LIBERTY Steel Group has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Paul Wurth and Stahl-Holding-Saar (SHS) to assess the building and operating of an industrial-sized, hydrogen-based steel making plant at Dunkerque in France.
The pan-European partnership will work together on a project to incorporate a 2 million tonne Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) plant, with an integrated 1 GW capacity hydrogen electrolysis production unit. The DRI plant will initially use a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as the reductant to produce DRI and hot-briquetted iron (HBI), before transitioning to using 100% hydrogen once the electrolysis production unit is complete. The DRI/HBI produced will primarily be used in the electric arc furnace of LIBERTY Ascoval in France but any surplus will be used at LIBERTY’s Ostrava and Galati integrated steelworks as well as the SHS-group’s Dillinger and Saarstahl plants in Germany,
Currently, initial feasibility work has proved successful the partners have signed an MoU which covers two phases: Phase 1 will improve the accuracy of the project’s commercial and technical feasibility and Phase 2 deliver the level of detail required for the effective implementation of the project.
