Techno-economic assessment of the FReSMe technology for CO2 emissions mitigation and methanol production from steel plants

The iron and steel industry accounts for 6 % of the global CO2 emissions and it is one of the main hard-to-abate sectors that must be un-locked to reach climate neutrality in the coming decades. The objective of this work is to assess the economics of the FReSMe (From Residual Steel gases to Methanol) process for reducing the carbon footprint of conventional steel plants based on the Blast Furnace route. This reduction is achieved by capturing and converting part of the steel plants residual gases into methanol. The process includes the Sorption Enhanced Water Gas Shift (SEWGS) technology to treat the residual gases separating the CO2 and producing a H2-rich stream. The latter can be recirculated back to the steel plant to cover part of its primary energy demand or reacted together with part of the separated CO2 to synthetize methanol. The CO2 excess can be used for underground storage. Four different process configurations with different methanol production capacities are investigated. Costs and performances of each configuration are assessed and compared to two reference cases. Results show that the FReSMe process allows to avoid around the 60 % of the overall steel plant CO2 emissions, while the reference plant with post-combustion capture in the power section only 18 %. The cost of CO2 avoided is in the range 40.6 €/tCO2 – 46.2 €/tCO2. When no carbon tax is considered, the optimal methanol production capacity results 600 t/day with a Levelized Cost of Hot Rolled Coil of around 520 €/tHRC, 9.4 % higher than in the base case (476 €/tHRC). With a carbon tax rate above 40.6 €/tCO2, the optimal configuration has a methanol production capacity of 300 t/day and it ensures higher emissions reduction and lower costs than conventional post-combustion carbon capture systems