A Subversive Change from “Carbon Metallurgy” to “Hydrogen Metallurgy”

Recently, the Hesteel Zhangxuan Technology hydrogen energy development and utilization engineering demonstration project designed by MCC Jingcheng has undergone safe, smooth and continuous production, and the metallization rate of high-purity direct reduced iron has stabilized at more than 94%, and the indicators have reached the international first-class standards, marking the world’s first 1.2 million tons of hydrogen metallurgy engineering demonstration project phase I project success. It also marks the transformation of China’s steel industry from the traditional “carbon metallurgy” to the new “hydrogen metallurgy” to take a subversive, demonstrative and key step, opening a new era of green, low-carbon and intelligent development of the steel industry.

From the start of construction on May 10, 2021, to the completion and operation of the full line on December 16, 2022, the first phase of the world’s first 1.2 million tons hydrogen metallurgical engineering demonstration project jointly developed and constructed by Hesteel Group and TENOVA (Italy) and MCC Jingcheng was completed and put into operation in Zhangxuan Technology of Hesteel Group. It unlocked a new application scenario for the comprehensive utilization of hydrogen energy in the world. In this project, for the first time in the world, the high-pressure shaft furnace zero reforming hydrogen metallurgy technology with coke oven gas as reducing gas is adopted. The hydrogen carbon ratio in the process gas is as high as 8∶1, and the metallization rate of the product – green and high purity direct reduced iron is more than 94%, reaching the international first-class standard. Compared with the same BF long process production, carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by 800,000 tons per year, and the emission reduction ratio can reach 70%. China Iron and Steel Industry Association pointed out in its congratulatory letter that this is a major breakthrough in the core key technology innovation of hydrogen metallurgy, an important milestone in the history of China’s steel and even the world’s steel history from the traditional “carbon metallurgy” to the new “hydrogen metallurgy” transformation, leading the steel industry into the era of “hydrogen instead of coal” smelting “green steel”.

Approaching the world’s first 1.2 million tons of hydrogen metallurgy engineering demonstration project, you can see that behind it, it is the breakthrough shackles of restructuring the energy system, the responsibility of boldly breaking into no man’s land of innovation, and the collection of wisdom and strength of intelligent construction.

Reconstructing the energy consumption system — breaking the ceiling of steel carbon emission reduction

In recent years, climate change has become the focus of global attention, and all countries are committed to promoting carbon emission reduction actions. As a major carbon emitter that has been focused on, the traditional steel industry is facing increasingly severe carbon emission reduction tasks. The energy carrier of traditional steel production mainly comes from carbon, so the gas emissions from the steel industry are mainly carbon oxides. From a global perspective, in 2022, the carbon emissions of the global steel industry will be about 2.8 billion tons, accounting for about 8% of the global energy system emissions, and the carbon emissions of China’s steel industry will contribute more than 60% of the global steel carbon emissions. Accounting for about 15% of the country’s total carbon emissions, it is the industry with the largest carbon emissions in China’s manufacturing sector. It can be seen that the carbon emission reduction task of the iron and steel industry is very arduous, and promoting carbon reduction in the iron and steel industry is a key focus area for the realization of China’s “double carbon” goal. After years of development, the production technology of China’s iron and steel industry has reached the world-class level, and the space for energy saving and carbon reduction centered on improving the efficiency of carbon energy utilization has tended to be small. Carbon reduction has almost hit the ceiling.

On May 17, 2023, the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) will come into effect, which means that many industries such as steel and cement will be subject to “carbon tax”. According to forecasts, the export cost of China’s steel industry may increase by 4% to 6%, roughly estimated at 200 million to 400 million US dollars. At the same time, the downstream steel industry is also paying more and more attention to the carbon emissions of steel products. For example, automobile companies such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW have required steel suppliers to provide life cycle assessment reports for automotive sheet products, and have proposed “green steel” requirements. This means that if the carbon emissions of the iron and steel industry cannot be reduced as soon as possible, it will not only directly affect the international competitiveness of steel products through “increase in carbon costs”, but also affect the green development of downstream manufacturing and construction industries through “carbon footprint”. Therefore, in order to achieve a breakthrough in carbon emission reduction in steel production, we must start from the source of energy. Reconstructing the energy consumption system of steel production, a new concept that cannot be broken but not established, has pointed out a new direction for breaking the ceiling of metallurgical low-carbon emission reduction.

In recent years, hydrogen energy as a green, clean and efficient secondary energy is accelerating development. If the steel production achieves “hydrogen instead of carbon” energy conversion, it will greatly reduce carbon emissions from the source, and even achieve “net zero carbon” emissions from steel production. The principle of metallurgical reduction reaction reflects that hydrogen is a good and efficient reducing agent. The diffusion rate of hydrogen is about 4 times that of carbon monoxide, and the diffusion rate of its reduction product water is about 1.5 times that of carbon dioxide, so hydrogen can reach the reaction interface faster than carbon monoxide through the fine pores of the ore, and the water vapor generated after reduction is also faster than carbon dioxide diffusion. Hydrogen not only has a reducing effect, but also has a catalytic effect on carbon monoxide reduction. It can be seen that hydrogen reduction is more efficient than carbon reduction, and the hydrogen reduction product is water, and no greenhouse gases are produced. Iron and steel production if the use of “hydrogen reduction” instead of “carbon reduction”, it can save the sintering, coking and other heavy pollution processes, its product – direct reduced iron can supplement the lack of scrap steel resources in China, provide high-quality pure iron for high-quality steel, is the pure raw material of electric furnace production of high-end high-quality steel and special steel, and then improve the international competitiveness of China’s high-end green low-carbon steel products.

Bravely enter the no man’s land of innovation -leading the disruptive change of the green development of the world’s steel industry

In order to effectively seize the development opportunity of restructuring the energy consumption system of iron and steel production, MCC Jingcheng and Hegang Group started to explore the use of hydrogen energy in iron and steel metallurgical production and matallurgy. There has two prerequisites must be solved.

One is that there must be abundant and cheap hydrogen resources. Hydrogen energy is a secondary energy source. Unlike coal, oil and natural gas, which can be directly extracted from the ground, it must be produced by using other energy sources through certain methods. Due to resource and energy endowments, China currently produces hydrogen mainly through fossil fuels, which are mainly used in the chemical industry. As an integrated iron and steel enterprise, the coking process can not only provide high-quality coke for the blast furnace, but also its by-product – coke oven gas contains about 60% hydrogen. For hydrogen metallurgy, coke oven gas can well meet the demand for gas sources both in terms of supply scale and economy. However, this is based on the existing resources and energy endowment to use coke oven gas to produce hydrogen, which is only a transition. The first phase of Zhangxuan Technology’s 1.2 million tons of hydrogen metallurgical engineering demonstration project has laid the foundation for the realization of 100% green hydrogen shaft furnace direct reduction in the future. In the future, with the development of distributed energy power generation and nuclear power industry, hydrogen production technology will progress rapidly, and relevant institutions predict that from 2025 to 2030, large-scale and cheap hydrogen will be widely used in the whole society, providing a stable gas supply for the future development of hydrogen metallurgy.

Second, a complete set of processes and equipment must be developed as process carriers. Modern iron and steel industry has developed quite mature, the current mature processes at home and abroad mainly include blast furnace, molten reduction, coal and gas based direct reduction, etc., of which the blast furnace process mainly uses coke and coal-based carbon thermal reduction system, molten reduction and coal-based direct reduction process although there can be no coking and sintering processes, but still is coal for energy of carbon metallurgy. Even though these processes can achieve local hydrogen rich injection, they cannot essentially change the properties of carbon metallurgy. Mature gas-based direct reduction process is mainly concentrated in North Africa and the Middle East, using natural gas as the gas source, natural gas after reforming to obtain a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide for iron reduction, from the principle point of view is the closest to the concept of hydrogen metallurgy. Therefore, in order to realize the energy reconstruction of “replacing carbon with hydrogen”, the selection of gas-based direct reduction as the process carrier meets the innovative demand of hydrogen metallurgy process.

After solving the gas source and determining the process, on November 22, 2019, the major event “About Hesteel Group and TENOVA of Italy and MCC Jingcheng jointly develop and build the world’s first 1.2 million tons of hydrogen metallurgy demonstration project” was publicly released for the first time. It is also confirmed that the world’s first set of hydrogen metallurgy project of Hesteel Group aims to use coke oven gas “self-reforming” to produce hydrogen and produce green high-quality direct reduced iron. Its basic route is: Innovative research and development from the whole process of distributed green energy, low-cost hydrogen production, coke oven gas purification, hydrogen metallurgy, finished product transportation, carbon dioxide removal, etc., to explore a world steel industry to develop low-carbon, or even “zero carbon” economy, starting from changing the energy supply structure, thoroughly solve the environmental pollution and carbon emissions generated in the process of iron and steel metallurgy. Lead the green and low-carbon transformation of steel smelting process.

Today, on the basis of existing design results, based on digital twin technology, Hesteel Group establishing a digital model of hydrogen metallurgy intelligent control system, “cloning” the production line to the cloud, creating a new generation of intelligent management and control mode, and establishing a new cocept of full-life cycle operation and control.

In fact, at the beginning of the construction of the project, MCC Jingcheng and Hesteel Group injected digital genes into the design of the whole plant, relying on the coding system of hydrogen metallurgy, combined with MCC Jingcheng BIM (building information model) design experience to create a digital twin of the steel plant. At present, MCC Jingcheng and Hesteel Group are striving to build the first set of hydrogen metallurgy full life cycle data coding system in China, laying the foundation for the comprehensive application of factory-level, workshop level and equipment-level digital twins. Based on the basic idea of “one blueprint to the end”, the project realizes the intelligent management of the whole life cycle of the hydrogen metallurgy production line from design, construction to operation, forms a multi-source data fusion application scheme of the whole business system, and provides a unified platform for the management and control of the whole plant’s production, quality, energy, environmental protection, safety and equipment, and realizes integrated management and control. The main idea of the project is to build the world’s first intelligent application of hydrogen metallurgy with automation, informatization, intelligence and digitalization as the guidance path, and the digital twin maturity model as the evaluation standard, so as to achieve intelligent management covering the whole process, the whole life cycle and the whole business system.

One is to design as a guide, to prevent the real with the virtual. Relying on the BIM design results of MCC Jingcheng, combined with digital twin technology, a digital collaborative design platform integrating emergency engineering design and equipment design is built fir enterprises, and the entire production line is simulated to provide safe and efficient digital solutions for hydrogen metallurgy plan.

The second is based on delivery to reflect reality. Build a hydrogen metallurgy engineering data center, gather information of the whole process of design, procurement and construction, construct a “mesh” data structure with “object” as the core, build an enterprise asset database, and realize the centralized storage of the whole life cycle information of engineering construction (such as design, procurement, manufacturing, construction, installation and commissioning), save the time of the whole process of design and construction, and improve construction efficiency.

Third, the DCS (decentralized control system) and SIS (Safety instrumentation system) systems based on Emerson’s DeltaV system were built to realize the automated operation of the production line and build a safety barrier for the stable operation of the production line. A full set of digital models such as heating furnace, heat exchanger, preheater, cooling and cleaning, compressor, combustion, cooling tower, shaft furnace, and external cooler have been established. Through real-time data and model calculation, intelligent control has been realized to help enterprises create unmanned and less unmanned production scenarios.

Fourth, the data is the brain, and the virtual pre-real. To build the steel enterprise information structure, the construction of ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, production and marketing system, real-time data procurement system, equipment management system, etc., a comprehensive integration of production, quality, energy, environmental protection, safety, equipment data, combined with big data analysis and artificial intelligence technology, to achieve accurate intelligent decision-making, and to move forward in the direction of virtual pre-real.

“Hydrogen” inspires green, “wisdom” unites the world, and “energy” create the future. MCC Jingcheng and Hesteel Group will further help the hydrogen metallurgy project to move forward in the green and intelligent direction of virtual and real symbialism, build Zhangxuan Technology of Hesteel Group into a world-class green, low-carbon and intelligent hydrogen metallurgy short process demonstration enterprise, and take the progress of national metallurgical technology as its own responsibility, and continue to deepen the integration and innovation of hydrogen energy and steel. Drive the formation of a new steel ecological industrial chain, provide a new path and create a new scene for the steel industry to transform the energy structure and realize the process revolution, and walk out of a sustainable and high-quality development path with China’s green and intelligent manufacturing characteristics.