While much of the rest of the world is focused on making greener fuels for cars, a new venture in Europe has backed up a step and is piloting a process to make green steel for tomorrow’s zero-emission vehicles.
Building vehicles use 17 percent of the world’s 1.8-billion-ton steel production each year, according to the World Steel Association. Making all that steel takes a lot of heat, which now comes from burning fossil fuels. As a result, producing steel releases about 7 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
Now EIT InnoEnergy, an investment fund, is backing H2 Green Steel (H2GS), a venture that is planning to run a steel plant in northern Sweden without fossil fuels.
The plant will include a “cracking” facility that will use renewable energy – largely wind and water power – to break apart the hydrogen and oxygen in water and harvest the hydrogen to fuel the steel plant, hence the “H2,” the chemical symbol for “hydrogen” in the project’s name.
H2GS expects to be making steel by 2024 and turning out five million tons a year by 2030.
H2GS is the first venture in EIT InnoEnergy’s European Green Hydrogen Acceleration Center, “a key enabler of industrial value chains and clean tech innovation, with the aim of developing an annual €100B green hydrogen economy by 2025 that could create half a million direct and indirect jobs across the green hydrogen value chain,” EIT said in a public statement related to the project.
H2GS plans to market its green steel to European carmakers producing vehicles that run on renewable energy, including hydrogen.
TRENDPOST: “Green hydrogen” is having a moment: interest in hydrogen has been stirring in the steel industry in recent years, three European steel firms are collaborating on a pilot project, and Saudi Arabia is building a green hydrogen facility in hopes of becoming a global hydrogen superpower (see our 15 September article, “SAUDI ARABIA AIMS TO BECOME A NEW ENERGY POWERHOUSE.”)
Although the technology lags solar and wind power’s advanced stage of development, hydrogen will continue to advance to take a respectable share of the renewable energy market by 2035.
