The availability of hydrogen and its cost competitiveness “remains an issue” for decarbonising the steel sector, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI)’s Maria João Duarte said during a hydrogen conference in Vienna last week monitored by Kallanish.
“In Europe right now, hydrogen-based DRI is obviously not economically available,” Duarte, representative to the EU Institutions at MHI EMEA, adds. “We don’t have renewable energy available to produce renewable hydrogen. We don’t have the infrastructure to import that hydrogen from elsewhere yet, so there is also an infrastructure gap that has to be met. We are talking about high capex and opex, and we are also looking at a sector that is very sensitive to international competition and energy prices.”
The steel industry benefits from multiple decarbonisation pathways, such as electrification, direct reduction with carbon capture and storage, and switching the fuel from natural gas to hydrogen. However, the pace of decarbonisation has been “slower than we anticipated,” she warned, stressing the need to derisk existing decarbonisation technologies.
Duarte argues that decarbonisation of steel is fundamentally a policy‑driven process. She calls for policies that can turn decarbonisation into a “viable business case”, emphasising that “it has to make sense from a competitiveness point of view.”
“Having a strong EU ETS coupled with a strong CBAM is fundamental to go ahead,” Duarte concluded. “Having structural changes, perhaps on how electricity prices are formed and the signals there are given, is also another important measure. We need demand-side policies and pools that bring all these benefits across the supply chain up until the consumer.”
Meanwhile, also speaking at the event, Austrian steelmaker voestalpine’s Matthias Pastl noted the company is prioritising electrification, not hydrogen, for decarbonisation (see related story).
