Breakthrough projects in the first half of 2021 in Sweden and the UK to replace coal in steelmaking and natural gas in glass manufacturing with hydrogen deliver first products, highlighting hydrogen’s potential to curb emissions in hard-to-abate sectors.

Three Swedish firms—steelmaker SSAB, state-owned miner LKAB and Vattenfall—set up the Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology (Hybrit) partnership in 2016 in an effort to replace coal with hydrogen in steelmaking. While several steel firms—including Luxembourg’s Arcelor Mittal and Germany’s Thyssenkrupp—have announced hydrogen projects to decarbonise operations or for direct use in production, SSAB claims to have delivered the first batch of hydrogen-produced steel using Hybrit technology.

2026 – Potential year hydrogen-produced steel hits the market

Steel is manufactured from sponge iron produced when oxygen is removed from iron ore, which is typically smelted in blast furnaces fuelled by coking coal. Hybrit uses hydrogen to catalyse a direct reduction process to make sponge iron, which can then be smelted into steel in electric arc furnaces.

Hybrit’s pilot plant in Lulea produced the first hydrogen-reduced sponge iron in June 2021. This iron was then used to produce steel the following month and delivered to Volvo the month after. SSAB aims to supply the market with hydrogen-produced steel at a commercial scale in 2026.

One of the key challenges for the use of hydrogen in steelmaking, according to Hybrit, is ensuring large volumes of the gas are preheated without the combustion of fossil fuels in the value chain.

Glass

Glass is similarly difficult to decarbonise. Glass manufacturing emits 2mn t CO₂/yr, according to UK industry association British Glass, with 58pc of these emissions coming from the use of natural gas to fire furnaces.

“It does not delay being able to decarbonise the glass sector, because wherever a furnace is in the operational cycle, you can switch it to hydrogen” Baddeley, Progressive Energy

“Some glassmakers have been looking at electrification and electric kilns. One of the reasons why most of them are not keen on electrification is down to the cost of electricity—it just does not stack up to do it,” says Adam Baddeley, head of project delivery at low-carbon technology developer Progressive Energy. In August, Progressive Energy announced a demonstration project with UK-based glassmaker Pilkington in which float glass furnaces were run on 100pc hydrogen provided by industrial gases company BOC.

Baddeley notes the capex required to install electric furnaces can run into the tens of millions of pounds, but that existing models can be converted to run on hydrogen. “It does not delay being able to decarbonise the glass sector, because wherever a furnace is in the operational cycle, you can switch it to hydrogen.”

This demonstration provides evidence to support the development of the HyNet North West project, which aims to build new hydrogen and carbon capture and storage infrastructure and distribute hydrogen via a new hydrogen distribution network in northwest England.

Subsidies

Hynet was awarded £5.2mn ($7.2mn) from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the basis of an industrial fuel-switching competition in January 2020. Wider hydrogen switching will likely be driven by extending the government’s contracts-for-difference (CfD) mechanism to include hydrogen projects, which would bring down the cost of the fuel to compete with natural gas.

The CfD mechanism could also specify different levels of support for hydrogen based on source.

Baddeley predicts the share of green hydrogen in the Hynet network will be relatively small before 2030 as it is not price-competitive with other sources of hydrogen. “Then again, it depends to what extent government incentivises green hydrogen compared with blue as part of the business model process. If they give a greater level of support, then we may see [green hydrogen] come forward more than expected.”

---

Author: Polly Martin