Page 30 - Best of STIL 2018 English

A better way forward
Salzgitter AG is supporting the SALCOS® and GrInHy projects with the aim of avoiding the production of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide
Several branches of industry are planning
to pump CO2 into underground storage to ensure less carbon dioxide (CO2) enters the atmosphere. In contrast, a number of steel
producers are attempting to chemically transform CO2 into other substances and make use of these. Salzgitter AG is taking a third path: simply gener- ating less CO2. This is a technically and financially ambitious plan, as the production of this gas is currently unavoidable in today’s steel manufactur- ing processes.
The Group initiated the SALCOS® project (Salzgitter Low CO2 Steelmaking) in order to examine alternative process technologies and evaluate the results of a transition. The project goal is to largely avoid the creation of CO2 in steel production by combining different technologies in an innovative manner. Salzgitter AG calls this approach “carbon direct avoidance” (CDA). The technical approach to CO2 avoidance is based on a
“direct reduction process” (DRP). Here, natural gas is used as a reducing agent, as it contains hydrogen as well as carbon in a chemically bound form. This
substantially reduces CO
duction. Generally speaking, there is nothing new about this method and it is already in use in large- scale industrial operations outside of Europe. This approach, however, has only proved cost effective to date in countries with a particularly low cost natural gas supplies. By contrast, instead of natural gas, SALCOS® aims to partially or entirely use pure hydrogen, produced on a climate-neutral basis. It is worth noting that there are no direct reduction facilities run along these lines currently operation- al worldwide.
And this is where another research project comes in which Salzgitter AG is involved: GrIn- Hy (pronounced: “Green-High”). The aim is to produce hydrogen from steam (H2O) by way of electrolysis. In order to generate hydrogen in a
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emissions in iron ore re-
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