Tata considers building hydrogen plant

Tata Steel has announced a partnership with chemicals company Nourvon that will look to produce hydrogen and oxygen at Ijmuiden in the Netherlands using water electrolysis.

The move is part of the company's drive to be a carbon-neutral steelmaker by 2050.

Using renewable electricity, the plant would save up to 350,000 t/yr of CO2. The hydrogen could be used as a reductant in the steelmaking process, within the production of direct reduced iron.

Sweden's SSAB is already trialling hydrogen-based steelmaking, and has said it will move away from blast furnace production — either through the hydrogen-based method or by using electric arc furnaces. SSAB recently broke ground on a pilot plant designed to test the concept, and hopes to have an industrial process in place by 2035.

Tata's Ijmuiden plant — one of the lowest-cost and most efficient in Europe — already hosts the HiSarna facility. This removes the need for coking and sintering, with iron ore being injected into the top of a reactor, liquefied and mixed with powdered coal, to produce liquid iron. Tata said last month that HiSarna could halve the plant's CO2 emissions.

Tata uses liquid iron from HiSarna in its steelmaking process, and has begun designing an industrial-scale plant that could be operational in seven years. The company is revamping blast furnace 5 at its Port Talbot site in South Wales, which will extend its lifespan by 5-7 years to the mid-2020s, when HiSarna could be a viable alternative.