The blast furnaces at the Scunthorpe steelworks could be converted to use hydrogen to make ‘green steel’, the industry minister has said.
Sarah Jones told Times Radio on Tuesday that the government was “looking at” using hydrogen to make direct reduced iron (DRI), to reduce the intense carbon impact of steelmaking.
Pure iron ore is made by heating coke and iron ore pellets to more than 2,000C inside a blast furnace, which separates the oxygen and iron. Carbon dioxide is released, the pig iron produced is purified and then it is combined with other elements to make steel.
Manufacturing steel accounts for 8 per cent of global emissions and there is a push to decarbonise the process by using ‘green hydrogen’ to make DRI. The
