Germany-based steelmaker Salzgitter Group has announced that the state government of Lower Saxony and the German federal government have signed an agreement to share the cost of funding the SALCOS® - Salzgitter Low CO2 Steelmaking program. This agreement was signed following the approval of the company’s supervisory board for the investment of €723 million for SALCOS®.
Only the notification from the EU Commission is now still awaited before the first stage of the SALCOS® transformation program can be implemented in full.
The goal of SALCOS® is, in three stages between now and 2033, to switch steelmaking in Salzgitter entirely over to low-carbon crude steel production. The first stage involving an annual capacity of 1.9 million mt of crude steel is scheduled to become operational by the end of 2025. As part of the transformation, two direct reduction plants and three electric arc furnaces will be built to incrementally replace the blast furnaces and converters. In this way, the previous process based on coking coal will be replaced by a new hydrogen-based route to steelmaking. Savings are expected in the order of 95 percent of the current annual carbon emissions of around 8 million mt. That means that around one percent of Germany’s emissions of carbon can be avoided.
