydrogen be the solution for this emission-heavy sector?

Swiss Steel Group is participating in the European Union-funded Hydreams project, which aims to explore how the steel industry can transition from natural gas to clean hydrogen, and thereby significantly reduce its carbon footprint. The project focuses on two types of furnaces (reheating and annealing) and two burner types (impulse and flat flame systems) to test the efficiency of hydrogen combustion in steel production.

Laurent Sieye, Swiss Steel Group’s sustainability manager at Ugitech, a global producer of stainless-steel long products, said: “The Hydreams project is the first comprehensive attempt to study the effects of hydrogen combustion on various steel grades. To date, no extensive studies have investigated the physical changes and potential deviations in steel properties when hydrogen is used instead of natural gas, such as differences in flame velocity, radiance, or exhaust gas composition.”

Thermal processing
He continued: “Replacing natural gas with hydrogen in thermal processing is still not mature enough and poses potential risks, including increased NO_x emissions and possible negative effects on steel quality and furnace refractory life — matters we aim to investigate and address in the Hydreams project, which will progress in multiple stages.

“The starting point was laboratory tests in pilot furnaces, followed by CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations, furnace modelling, and industrial demonstration trials. In the first phase, tests were conducted with 13 different steel grades, and no structural differences or changes in composition were observed in the steel samples after heating with air/natural gas, air/hydrogen, oxy/natural gas, and oxy/hydrogen.”

Mr Sieye went on to say that over the next few years, Hydreams will conduct a series of industrial trials, with three demonstrators for different heating processes and product types (blooms, forged bars, and coils) planned. He concluded: “The project aligns with the EU’s climate change mitigation and steel industry decarbonisation priorities, with resulting solutions offering an alternative to electric heating, which presents technical challenges in specific applications, such as excessive wear of electric resistances at high temperatures or poor temperature homogenisation within the furnace.”