NEDO Green Innovation Fund Project: Reduction of CO2 emissions from the steelmaking process of more than 50%

NEDO (The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization) announced on January 7 that it will undertake the "Hydrogen utilization in iron and steelmaking processes (total budget 193.5 billion yen)" to decarbonize the steel industry, which emits large amounts of CO₂ during the manufacturing process. This will be implemented as a part of the "Green Innovation Fund Project," launched by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, by creating a fund totaling 2 trillion yen for NEDO. In this funded project, the public and private sectors share ambitious and concrete goals, and will continue to support the companies that tackle these goals as management issues for 10 years, from R&D/demonstration to social implementation.

In this project, the company aims to develop technologies that reduce fossil fuel consumption throughout the ironmaking process and enable a reduction of more than 50% in CO₂ emissions by 2030; these technologies include methods that utilize more hydrogen in a blast furnace and hydrogen-reduction approaches utilizing low-grade iron ore in direct reduction furnaces. The government's "2050 Carbon Neutral" goal targets the achievement of zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and the Green Innovation Fund project was launched to achieve the same. In this funded project, the company decided to initialize a hydrogen utilization project to support companies working on "hydrogen utilization in the steelmaking process". The project implementation period is 10 years, i.e., from FY2021 to FY2030.

In this project, two R&D themes will be emphasized. The first theme is the "development of hydrogen reduction technology using a blast furnace". To this end, the development of hydrogen reduction technologies that utilize on-site hydrogen will be addressed. The NEDO project titled "Development of environment-friendly process technology/Development of process technology for hydrogen reduction, etc." aims to establish technologies that can reduce CO₂ emissions by 30%, as determined through a performance verification test involving a test blast furnace approximately 1/400^th the size of an actual blast furnace (volume of 12 m³). Based on the results of this test blast furnace, a 500 m³ class, actual blast furnace will be remodeled, and a blow test with normal-temperature hydrogen gas will be conducted. Changes in the process conditions and the CO₂ reduction effects due to the scaling-up will be verified, and suitable technologies will be developed for implementing this approach in domestic steel plants. The development of a low-carbon technology that utilizes the CO₂ contained in external hydrogen and the blast furnace exhaust gases will be promoted. Large-scale hydrogen reduction technologies will also be developed by significantly increasing the amount of hydrogen input. Furthermore, a technology will be developed to reduce the CO₂ emitted from blast furnaces by 50% or more, by producing methane from the CO₂ contained in the blast furnace exhaust gases and using it as a reducing agent.

The second theme is the "development of direct hydrogen reduction technology that reduces low-grade iron ore with hydrogen alone". A technology will be developed for the direct reduction method using low-grade iron ore by employing hydrogen instead of natural gas, which can reduce the CO₂ emissions from direct reduction furnaces by 50% or more, as compared with the current blast furnace method.

Specifically, after developing these elementary technologies in a small-scale test reactor that is 1/250^th to 1/150^th the size of an actual reactor, a medium-scale direct reduction furnace that is 1/25^th to 1/5^th the size of an actual furnace will be manufactured, and a performance verification test will be conducted. In addition, a technology will be developed to remove the impurities from electric furnaces that employ low-grade iron ore and to mass-produce high-grade steel. Specifically, to reduce the amount of phosphorus to 0.0015% or less and nitrogen to 40 ppm or less in the molten steel from electric furnaces, elementary technologies will be developed using a small test electric furnace (with a throughput of 3-10 tons). Subsequently, a large-scale test electric furnace with a throughput of approximately 300 tons will be manufactured, and performance verification tests will be conducted. Nippon Steel, JFE Steel, Kobe Steel, and Japan Research and Development Center for Metals have planned the implementation of these development projects.