Project description
Building the future of green steel
Steel production is changing; it is getting greener. The European steel industry needs to adapt in order to remain competitive. Unfortunately, supply chain adaptations and climate change are creating challenges that need to be overcome. Currently, the steel sector uses scrap to make up for part of its supply. However, the scrap's low quality limits its use. In coordination with European steelmakers, the EU-funded CAESAR project will develop novel technologies for better scrap organisation and usage throughout the steel sector, decreasing CO2 emissions and energy consumption.
Objective
Today, the European Union?s steel sector is a modern industry with its main customer base found within the EU home markets, particularly in high-end segments. However, challenges remain to keep the EU steel sector both competitive at a global level and climate-neutral, in line with the European Green Deal and the CleanSteel Partnership?s vision.
The scrap usage in steelmaking is a common practice to improve the process? sustainability, as it decreases the use of virgin raw materials and boosts the circularity of the sector (decreasing CO2 emissions and electivity consumption). Nevertheless, the current trend in the EU scrap market points at a slight decrease in the pre-consumer scrap and an increase in the short- and long-term of the post-consumer scrap stream, due to an increase in steel consumption. Nowadays, these ?low-quality? scrap streams are not suitable for most applications, thus limiting their use in steelmaking.
In order to increase the steel scrap recycling capacity and energy efficiency, while keeping EU competitive and safe in terms of raw materials imports, energy consumption and climate change impact, innovative technologies to ?clean? the scrap before it reaches the steel furnaces need to be implemented. CAESAR gathers up steelmakers, technology developers and research centers in a joint effort to validate, at full-size industrial scale, integrated scrap upgrading, sorting and characterization technologies, thus enabling to untap volumes of low-quality scrap streams in Europe, while keeping a high-quality product and generating valorization routes for all the non-ferrous fractions obtained, towards a zero waste steel sector.
Fields of science
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
1000 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium