core sector communique

 ESTEP - European Steel Technology Platform

New steel initiatives for a low carbon society

Luxembourg, 3 March 2010 – The European steel industry and its policy-making partners came together today in Luxembourg for the 7th meeting of the Steering Committee of the European Steel Technology Platform (ESTEP).

All stakeholders of ESTEP attended or were represented at the meeting, including high level representatives of the EU Commission and Member States. Chairman Michel Wurth started the meeting by confirming the commitment of the European steel industry to contribute to the EU’s climate change objectives and at the same time ruling out unilateral objectives for binding CO2 emission reduction targets which would make it impossible to maintain competitiveness in a global steel market,. On the subject of R&D and innovation, the Chairman welcomed the Commission’s consultation on the future ‘EU 2020’ Strategy, and in particular value creation-based on knowledge and the need to create a competitive, connected and greener society. He reminded participants that steel is a unique contributor to a more sustainable society through the features of its energysaving products, which are themselves endlessly recyclable, and through significant improvements on the process side, such as the development of breakthrough
technologies by European steelmakers to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% in the long term.

The meeting continued with new nominations and appointments. Dr. Kirby Adams was appointed as an additional Vice-chairman of the Steering Committee. Following the retirement of Mr. Jean-Claude Charbonnier, Mr. Bertrand de Lamberterie was appointed as the new Secretary General of ESTEP.

The European regulatory framework of the CCS flagship programme and progress in the implementation of the SET-Plan were addressed respectively by Mr. Scott Brockett and Mr. lyn Evans from the European Commission. 

ULCOS-II: a major breakthrough contribution of the steel industry to the fight against climate change Although the European steel industry has undergone a severe crisis which has led to significant production cuts and temporary idling of steel-making capacity, the industry firmly believes that demand for steel – an elementary building material of our society – will remain robust in the long run, hence the need to implement solutions for producing steel with a reduced CO2 footprint.

A two-phase strategy was put into place in 2008 to achieve the challenging objective of ULCOS which is to cut the CO2 emissions by a factor 2 in the long term. The most advanced technology of the four breakthrough selected routes in the first phase of the project will be implemented at a scale that will make it possible to estimate operating  conditions with confidence. This new blast furnace based technology with Top Gas Recycling will be combined with carbon capture and storage. These two technologies are brought together in the ULCOS-BF project.

As announced at the last ESTEP steering committee meeting, the project consists in testing the Top Gas Recycling concept on a mid-sized blast furnace at Eisenhüttenstadt (Germany), followed by an industrial demonstrator in Florange (France) which will be combined with a groundbreaking experiment to store captured carbon dioxide underground in the Lorraine region. Both project sites belong to ArcelorMittal.

In the mean time, progress has been made in terms of definition of technical specifications and identifying suitable funding and financing mechanisms. A detailed project timeline has been established, starting in 2010 with design & engineering of the Eisenhüttenstadt blast furnace, and culminating in 2015 with the start-up of industrial CO2 injection in Lorraine.

The Hisarna project – one of the longer term alternatives to reduce CO2 emissions in steelmaking – was also presented by the project coordinator, Koen Meijer from Tata Corus.
Steel solutions and sustainable “people” policies As the ESTEP platform is committed to tackling not only its own energy and climate change challenges but also to contribute to those of its main customers, ESTEP's energy programme was addressed by Dr. Pietro Gimondo, who showed how new advanced steel solutions can help develop a new generation of power plants, as well as equipment for wind and solar energy production.

Furthermore, since skills also have to be sustainable, Dr. Rudolf Carl Meiler introduced ESTEP's ambitious “people” programme, which aims at a sustainable human resource management for the European steel industry through key initiatives such as research, attracting and recruiting talented people, creating new training concepts and improving working conditions thanks to innovative solutions in health and safety. Finally Peter Schwab, Chairman of the Support Group, explained how ESTEP policies will meet the future challenges of the European low-carbon economy and the EU 2020 strategy.

Strong support from Member States for ULCOS-BF Following the steering committee meeting, the Members State representatives of the Mirror Group of ESTEP met in an informal meeting hosted by Marco Walentiny, representative from Luxembourg, to discuss implementation of the ULCOS-BF project, in particular with regards to timings and funding. The project was acknowledged to be of great importance for Europe, from both an economic and an environmental point of view.

The Members State representatives welcomed the project planned by the European consortium under the leadership of ArcelorMittal, ThyssenKrupp and Tata Corus, which would in their view not only send a powerful message in terms of global climate change policy, but would also be of significant importance for the long-term competitiveness of  the European steel industry. Due to the strategic nature of the project and the sustainable contribution in the fight against climate change, they urged the European Commission to give full support to the ULCOS-BF project, and underlined the importance of the project receiving formal recognition as one of the CCS demonstration projects under the ETS Directive of the European Union.