European clean steel: discover HaDEA’s projects towards climate neutrality and circularity

On 19 March, the European Commission presented the Steel and Metals Action Plan, announced in the Clean Industrial Deal. The focus of this action plan is on lowering energy costs, creating lead markets for low-carbon products, increasing circularity, levelling the international playing field and leveraging investments.

HaDEA implements several projects in the field of steel, to help tackle the challenge of the EU industry’s transition towards climate neutrality and to improve circularity in the steel production chain. In particular, it already manages projects funded under Horizon Europe as part of the Clean Steel Partnership for a total budget of around €105 million. These projects cover scientific areas such as: circularity through improvement and valorisation of scrap, development and upscale of low-carbon technologies and optimisation of steel process production. In total, Horizon Europe could dedicate up to €350 million to steelmaking research for the period 2021-2027 under the Partnership.

Discover 5 of the running Clean Steel Partnership projects managed by HaDEA (from the 2023-2024 work programme):  

AgiFlex will exploit a highly innovative multi-agent approach for production and energy management in steel production, monitoring and controlling processes, conditions and resources as well as optimising process integration and gas and energy flows along the complete steel production chain. It will also develop digital twins for existing and new production steps and couple them into a framework for holistic optimization.

DUST2VALUE seeks to introduce an innovative hydrogen reduction technology that efficiently recovers zinc from steelmaking residue streams while simultaneously producing an iron-rich material with a high metal content that can be recycled back as a scrap substitute. This process enhances circularity in steelmaking while slashing greenhouse gas emissions, paving the way for a sustainable future.

H2PlasmaRed will focus on the development of hydrogen plasma smelting reduction (HPSR) technology. By pioneering this approach, H2PlasmaRed aims to revolutionise steelmaking, drastically reducing CO2 emissions compared to conventional methods of iron ore reduction. 

MEDALS aims to increase the recycling rate of steel and metals by improving scrap sorting and enhancing the separation of unwanted elements from valuable alloying elements. It will improve technologies along the value chain of scrap-based steel production, as new sorting and separation techniques, methods to remove copper and tin in the liquid phase, copper recovering from steelmaking residues through pyrometallurgical processes, and creation new steel products capable of handling higher copper content.

ZHYRON proposes an innovative solution by combining pyrometallurgical and hydrometallurgical stages with green hydrogen gas as a reductant to develop a sustainable valorisation route for iron-rich and zinc-containing by-products. This will reduce carbon emissions and increase circularity in the steel industry.

Background:

European clean steel: discover HaDEA’s projects towards low carbon steelmaking - European Commission