LIBERTY Steel Group, part of Sanjeev Gupta’s sustainable industry leader GFG Alliance, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Paul Wurth and SHS – Stahl-Holding-Saar (SHS) to assess the building and operating of an industrial-sized, hydrogen-based steel making plant at Dunkerque in France. If developed, the plant would be one of the first operations of its type in France.
The pan-European partnership will work together on a project to incorporate a 2 million tonne Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) plant, with an integrated 1 GW capacity hydrogen electrolysis production unit, next to GFG’s ALVANCE Aluminium Dunkerque site. The DRI plant will initially use a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as the reductant to produce DRI and hot-briquetted iron (HBI), before transitioning to using 100% hydrogen once the electrolysis production unit is complete. The DRI/HBI produced will primarily be used in the electric arc furnace of LIBERTY Ascoval in France but any surplus will be used at LIBERTY’s Ostrava and Galati integrated steelworks as well as the SHS-group’s Dillinger and Saarstahl plants in Germany.
