Saarland mills launch label for green steel

Germany’s Saarland mills, Dillinger Hütte and Saarstahl, will be marketing their low-emission products under the name of “Pure Steel”, Kallanish learned at the Green Day meeting organised by German steel stockholders federation BDS last week.

Just like Germany’s other blast furnace-based steelmakers – thyssenkrupp, ArcelorMittal and Salzgitter – the Saarland mills have decided to convert to the direct reduced iron-electric arc furnace route. In December, their parent holding company, Stahl-Holding-Saar (SHS), announced an investment of €3.5 billion ($3.8 billion) for its technological transition (see Kallanish 2 December).

“These are investments of an adventurous dimension, carried out during ongoing operation,” SHS chief executive Karl-Ulrich Köhler said at the conference, where he laid out the group’s transformation path. Until 2030, it plans to start operation of a DRI facility plus two EAFs with a capacity of 3.5 million tonnes/year of crude steel. “We will then need 55,000 tonnes/year of hydrogen – today we have none yet,” he cautioned. By 2045, the mills plan to install another EAF with a capacity of 1.2m t/y.

Köhler is not uncritical regarding the trend of labelling what is meant to be green steel. “We need to be careful with such labels,” he said during the subsequent discussion. “What we need is a sincere solution, not a label solution.”

So far, Germany’s other main mills have come up with labels of their own for their low-carbon products: thyssenkrupp with “Bluemint”, Salzgitter with “Salcos”, and ArcelorMittal with “XCarb”.

Christian Koehl Germany