Chinese to launch the country's first hydrogen metallurgical plant
Tenova, a leading company specializing in innovative solutions for the metals and mining industry, has signed a contract with China's HBIS Group to implement the Paradigm project, a plant for the development and use of high-tech hydrogen energy. The project includes an ENERGIRON DRI unit with a capacity of 600,000 thousand tons per year.
This will be a Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) plant fueled by hydrogen rich gas, utilizing the most advanced, competitive, environmentally friendly and reliable technologies from Tenova's portfolio of process technology, which includes cutting edge digital models for equipment and predicting metallurgical behavior.
“This is also an important breakthrough for the Chinese steel industry as it will be the first hydrogen-fueled direct iron reduction plant in China,” said Stefano Maggiolino, President and CEO of Tenova HYL.
The HBIS DRI unit will use a make-up gas with a hydrogen concentration of approximately 70%. Due to the large amount of H 2 , the HBIS plant will be the greenest DRI plant in the world, producing only 250 kg CO 2 per tonne of DRI. Carbon dioxide will be selectively recovered and some of it will be reused in downstream processes with a final net emission of only about 125 kg CO 2 per tonne. The plant is scheduled to go into production by the end of 2021.
The global steel industry is looking for smart, innovative technologies to reduce its carbon footprint. As a result, hydrogen is now being used as a replacement for coal in the metallurgical process. ENERGIRON technology, jointly developed by Tenova and Danieli, is the most feasible high-intensity H 2 DRI system available and is already designed for extremely low CO 2 emissions from new metal products.