Steelmaking with hydrogen faces supply problem – Ieefa

Scarce high-grade iron ore supply is a potential barrier to the widespread use of green hydro-gen in the decarbonisation of steelmaking

The availability of high-grade iron ore is a potential barrier to the uptake of hydrogen in steelmaking, according to a new study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa). There are two main production processes for making steel from iron ore. The most widespread is the integrated blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace process (BF-BOF), in which iron oxide is reduced to iron inside the blast furnace with coke (derived from coking coal) as a reducing agent. The product of this process is then turned into steel in an oxygen furnace. This method was responsible for 73pc of global steel production in 2020. A second method is to directly reduce iron without melting a