Carbon reduction cost of hydrogen steelmaking technology in China

Abstract

Hydrogen energy is a key deep de-carbonization technology option for steel production. This study aims to provide a reference for the selection of technological routes by conducting a fair comparison with the evaluation of other deep de-carbonization technologies, such as scrap-based electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, under the same research framework. This study updates the direct/indirect GHG emissions and steelmaking costs of blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF), scrap-based EAF, fossil fuel-based direct reduced iron (DRI), hydrogen steelmaking, and CCS technologies in China. Using the H-DR (part) process can only achieve a 43.4 % reduction compared to BF-BOF, while the H-DR (full) process results in GHG emissions comparable to scrap-EAF. The study also discusses the unit abatement costs of hydrogen steelmaking technology compared to other emission reduction technologies. The cost of H-DR (full) is 6186 RMB/tcs, which is twice that of BF-BOF and 1.3 times that of scrap-EAF. The main conclusions are that green hydrogen steelmaking is expected to achieve near-zero emissions and can complement scrap-based EAF. The abatement costs of pure hydrogen steelmaking are relatively high, but by using partial hydrogen or by-product hydrogen, the abatement costs can be reduced to the level of scrap-based EAF.