Green iron from waste products | Final permits secured for full-scale green-hydrogen DRI plant in Sweden
Swedish start-up GreenIron’s 20,000 tonnes-per-year sponge iron project is currently under construction
A Swedish company building a pioneering green iron project that will use hydrogen to make tens of thousands of tonnes of direct-reduced iron (DRI, also known as sponge iron) has received the final permits it needs to build and operate its plant.
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GreenIron has been granted permission by the Land and Environment Court in Östersund to process up to 30,000 tonnes per year of waste material to make up to 21,000 tonnes of DRI per year at its full-scale plant currently under construction in Sandviken,120km north of Stockholm.
But unlike most commercial-scale DRI plants typically operated by steel manufacturers, which usually process iron ore that has been mined, into sponge iron, GreenIron will use a variety of waste products containing oxidised iron, such as slag (a residual product from ironmaking), to process into pure metal.
The company said it can use roasted pyrite (a waste product from fertiliser production), filter dust, mill scale (a residual product from hot-rolling steel), swarf (left over from metal grinding), tailings and other oxidised metals to process into DRI, reducing the amount of iron ore mining required to produce steel.
GreenIron has a preliminary agreement in place with H2 Green Steel, which is building a giant green hydrogen, DRI and green steel production plant in Boden, northern Sweden, to supply waste products from that project when it begins operation.
The permit for the Sandviken plant currently allows DRI production only, Ilic said, but GreenIron’s technology could also reduce other oxidised compounds such as copper oxide and nickel oxide into pure copper and nickel.
The company has previously said it wants to deliver 300 of its small-scale furnaces by 2028.
Hydrogen in direct-reduced iron production
Green steel producers are planning to use green hydrogen to decarbonise their steel mills, which together account for 7-8% of all global carbon emissions.
Traditionally, iron has been extracted from iron-oxide ore by burning carbon-rich coking coal in a blast furnace, where the fossil fuel produces high-temperature heat while simultaneously removing oxygen from the ore by converting it to carbon dioxide.
This highly polluting method can be replaced with green hydrogen in a direct-reduced iron (DRI) facility, where the H2 reacts with the oxygen to produce steam (H2O) rather than carbon dioxide.
In fact, hydrogen-based DRI is currently the only proven pathway of decarbonising steel production, when paired with an electric arc furnace powered by renewable energy.
Policymakers want producers to eliminate emissions from the sector by using green-hydrogen DRI that is then turned into green steel using renewables-powered electric arc furnaces, but with green H2 costing in excess of €5/kg in Europe, it would result in significantly more expensive steel that will require offtakers to pay a premium.