2023-08-26 04:01:02
The head of the ambitious decarbonization plan of the steel company ArcelorMittal in Spain, Oswaldo Suárez, an engineer from Gijón, has left the company after taking early retirement. His departure occurs at a crucial moment in the negotiation that the multinational maintains with the Government of Spain for the final acceptance or not of the aid granted by the executive for an amount of 450 million to carry out the fuel substitution plan fossil fuels for clean energy sources that the steel group intends to undertake in part of the steel head of its factory in Gijón. Sources consulted confirmed that his replacement has not yet been named.
The plan agreed by ArcelorMittal with the Government of Spain, and which was made public in July 2021, will involve a planned investment of 1,000 million to replace one of the two blast furnaces in Gijón (A) with a direct mineral reduction furnace iron (DRI), which will use green hydrogen –and temporarily natural gas and, where appropriate, synthetic gas or steel gases– instead of coal, and the transformation of the current conventional steelworks in Gijón (with BOF converter) into a hybrid electric furnace capable of consuming both scrap steel and pre-reduced iron from the DRI furnace.
Of both actions, the ArcelorMittal investment committee in Luxembourg already confirmed on July 27 the execution of the electric furnace project (for which the Spanish Administration has granted various public aid), but the final approval by the company is still pending. construction of the DRI furnace, which is the most expensive facility in the partial decarbonization plan of the Gijón factory and for which the European Commission authorized in February the granting of the 450 million in public aid committed by the Government of Spain. After the permission of the European Competition authorities and the community executive, the subsidy for the DRI was approved by the Council of Ministers on April 5, and the multinational delivered the documentation required in the concession decree on June 15.
Since then, there have been contacts and negotiations between the company and the Government. The company makes the construction of the DRI subject to the guarantee of availability of green hydrogen at a competitive cost. ArcelorMittal requires a price of hydrogen at 2.5 euros per kilo, half of what it currently quotes, so that steel without CO2 emissions does not support additional costs that marginalize it in the market. If the DRI is not undertaken, the future hybrid electric furnace in Gijón could consume scrap or imported pre-reduced products, but in that case the integral production would be reduced by half. Even with the DRI furnace, the forecast is that Asturias will lose productive capacity (it will reduce it by 1.1 million tons compared to the current 5 million) and a thousand jobs (20% of the workforce).
Unions and the Government hope that ArcelorMittal will undertake in the future the construction of another DRI furnace to replace the second blast furnace in Gijón (B) and the transformation of the conventional steelworks in Avilés into another hybrid electric furnace, which has already been the subject of talks. between the Spanish executive and the Mittal family (main shareholder of the group and leader of the multinational) in several interviews held at the summits in Davos (Switzerland).
Oswaldo Suárez, a professional from the house, was appointed head of ArcelorMittal Spain’s decarbonization plan two years ago, in July 2021. His appointment came out thirteen days after the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez; The executive president of ArcelorMittal, Lakshmi Mittal, and his CEO, Aditya Mittal, staged the agreement in Gijón to undertake the partial decarbonization of the Veriña factory. On that visit, it was Oswaldo Suárez who, in the presence of the president of ArcelorMittal Spain, José Manuel Arias, explained the details of the project on a model of the factory. Until then Suárez was responsible for the so-called Asturias Cluster, which encompasses the steel plants of Asturias, Lesaka and Legasa (Navarra), Sagunto (Valencian Community) and Etxebarri (Basque Country). He had previously been director of the Asturian facilities and had previously held other responsibilities since joining the old CSI (merger of Ensidesa and AHV) in 1992.
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