Description
LOW CARBON FUTURE
Exploitation of projects for Low-Carbon future steel industry
The project “LowCarbonFuture” has the objective to collect, summarize, evaluate and promote research projects and knowledge dealing with CO2 mitigation in iron and steelmaking.
As final result, LowCarbonFuture will generate a roadmap stating research needs, requirements and boundary conditions for breakthrough technologies and a new CO2 lean steel production to guide the EU steel industry towards the world’s climate contract and the EU climate goals, e.g. by implementing the key findings in the strategic research agenda of the European Steel Technology Platform (ESTEP).
Furthermore, “LowCarbonFuture” will contribute to an update of the steel roadmap for a low carbon Europe 2050 and the current BIG-Scale initiative of EUROFER.

CO2 intensity
According to the steel roadmap edited by the European Steel Association (EUROFER), CO2 emission must be decreased by at least 80 % until 2050 (based on 1990’s level)
Plan for CO2 intensity reduction in European steel industry [EUROFER Roadmap].
Only by means of ironmaking and steelmaking process development, the reduction target cannot be reached, since European production routes, especially the route Blast Furnace (BF) – Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) perform at their physical thermodynamic limits.(black and blue curves in Figure).
A complex mix of actions are necessary (curves orange, red and brown in Figure) are necessary to reach a so drastic reduction target
Current pan-European research is focused on the three pathways Carbon Direct Avoidance (CDA), Process Integration (PI) and Carbon Capture, Storage and Usage (CCU).
Project consortium:
- VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut GmbH (BFI)
- Centre de Recherches Metallurgiques (CRM)
- Rina Consulting Centro Sviluppo Materiali S.P.A. (CSM)
- K1-MET GmbH (K1-MET)
- Swerea MEFOS (MEFOS)
Project coordinator:
- BFI
Timeline:
- 2018-2020

Project consortium