Air Date: Week of December 13, 2024

The Swedish company, Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel), produces steel using green hydrogen rather than coal. (Photo: Reid R. Frazier / The Allegheny Front)

Steel production accounts for 10% of all carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, in part because it’s typically made with coal. But in Sweden, there are alternatives that can cut steel’s carbon impact down to almost nothing. Reid Frazier of the Allegheny Front reports.

Transcript

DOERING: Steel is a modern-day necessity–and a huge climate problem. It goes into everything from washing machines to buildings. And making steel accounts for 10% of all carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. But in Sweden, some companies have found a way to cut steel’s carbon footprint down to almost nothing. Reid Frazier of the Allegheny Front went there to see this transition firsthand.

FRAZIER: On a bright October afternoon, Anne Graf hops into the back seat of a Toyota pick-up truck.

GRAF: So what are we doing? We're putting our seatbelts on, and we're driving out onto the site.

FRAZIER: Graf is with the Swedish company Stegra. She’s showing me the company’s big construction site here near Boden, Sweden, just below the Arctic circle.

GRAF: The world's first large scale green steel production facility.

FRAZIER: The 600-acre site is surrounded by forest. It’s a nearly $7 billion project. Graf says the fossil-free steel made here will be the same as what’s produced at traditional mills.

GRAF: it will become cars, trucks, construction materials. It will become dishwashers and fridges and freezers. And I think steel, it's all around us in our everyday. Once you start thinking about how much steel you see or use in a day, you'll be surprised.

FRAZIER: Basically, all the stuff that makes modern life possible will be made here. But the way most steel is made now, all that stuff comes with a heavy climate price. Steelmakers have been using the same basic recipe for hundreds of years–they heat up iron ore in a blast furnace with a refined coal known as coke. Carbon from the coal reacts with oxygen in the iron ore, creating lots of carbon dioxide - or C-O-2. But instead of coal, Stegra will use hydrogen, a common industrial gas. This way, the biggest byproduct is hydrogen plus oxygen–H-2-O.

GRAF: In a very concrete way we are physically going to remove CO2 emissions by providing better steel.

FRAZIER: And by better, she means cleaner. Scientists have known hydrogen could be used to make steel for decades. But it’s hard to work with, and more expensive than coal. Plus, most hydrogen today comes from fossil fuels– in a process that leads to a lot of carbon pollution. Stegra will produce its hydrogen out of water, using renewable energy, significantly cutting its CO2 footprint.

GRAF: What you're doing is essentially replacing a coal mine with a facility that uses electricity and water.

FRAZIER: Other steel companies in Sweden are also starting to work with hydrogen. The steelmaker Ovako recently converted some of its furnaces from natural gas to hydrogen.

PERSSON: It was very hard. (laughs)

FRAZIER: Mikael Persson of Ovako managed the project.

PERSSON: I've never done this. We have – nobody has done this. So we we went into it with a blindfolded.

FRAZIER: His team spent four years building a hydrogen plant inside an old steel mill. Persson leads me inside.

PERSSON: Yeah. This is the plant.

FRAZIER: Persson leads me into a large white room. Inside are eight cylindrical tanks –picture huge double-A batteries larger than a tractor trailer – each laid on their sides. An electric current courses through each tank, separating water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

PERSSON: The current is really, really, really high. So, so the power needed as a, as a, as a maximum is for the whole plant is what we call 20 megawatt.

FRAZIER: That’s a lot of juice – enough to power 10-thousand homes in the US. The company can use this much electricity with very little climate impact. That’s because Sweden’s electric grid is almost entirely carbon-free. The country relies mostly on hydro-electric and nuclear plants–not fossil fuels. But what’s really driving this investment in green steel now? Money. In Europe, it’s about to get much more expensive to make steel the old fashioned way. Max Åhman is a professor at Lund University in Sweden.

ÅHMAN: The EU system for putting a price on carbon has actually started to work.

FRAZIER: The European Union has a carbon trading system that taxes companies for emitting greenhouse gases. It’s set to impose a larger penalty on traditional steelmakers in the next decade.

ÅHMAN: With that price on CO2, then suddenly actually green steel from hydrogen is more or less competitive.

FRAZIER: Car makers like Volvo and BMW have lined up to buy green steel in Sweden to meet their own climate goals. Lars Nilsson, also of Lund University, says this outcome seemed a longshot a decade ago. That's when he started working on a project with another Swedish company, on a hydrogen pilot project completed in 2021.

NILSSON: I remember other big steel companies sort of laughing about it. You know, this is just fairy tales, but I think it's quite real. It’s, you can discuss technology readiness but it’s not a giant technological leap.

FRAZIER: And dozens of similar projects are in the works around the world. Nilsson says Sweden is proving green steel is possible. But to make it work elsewhere, the industry needs lots of affordable clean energy. And policies–like a carbon tax–that will help it compete with traditional steel. For Living on Earth, I’m Reid Frazier in Boden, Sweden.

DOERING: Reid’s reporting was made possible by the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship.

 

Links

Read and listen to the story on Allegheny Front

Read more about Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel)

Read more from Allegheny Front 's Energy Reporter Reid Frazier