Tata Steel Launches Hydrogen Trial For Steel Production

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Apr 24, 2023

Tata Steel, the giant Indian steelmaker, on Monday said it had started injecting hydrogen gas at a major plant in the world’s first test of such a large quantity of hydrogen gas continuously injected in a blast furnace. 

The trial, part of Tata Steel’s plan to reduce coke consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, is injecting record-high volumes of hydrogen gas and is expected to continue for a few days. 

The trial involves the injection of hydrogen gas using 40% of the injection systems of the blast furnace at Jamshedpur Works. If successful, the use of hydrogen gas has the potential to reduce the coke rate by 10%, which would mean around 7-10% reduction in CO2 emissions per ton of crude steel produced, Tata Steel said on Twitter. 

“This endeavour, aligned with the TataSteel’s vision of becoming NetZero by 2045, is part of the larger pursuit of becoming industry leader in sustainability,” the Indian company added.

Steel-making is one of the industries where emissions and the use of fossil fuels are hard to abate as production cannot come from readily available renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power generation. 

Industry players have vowed to reduce their emissions and are working to find alternatives. 

For example, Sweden-based company H2 Green Steel was founded in 2020 with the ambition to accelerate the decarbonization of the steel industry using green hydrogen. The founder and largest shareholder of H2 Green Steel is Vargas, which is also co-founder of Swedish battery maker Northvolt. 

H2 Green Steel has its first green steel plant under development in Boden, northern Sweden. The plant is expected to produce five million tons of green steel—manufactured with clean energy—by 2030. The green steel production in Boden will be powered by one of the world’s largest green hydrogen plants, running on renewable electricity. Instead of emitting large amounts of CO2, as in traditional steelmaking processes, the primary emission will be water.