Blastr Green Steel, a low-carbon steelmaker developing new greenfield assets in Finland, has announced the departure of its current CEO, Mark Bula.
“Mark has played a key role in bringing Blastr to where it is today, and the Board would like to thank him for his contribution,” Blastr said in its press release.
Blastr said that “all existing business operations and commitments continue as normal,” with the company “fully committed to the continued development of the Blastr companies and to maintaining strong relationships with our partners, suppliers and employees.”
In a separate social media post, Bula clarified that he will stay on in a limited capacity to support Blastr with an “orderly handover” of his responsibilities. Bula held the CEO role at Blastr for just over two years, previously working on steel transformation projects at Big River Steel in the US, before moving to serve as CCO at rival greenfield steelmaker H2 Green Steel – now Stegra.
Bula went on to highlight Europe’s steel industries as an example of how the domestic policy environment remains insufficiently supportive of actually realising industrial decarbonisation, describing “an uncomfortable tension between wanting cleaner, more secure domestic supply chains and opposing the mines, power generation, transmission, ports, railways and industrial facilities required to create them.
“If we aren’t prepared to build them in G7-aligned economies, we should not be surprised when more of the world’s industrial capacity is built somewhere else.”
As described in McCloskey’s Global Green Steel Profile, Blastr is constructing new low-carbon electric-arc furnace-based (EAF) steelmaking capacity in Inkoo, Finland; consisting of a hydrogen electrolyser, a 2 mt/y direct-reduced iron (DRI) plant, and a 2.5 mt EAF, with slab casting and rolling line facilities.
