Metinvest invests $20 billion in green steel

Metinvest will focus in the next few years on known and proven technologies for the reduction of the carbon footprint of its Ukrainian assets, the company’s general director Yuri Ryzhenkov says in an interview published on its website.

This includes direct reduced iron (DRI) in combination with electric arc furnaces (EAF). This step-by-step approach to delivering on its objectives will help the company reduce CO2 emissions by more than 90% by 2050 and completely abolish the sinter-making process, he adds.

Metinvest Group intends to invest $1.3-1.5 billion annually over the next 3-4 years, Kallanish notes.

“The final stages of the strategy are expected to include the use of hydrogen, but today there is still no way to produce cheap hydrogen either in the country or anywhere else in the world,” Ryzhenkov notes. “That is why we have set this time frame in the hope that a method for producing cost-effective hydrogen will be found.”

In the short term, Metinvest intends to invest $1 billion in organising the production of high-quality raw materials at Severny GOK, which can be used in green steel production.

“The construction of a plant with a capacity of 4-4.5 million tonnes/year of electrical steel will require at least €2 billion ($2.2 billion),” Ryzhenkov says. “In order to change the technology completely, the estimated costs will be about $15-20 billion over the next decade and here we need government support.”

However, today there are no decarbonisation programmes in Ukraine, or even any progress on developing them, so we aim to encourage the government to move in this direction, he adds.

Metinvest also intends to increase the efficiency of current processes at one of the factories in Zaporozhye or Mariupol. To this end, the group is exploring the option of launching a new natural gas facility to reduce carbon emissions.

At the moment, the location of the complex is being discussed and completion of the feasibility study is expected in the first half of 2022.

Metinvest is currently discussing a target capacity of 4-4.5m t/y of steel in Zaporizhia and would like to keep volumes of about 9m t/y of finished products in Mariupol.

“If Zaporizhstal becomes a mill that only makes pig iron, then we have the opportunity to develop both the Mariupol site and the site in Kamianske, thus compensating for the retiring steelmaking facilities,” the head of the plant says.

Svetoslav Abrossimov Bulgaria