‘What we do is really good for the world’

AIST executive director Ron Ashburn opened the 2023 President’s Breakfast at the AISTech convention and exposition with some rousing, senatorial comments. “We’re going to make this industry as green as it can be,” he told the assembled masses as they tucked into their bacon and eggs. It was a theme picked up by AIST president Keith Howe, ArcelorMittal North America’s CEO John Brett, Nucor Corporation’s chairman, president and CEO Leon Topalian and SSAB’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, Martin Pei. Matthew Moggridge* was there.

WANDERING the mean streets of Windsor, Ontario, on the opposite side of the Detroit River in Canada, I found a record store and dived in to see if I could find an album that has eluded me ever since I ditched vinyl for CDs back in nineties. At the time I thought it was progress, but for some time now I’ve bemoaned the loss of vinyl in my life and the fact that I only possess three ‘long players,’ which are stored away in my loft.

The album in question was Future Games – a Kahauna Dream by Spirit, and when I later inserted it into the CD player of my decidedly uncool car I was transported back to some weird times. One track on the album was entitled Detroit City and, true to the lyric, ‘I walked into Detroit City with a suitcase in my hand,’ although I had no intention of playing ‘with a group called Angels to prove I was a man’. I did manage to talk to the people and walk among the crowd, and if I’m honest, I would have to say out loud, that it was a ‘good, good feeling’ and that’s about as far as I can take this musical allusion.

That said, while I did walk into Detroit City with a suitcase, it wasn’t so much in my hand, it was on plastic casters, and I pulled it noisily behind me as I walked towards a taxi that would ferry me across the river to where I was staying in the Doubletree by Hilton on the riverside. Room 526 offered panoramic views of the Detroit skyline. I could even see the Huntingdon Convention Centre where I would be spending the next three or four days at an event I’ve praised for many years, AISTech. Every day I took the bus across the river, showed my passport, answered a few border control questions, such as ‘am I carrying any firearms?’ and then repeated the process on the Canadian side of the border later in the day.

Ron Ashburn, executive director of the AIST, always looks the same – which is a good thing – he doesn’t age, and it was good to see his familiar face on stage at the start of the President’s Breakfast. “We’re going to make this industry as green as it can be,” he said, senatorially, adding

*Editor, Steel Times International that the ‘steel industry has helped build the modern world’ and that ‘clean energy needs steel and vice versa’. Ron insisted that ‘what we do is really good for the world’, sounding like he was campaigning in the primaries, but he was preaching to the converted, all 1,300 of us who were sitting there eating our bacon and eggs and Danish pastries. I was thanking my lucky stars that the need to take an early bus through the Windsor-Detroit tunnel stopped me enjoying a hotel breakfast. Normally, I manage to eat both, but not on this occasion.

Ron continued, stating that we’d have ‘net zero in three decades’ and then provided a few facts about the event that was soon to unfold upon the great and the good of the American steel industry. In truth, it wasn’t just American steelmakers present in Detroit. Representatives of the global industry were in the Motor City contributing to the 445 technical presentations and being a part of the 588 exhibitor companies.

When AIST president Keith Howe took to the podium he described decarbonization as ‘the moon shot of our time’. The race to decarbonize society was on, he said, and it was a great opportunity, a global problem that needed a global solution, but, he asked, can it be achieved? “Some say the answer is elusive, but it’s not impossible,” he added. “It is achievable, we have the talent and the will,” he continued, acknowledging that words and phrases like ‘green steel’ and ‘decarbonization’ were now commonplace and that society is demanding decarbonization. “It won’t be easy or inexpensive,” he concluded, stating that there was no single road to reach carbon neutrality.

Howe reminded the attentive audience that the AIST now has 16,643 members and that female membership was up 23.4%.

Martin Pei, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Swedish steelmaker SSAB was in town to pick up the Tadeusz Sendzimir Medal and was keen to point out that steel was a fantastic material, infinitely recyclable, and that demand will increase in future. He pointed out, however, that steelmaking with iron ore was associated with massive greenhouse gas emissions, ‘a problem that needs to be solved’. Pei said that SSAB had been working for a long time on what he called

‘the climate frontline’. “What we’ve done so far is not enough,” he said, which was an odd thing to say when you consider that SSAB is, arguably, streets ahead of any other steel company in the sphere of developing green steel technology, but I think he was referring to the global steel industry. Pei said that in 2015 the time felt right to launch a new process involving the use of hydrogen gas instead of coal as a reducing agent for ironmaking. The company has since proved that it’s possible to produce steel using hydrogen-reduced iron, but Pei admitted that the industry was still at the beginning of its journey towards fossil-free steel.

Leo Topalian, chair, president and chief executive officer of Nucor Corporation described winning the 2023 Steelmaker of the Year award as an ‘incredibly humbling honour’. Speaking of the AIST’s first ever winner of the award, Ken Iverson, Topalian said, “We stand on the shoulders of giants”. He said that Nucor’s goal was to become the world’s safest steel company and said there were several exciting greenfield projects coming through. “We’ve just come off two phenomenal years across a range of use markets,” he said, adding that the industry ‘must remain vigilant on trade laws’. He said that American manufacturing was experiencing a renaissance, that the North American steel industry has an ‘enormous competitive advantage’ and that ‘sustainability transcends competition’.

John Brett, CEO of ArcelorMittal North America, talked about decarbonization as a path forward, brazenly promoting the business and boasting steel manufacturing in 16 countries, customers in 155 countries, steel production of 59Mmt, 8.2Mt in North America alone. He spoke of an EBITDA of $14.2 million, 158,000 employees globally, 16,000 in the USA, free cashflow of $6.4 billion in the USA and record low net debt of $2.2bn.

Brett said that ArcelorMittal North America was gunning for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and that company has more than 150 research and development programmes on the go.

He said that health and safety had been a top priority since the company was formed in 2006 and that the plan was to double the number of women in management positions. In short, he was throwing out a lot of positive facts about the business, including that 41 new products and solutions were launched in 2022 and that 79 new inventions had been protected last year.

On decarbonization, Brett was a little more cautious. He said that while 70% of the global economy has established a net zero target, concrete plans to deliver on those commitments were in their infancy for two reasons: staggering costs and technical readiness. “Sure, increasing scrap will reduce our CO2 emissions, but sufficient quantities of scrap will not be available for decades. Primary steelmaking will be around for years so how do we decarbonize the steel industry? There are multiple ways to make steel so multiple paths to decarbonize, that’s the approach we’re taking at ArcelorMittal.”

Brett said that the first pathway to decarbonize was ‘smart carbon’ – meaning increased use of clean fuels. He highlighted a number of pilot programmes in progress around the world including one at Torero where waste wood and end-of-life plastics were being converted into bio-coal, and a joint development with Lanzatech involving gas fermentation transforming waste gas into bio-ethanol. He also discussed the IGAR project at the company’s Dunkirk facility where the name of the game is reforming carbon to reduce iron ore.

The idea is to capture waste CO2 from the blast furnace and convert it into a synthetic gas (syngas) that can be reinjected into the blast furnace in place of fossil fuels. “Since the amount of coal and coke needed in steelmaking is reduced, this process helps to reduce CO2 emissions,” claims ArcelorMittal.

The syngas is made up of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) and is formed by heating waste CO2 with natural gas to high temperatures using a ‘plasma torch’ in a process known as dry reforming. ArcelorMittal’s plan is to use bio-gas or waste plastics instead of natural gas, furthering the use of circular carbon. With the plasma torch running on clean power, the entire process enables substantial emissions reductions, it is claimed. The IGAR project has been through a number of phases, says ArcelorMittal. “Last year, to overcome the corrosive effects of the high-temperature syngas involved, our R&D labs in Maizières, France, developed both the specialist metals and refractories needed,” the company says on its website, adding that, “Today in Dunkirk, France, ArcelorMittal is running a €20 million project, supported by the French ADEME, to construct a plasma torch. To test-use the hot syngas created by the plasma torch, a pilot project is also running at the same plant.”

Brett said that the scale of ArcelorMittal globally means there are pilot programmes underway around the world. He said that the company was investing $500 million in tech companies supporting decarbonization – referencing Boston Metal, Heliogen and Lanzatech – and claimed that half of that money had already been committed: Projects like a state-of-the-art 5.3Mt finishing facility with a 1.5Mt EAF and an option to double capacity intensity at ArcelorMittal/NipponSteel’s Calvert facility; ArcelorMittal Mines Canada converting 10Mt of annual pellet production to DRI pellets by the end of 2025 to supply feedstock to ArcelorMittal’s North America operations; and ArcelorMittal Mexico’s 4.5Mt DRI capacity, four 3.8Mt EAFs and new hot strip mill that produced its first coil in December 2021.

“Incentives contained in the USA’s Inflation Reduction Act IRA provide economically viable paths to address the vast majority of remaining CO2 emissions,” said Brett, who then name-checked the recently acquired ArcelorMittal HBI Texas, a 2Mt capacity facility with its own deep water port.

Brett said he was ‘very very excited’ about the future for ArcelorMittal North America. It was, he said, very fortunate that the US and Canadian governments provided assistance to support what he called ‘the tremendous cost of decarbonization’.

On the question of standards, Brett said that the industry should be ‘proactively engaged’ and provide guidance to define grades of low carbon steel. Primary steelmaking, Brett believes, will be around for decades and standards should clearly define boundaries as to how CO2 is going to be counted.

“We have to play a primary role in decarbonizing the industry, but we need co-operation,” said Brett.

“Net zero, let’s not just talk about it, let’s make it happen,” he concluded.

As the crowds filed out of the auditorium and the breakfast plates were being cleared away, I hot-footed it to a small press conference elsewhere in the convention centre where Philip K Bell, head of the Steel Manufacturers Association, told me there will always be a place in steelmaking for the blast furnace.�