Abstract

In 2022, the iron and steel industry accounted for approximately 13% of Sweden’s total CO2 emissions, with the primary source of emissions being the reduction of iron ore in a blast furnace. An attractive way to reduce emissions is to replace the blast furnace with direct reduction using hydrogen, combined with an electric arc furnace. This technology has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by 98% compared to the blast furnace process. To further reduce emissions, carbon capture technologies can be implemented.
The purpose of this work is to investigate how carbon capture can be implemented in a system that uses hydrogen direct reduction and melting of direct reduced iron (DRI) in an electric arc furnace. Eight different carbon capture scenarios and one reference case without carbon capture were evaluated. These scenarios were modelled in Microsoft Excel, where mass and energy balances were calculated for each component in the steelmaking process. The results from the model were evaluated based on energy and economic performance.
The results of this work showed that carbon capture can reduce CO2 emissions by 90%. Even though both energy demand and production cost increased for all cases using carbon capture, this might be a viable option to further reduce the carbon emissions from the steel industry.