Yury Ryzhenkov, CEO of Metinvest Group, in on air CNN said his company is not abandoning its plans to decarbonise steel production in Mariupol.
“We planned to decarbonise for green steel production in Mariupol, and this is still planned. And we believe that we will be able to do it, we believe that we will do it in Mariupol, in Ukraine,” said Y. Ryzhenkov.
He also noted that despite the significant damage, the competently carried out conservation of the production capacities of the Ilyich and Azovstal metallurgical plants will allow restoring the production of steel and metal products after the end of hostilities.
“I believe that we can restore them, and the restoration will be two-sided: on the one hand, we will try to restore existing technologies, but at the same time we will launch new technologies that we envisaged and announced several months ago,” said the head of Metinvest, emphasizing that he doubts that "the Russians will be able to resume the operation of these plants and bring them to a significant capacity with what they have."
Recall that by 2050 Metinvest planned to produce all of its steel in electric furnaces using direct reduced iron as part of the elimination of sinter and coke, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% compared to current levels. To achieve the above, Metinvest intended to annually invest $1.3–1.5 billion in Mariupol plants over the next 3–4 years.
Metinvest is a vertically integrated group of mining and metallurgical enterprises. Its enterprises are located in Ukraine - in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk regions, in European countries. In Bulgaria, there is a Promet Steel plant with a capacity of 500 thousand tons of rolled metal per year, in Italy - Metinvest Trametal and Ferriera Valsider with a total capacity of 1.2 million tons per year. In the UK, the company owns the Spartan UK plant, which can produce 200 thousand tons of rolled steel per year.
The main shareholders of Metinvest are the SCM group (71.25%) of Rinat Akhmetov and Smart Holding (23.75%) of Vadim Novinsky, who jointly manage the company.
