Hydrogen fuels steel and glass production

Recent industrial projects demonstrate hydrogen’s feasibility as a fuel and chemical reactant, although commercial scale-up is still distant

Breakthrough projects in the first half of 2021 in Sweden and the UK to replace coal in steelmaking and natural gas in glass manufacturing with hydrogen deliver first products, highlighting hydrogen’s potential to curb emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. Three Swedish firms—steelmaker SSAB, state-owned miner LKAB and Vattenfall—set up the Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology (Hybrit) partnership in 2016 in an effort to replace coal with hydrogen in steelmaking. While several steel firms—including Luxembourg’s Arcelor Mittal and Germany’s Thyssenkrupp—have announced hydrogen projects to decarbonise operations or for direct use in production, SSAB claims to have delivered the first batc