Producing more. And greener. This is the ambition behind SteelUp!, the new “green” project presented by the directors of ArcelorMittal Long Products Luxembourg on Wednesday 24 January, at the firm’s press conference held to mark the start of the year. Two sites are involved in this major project: Rodange and Belval.
At the moment, the Rodange steelworks, which specialises in the production of premium steel for rails, is mainly supplied by blast furnaces in Dabrowa Górnicza, Poland, and Duisburg, Germany. A tiny proportion comes from Belval. And even then, only for the least demanding products.
Top-of-the-range electrics
“The aim is to relocate foreign production to the Belval steelworks,” explained SteelUp! project manager Michael Szefer. This means transforming the ‘blast furnace’ production supplied by Dabrowa Górnicza (1,300km by rail) and Duisburg (350km) for Rodange’s top-of-the-range products into ‘electric furnace’ production at Belval, for these same products.
The problem is that while an electric furnace like the one at Belval performs well in terms of CO2, with up to six times fewer emissions (350kg per tonne of steel) than a blast furnace steelworks, it is also of much lower quality. As proof of this, Belval has so far concentrated on standard products, “without any major metallurgical specificities,” such as beams.
“Everything that will be sold in Luxembourg will come from Luxembourg,” says Michael Szefer, head of the SteelUp! project. Photo: Matic Zorman/Maison Moderne
The need to upgrade will result in the replacement of the existing electric oven, built in 1996, with a brand new unit featuring the latest technological advances. Delivery and pre-assembly are scheduled for the coming months. The schedule calls for “final installation during a mass shutdown from 15 December 2024 to 15 January 2025.” The first load will follow immediately afterwards, in the second half of January 2025.
The €67m investment (of which €15m will be borne by the French government) is expected to cut energy consumption by 15%, while the electric furnace will boost productivity by around 15%, to around 150,000 tonnes a year. According to ArcelorMittal Long Products Luxembourg, XCarb certification of production will save 200,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year in Europe.
“With this project, we will be able to ensure that ArcelorMittal is completely self-sufficient in the country. Everything that will be sold in Luxembourg will come from Luxembourg,” Szefer added.
Dust to be eliminated
“We’re deploying a lot of projects on optimising processes to reduce our footprint, but it’s also associated with reducing our pure environmental impact. You can’t have one without the other,” noted environmental manager Guilhem Dollé, who is piloting two projects at the Differdange site. They will run until 2026, at a cost of around €20m.
“The impact for an industry like ours is linked to the management of diffuse emissions, a dust generated by the manufacturing process,” explained Dollé. This dust comes from production slag, estimated at 100kg per tonne of steel. “But it’s a noble product, recycled for other use,” added the manager.
Initially, ArcelorMittal Long Products Luxembourg focused on the handling aspect, with a change in the dust abatement process. The handling site was moved away from residential areas, and a hall was also built to house the products.
Back to Florange
The second step was to extract the dust from the installations. To do this, ArcelorMittal did not go far. The dust extraction system at the Florange steelworks, which was shut down ten years ago but only operated for eight months, is now being dismantled. It will be reinstalled at Differdange, before sensors are installed “as close as possible” to each source of dust. Construction and connection should be completed by the end of 2025, beginning of 2026.
ArcelorMittal Long Products Luxembourg has six production units (two steelworks and four rolling mills) and one machining unit in the country. The industrial group, which boasts of injecting €505m into the national economy (salaries, contributions, costs of local suppliers, etc.), employed 3,368 people as at December 2023. As far as the ecological transition is concerned, as country head Henri Reding pointed out, the company’s international objectives are to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and a 35% reduction in CO2 emissions in Europe by 2030. “And 2030 is very soon indeed.”
This article was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.