European Steel Technology and Application Days (ESTAD)

Title: Circored Fine Ore Direct Reduction as one Route towards Carbon-free Steel

Speaker: Sebastian Lang, Director – Modelling & New Business

Date: August 31, 2021

Time: 3.00-3.20 PM CEST

Duration: 30 minutes including Q&A.

Europe’s Green Deal, announced in March 2020, with its legally binding target to climate neutrality by 2050 tremendously accelerated the dynamics for the development of carbon-free steelmaking technologies. About 70% of the world’s steel is produced via Brownfield route, an efficient but highly carbon-intensive process. With limited investment cycles left until 2050, the steelmaking industry is faced with the decision which alternative technologies for iron or reduction to invest in within the next 5-10 years.

One widely discussed solution is the hydrogen based direct reduction and EAF route to replace blast furnace-BOF steelmaking and most projects focus on shaft furnaces for the direct reduction with hydrogen. However, a conversion to this process only would create a gap of several hundred million tons of DR-grade pellets with all the impacts on pellet availability and prices. Metso Outotec has devised an alternative: Circored® , a hydrogen-based reduction process in a fluidized bed developed in early 1990‘s by Lurgi Metallurgie (a predecessor of Metso Outotec), the technical feasibility of which has been proven in an industrial-scale demo plant in Trinidad.

After this presentation, you will understand:

• The Circored process and how it is used for the direct reduction of iron ore fines, avoiding the need for agglomeration
• The implications of hydrogen as single reducing agent and where it could come from
• That produced HBI or DRI can directly be used as feed materials in EAFs for carbon-free steelmaking​

We also hope you can then join us for our second presentation where we will go into further details on Metso Outotec digital solutions for optimizing pelletizing plant operation via advanced automation and process modelling.

Title: A digital approach to optimize pelletizing plant operation via advanced automation and process modelling

Speaker: Robert Schiemann, Senior Research & Development Engineer

Date: September 2, 2021

Time: 1.40-2.00 PM CEST

Duration: 20 minutes including Q&A

Everyday trade-off between production, quality, and energy results normally in challenging and potentially disturbed process conditions. Such process instabilities are challenging in many ways: Reduced or unreliable pellet quality; decreased energy efficiency; reduced plant availability; shorten equipment lifetime etc. An automated and smart process control can substantially improve operational quality. Mr Schiemann will introduce the principles and benefits of such a system and exemplify them by means of Metso Outotec Optimus.

After this presentation, you will understand:

• The power of an optimized process control for continuously improving metallurgical plant performance
• How you can use such systems to continuously realize benefits such as:
• Improved and more repeatable product quality
• Unlocking production increase potentials
• Reduction of operational cost
• Increase of operational safety
• Increase of equipment lifetime

Read more about ESTAD 21 here.

Read more about Metso Outotec Circored® process.