In the June 3 edition of Combustion Industry News, we reported on a pilot carbon capture unit starting operations on the blast furnace off-gas at the ArcelorMittal steel plant in Gent, Belgium.

In a new trial which expands the multi-year carbon capture pilot taking place at the Gent site, ArcelorMittal and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) are now partnering with climate tech company D-CRBN to test technology that converts CO₂ into carbon monoxide using plasma.

In a press release issued on July 8 2024, ArcelorMittal stated that this is the first industrial testing of D-CRBN’s plasma technology, making ArcelorMittal Gent the first steel plant in the world to trial the process, which has been designed to reduce CO₂ emissions.

The company says the carbon monoxide can be used as a reductant in the steelmaking process – replacing part of the coke or metallurgical coal used in the blast furnace – or as a basic ingredient in Gent’s Steelanol plant, for chemicals or alternative fuel production.

The source of the high purity carbon dioxide required by the D-CRBN process is MHI’s carbon capture unit. As described in the previous CIN article, this unit is currently being used to capture blast furnace off-gases, and off-gases from the hot strip mill reheating furnace, in Gent.

A pipeline between MHI’s carbon capture unit and D-CRBN’s unit was connected on 1 July to test the feasibility of using the CO₂ captured by the MHI technology as a feedstock for D-CRBN. The industrial pilot will make sure any impurities that accompany the CO₂ produced during steelmaking do not have a detrimental effect on the process and product gas.

MHI Senior Vice President (CCUS) of GX (Green Transformation) Solutions, Tatsuto Nagayasu says carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS) technologies “will play a critical role in decarbonising existing assets in the steel industry”. He describes the collaboration with ArcelorMittal and D-CRBN in Belgium as “another tool for the industry to reduce its carbon footprint — capturing emissions, converting them into a valuable feedstock, and feeding them back into the process.”