Iron and Steel CCS Study (Techno-Economics Integrated Steel Mill)

Publication Overview

• The primary goal of this project is to establish a methodology to evaluate the cost of steel production when deploying CO2 capture technology in an integrated steel mill. The objectives of this study were:
• To specify a “REFERENCE” steel mill typical to Western European configuration; and assess the techno-economic performance of the integrated steel mill without and with CO2 capture.
• To evaluate the techno-economic performance, the breakdown of the CO2 emissions; and estimating the CO2 avoidance cost of the following cases: o Case 1: An integrated steel mill typical to Western Europe as the base case. o Case 2: Post-Combustion CO2 capture using conventional MEA at two different levels of CO2 capture rate (End of Pipe Cases or EOP) o Case 3: An Oxygen Blown Blast Furnace (OBF) with top gas recycle and the use of MDEA/Pz as solvent for CO2 capture

Publication Summary

The global steel industry has made significant investment in reducing CO2 emissions mostly by raising their energy efficiency. However, to achieve a reduction of the direct CO2 emissions per tonne of steel produced from BF-BOF route by greater than 50%, CO2 capture and storage is required. Development of breakthrough technology such as oxy-blast furnace (OBF) is currently on-going within the steel industry but will require large scale demonstration to validate engineering design and optimisation of the process. This study presented one of the several options that could be employed for a steel mill with OBF and CO2 Capture. Deployment of post-combustion capture technology, capturing CO2 from various sources of flue gases within the integrated steel mill is technically possible and could be readily retrofitted to an existing steel mill. However, this study has demonstrated that this option could have significant costs implications on steel production which could affect the commercial viability of the steel plants fitted with CCS. The steel industry is a globally competitive industry and hence they will be reluctant to introduce cost disadvantages like adding CCS without some global agreement on emissions reduction.